I’ve been through three rounds of reorgs in two years. Every time, the justification is “flattening.” But what I’m seeing is that we’re not faster or leaner, we’re just more chaotic. The people who used to handle problems before they reached me are gone, and now I’m buried in approvals and escalations. Meanwhile, the C-suite keeps talking about “speed.” Are we missing something? Or is this just the new normal?
— VP, Entertainment Company
Let me tell you something you already know but need to hear anyway: what you’re describing is not normal. It’s just widespread.
This idea that fewer layers equals more speed is one of the great lies of modern reorg culture. The fantasy is that by “flattening,” you’re streamlining decisions, killing bureaucracy, empowering teams. But what actually happens? You blow out the middle, and then pretend the org can still function like nothing’s changed.
Except it has. Directors and senior managers weren’t overhead, they were the shock absorbers. The interpreters. The early-warning system. When they vanish, the friction doesn’t go away; it just moves up the stack. And now it’s on your plate. Every escalated one-off. Every cross-team tangle. Every trade-off that used to get resolved three levels down is now ricocheting around your calendar like a pinball.
You’re not crazy. You’re just stuck in an org that mistook hierarchy for dysfunction and forgot what structure is for.
Let’s talk about that C-suite “speed” mantra. I’ve sat in those rooms. Speed is the drug they sell upstairs when results stall. It sounds brave. It looks great on a slide. But without structure, speed is just entropy. And if your VPs are suddenly operating as triage nurses, you’re not moving faster—you’re just bleeding in more directions.
And now AI’s being floated as the answer to all this. I’ve seen the decks. I’ve heard the spin. But replacing trust with tooling doesn’t make your org faster—it just makes your screwups harder to unwind.
This isn’t a strategy problem. It’s a systems design failure. The folks who cut the middle thought they were trimming fat. What they actually did was amputate muscle and now expect the org to run a marathon. You can’t fix that with a Slack channel and a 90-minute all-hands.
If you’re looking for a path forward—and not just survival—you need to start advocating, loudly, for rebuilding that connective tissue. Not in theory. In headcount. In cross-functional roles. In actual power to make decisions before they escalate. Because “flat” sounds cool until you realize it means everyone’s stuck in the same meeting, waiting for a tiebreaker who’s six weeks behind.
You’ve got good instincts. Trust them. The chaos isn’t the cost of doing business. It’s the receipt for a bad one.
Skip Says
Cutting the middle doesn’t create speed, it creates chaos. Strong managers aren’t blockers; they’re the ones who prevent constant escalations. If it feels like dysfunction is piling up in your inbox, that’s because it is. “Flat” orgs may sound modern, but without real structure, they just collapse more efficiently.
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