01
Roles & responsibilities
What this team owns, what it contributes to, what it hands off. At the workstream level, not the job description level.
Scope
DIAGNOSTIC
The strategy that comes with an organisational answer.
Most org design work starts with a structure and works backwards — layers, spans, boxes, reporting lines. We start with the strategy and work forwards. A commercial organisation isn't a chart; it's the answer to three specific questions. What capabilities does the strategy actually require? What do internal stakeholders expect from the organisation — how do adjacent functions, business units, and leadership want to interface with this team? And what specifically needs to be delivered, by whom, on what timeline? Only when those three questions have clear answers can a structure be drawn. Starting with the box on the page is how you end up with an organisation that's elegantly designed and fundamentally misaligned with what the asset actually needs.
The diagnostic is deliberate about sequence. Capability requirements come first — they're anchored in the strategic objectives and relatively stable. Stakeholder expectations come second — they're more variable and often where the hidden constraints live. Delivery accountability comes third — it's where the first two get reconciled against resource reality. The playbook at the end of the process isn't a chart; it's a set of operating decisions: who owns what, what the interfaces look like, how escalations flow, where the authority actually sits.
Organisational Diagnostic — Three Questions Feeding The Design
Pharmamosaic · Organisational Design · Fig. 01
INTERACTION & GOVERNANCE MODEL
An organisation works through its interactions, not its boxes.
An org chart shows where a team sits. It doesn't show how the team operates — which functions it depends on, which ones depend on it, which relationships are directive and which are reciprocal, where the handoffs happen and where the accountabilities overlap. We design the interaction and governance model that answers those questions explicitly. That means defining, for each relationship the focal team or function holds: the nature of the interaction, the decision rights, the escalation pathway, and the cadence at which the relationship is worked.
We start with the diagnostic work from the previous step — the three questions about capability, stakeholders, and accountability — and translate those answers into a designed model, relationship by relationship. For each connection the focal team holds, we decide the nature of the interaction, who carries the decision rights, how escalation works when the relationship strains, and the cadence at which the work actually happens. The result is a governance model that's explicit about the grey areas most organisations leave ambiguous. It's tested against the operating reality of the client before it gets codified — because a governance design that looks elegant on the page and falls apart in the field is worse than no design at all.
Organisational Interaction Map — Illustrative
Primary interaction
Secondary
Occasional
Directive / escalation
Pharmamosaic · Organisational Design · Fig. 02
THE PLAYBOOK
How a new team gets hardwired into the business.
Organisational Playbook — Six Domains
Organisational Playbook
02
Governance & decision rights
Who decides what, where authority sits, how decisions escalate when the relationships strain.
Authority
03
Interaction model
How this team works with adjacent functions, BUs, and leadership — relationship by relationship, explicit about each.
Seams
04
Operating cadence
The meetings, reviews, and decision points that hold the model together. Who attends, what gets decided, at what frequency.
Rhythm
05
Capability commitments
What the team needs to be able to do, what's in place, what's being built, and against what timeline.
Build
06
Integration roadmap
The sequence of moves from current state to target state. Milestones, dependencies, review gates.
Path
Pharmamosaic · Organisational Design · Fig. 03
The playbook is the deliverable. Everything else — the diagnostic, the governance model, the capability design — is scaffolding. The playbook is where it all lands in a form the business can actually run against. The point of the document is integration: how does this new team, function, or capability fit into the organisation that already exists? What are the roles and responsibilities, what are the decision rights, which meetings matter and on what cadence, how do the interactions with adjacent functions work in practice? It's the bible for the next twelve to eighteen months — the operating reality made explicit, so the organisation can execute against it rather than rediscover it.
A complete playbook covers six domains. Taken together, they answer the question every new team ultimately has to answer — how do we get from where we are to where the strategy needs us to be, inside a business that wasn't built around us? Getting from here to there is rarely a structural problem. It's a problem of clarity: clarity about scope, about who decides, about how the seams are held, about what the team owes and is owed by the rest of the organisation.