A poorly designed enterprise is illegible and incomprehensible to employees and customers

I have seen many businesses where competent people work with dedication and conviction, but where no one seems to have any idea what they are doing. They have lost sight of both the reason why they are doing things and how they contribute to a larger collective ambition. As transformation programs follow one after another, systems pile up, and initiatives multiply in all directions, organizations end up becoming illegible and incomprehensible. Unable to find a shared collective meaning, each person translates what they understand at their own level, in their own way, and often according to their immediate interests.

Strategy becomes a machine for feeding ambitions, operations become indicators, and teams become deliverables. At first glance, all this seems logical, and we would not notice it if we were not struck by the kind of void that exists between the three.

This loss of clarity about what connects and articulates the different players is not an accident but a symptom of a business that, in a way, has stopped thinking about itself.

When we no longer conceive of the business as a whole, it becomes a puzzle and, true to Deming’s observation that “a bad system will always beat a good person”, it struggles to satisfy customers and employees because for more than 20 years we have perfected systems without ever taking into account the intention they were meant to serve.

In short:

• Businesses often lose sight of the link between their purpose, their operations, and their collective contribution, which leads to a loss of meaning and internal clarity.
• The growing gap between identity discourse (values, culture) and operational reality is the result of a design flaw rather than a simple lack of alignment.
• Technology, by filling the void left by management, imposes standardized operating methods that can weaken the business’s identity.
• Enterprise design aims to reconnect identity, experience, and operations to create a coherent, clear, and resilient organization.
• Enterprise design must become a collective and shared practice within organizations to ensure that technical and managerial decisions remain in line with a clear intention.

Loss of connection between identity and operations

In many businesses, identity has become the domain of communication and executives, while operations are controlled by information systems that impose a certain philosophy of the business, of work, and of how things should be done.

The former talk about values, while the latter are on autopilot.

The former talk about culture, values, and mission, but these words no longer translate into the daily lives of the latter. Customer focus is celebrated, but processes remain designed for compliance and economic efficiency. There is talk of agility, but decisions come down even faster than they come up. There is talk of trust, but performance is measured at the micro-task level in a climate of widespread micromanagement.

This disconnect between identity, experience, and operations is not simply a lack of alignment but a flaw in design. As Parisa Foroudi (2024) points out in her work on business identity, the consistency between what a business says it is and what it actually does directly influences internal and external trust (Business identity management: A study of employees’ perceptions in the context of the retail and hospitality and tourism sectors). Without consistency, identity is no longer a benchmark or a guide, but merely a showcase.

I have seen this in executive committees where each function defended its own consistency while ignoring the whole: marketing protects the brand, HR protects the culture, IT protects security, and each acts with good reason but without a common guideline. The business then behaves like an organism in which each organ functions perfectly but without knowing to which body it belongs.

Technology takes over in the absence of design

But accusing technology of denying meaning and identity in order to impose its own way of operating would be somewhat futile: nature abhors a vacuum, and it has simply filled the one left by management, sometimes even reluctantly, but someone had to take charge (How management let systems do the thinking for them).

Over the years, information systems have ceased to be supports and have become structures. It is time to evolve our vocabulary and abandon this outdated notion, because they have indeed become operations systems. This is a development that we should, in principle, consider positive, were it not for the fact that we consider the link between identity and operations to be vital in terms of experience and sustainable economic performance. They import their conception of operations and their philosophy of the business, leaving its identity aside.

It is not the leaders who have redefined the modes of collaboration and operation, but the platforms, just as it is not the managers who have adjusted the processes, but the ERPs. As R. van de Wetering (2021) has already shown,business architecture only creates value when it is based on a clear vision (Dynamic business architecture capabilities and organizational benefits: an empirical mediation study). Without intention and therefore without design, it either solidifies and amplifies what already exists or imports practices from outside that reflect the identity of their designers.

Technological choices have therefore become implicit design decisions. When a business chooses Salesforce over another tool, it implicitly adopts a way of thinking about customer relations. When it configures an HR process in Workday, it formalizes a management model that is “constrained” by the capabilities of the tool and influenced by any consultants who are experts in HR processes but for whom the business’s identity, employer brand, and employee experience are negligible factors.

Behind what appear to be purely technical decisions lie acts of enterprise design that are most often unconscious.

I often think of Klarna, the fintech company that massively automated its customer service using AI, only to discover that what it gained in speed, it lost in identity and ultimately in customer satisfaction. Technical efficiency replaced relationships, and the brand found itself alienated from its own identity (Taking back control of enterprise design: intention before tools).

A corporate culture is not lost in a single decision, but is diluted by the choices and parameters of tools.

Enterprise design as a factor of consistency

Enteprise design is not about redesigning organizational charts or adding another layer of methodology, but rather restoring consistency to the system.

While architecture describes, design formulates an intention where strategy formulates ambitions, design connects. It brings together three dimensions that organizations have kept separate for too long: what the business wants to be (identity), what it brings to life (experience), and how it acts (operations).

Designing means making things clear and coherent and enabling each player to understand how their actions embody the vision.

Peter Drucker summed it up long before anyone talked about AI: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” Today, I would say that “your operations eat your strategy for breakfast”… if they do not reflect your culture because what has changed since Drucker is that IT can take control of a business without regard to its culture and thus undermine a strategy that makes it a factor for success. It is the role of corporate design to restore this continuity.

Sharon Kristal’s (2020) work on brand identity shows that identity is not a fixed attribute but is co-created through interactions, routines, and organizational choices (Performative corporate brand identity in industrial markets). Enteprise design creates the conditions in which identity can be expressed on a daily basis through operations.

Legibility becomes a competitive advantage

Organizations don’t get lost because they don’t have plans, but because they don’t understand or anticipate what happens when the plan meets reality.

A legible business is one that knows how to explain itself, that knows why a decision was made, how it applies, and what purpose it serves.

This legibility builds trust and engagement among employees, because people can accept a decision they understand, even if they don’t agree with it, as well as among customers who experience or suffer the consequences.

It also creates speed: people act without excessive bureaucracy because the framework is clear.

And finally, it creates resilience: we can absorb the unexpected because we understand the logic of the system.

Deming emphasized that nothing can be improved without understanding the system in which we operate. Enterprise design extends this idea: it makes visible the way an organization thinks, acts, and learns in line with what it is, so that every improvement serves the coherence of the whole rather than the performance of a part.

Towards a shared design language

Enterprise design is not a discipline reserved for a select few experts, but rather a common grammar that provides executives, business lines, and technicians with a space to think together.

Frameworks such as EDGY (EDGY: a common language to align identity, experience, and operations) are not recipes, but languages that allow us to express the links between identity, experience, and operations with the same precision that an architect expresses technical constraints, but in a way that is meaningful and understandable to all stakeholders, regardless of their profession.

What I like about this idea, beyond the method itself, is the conversation it makes possible, turning ambiguity into an opportunity for dialogue.

But even a shared language is useless without application, and consistency cannot be decreed: it must be conceived, maintained, and re-discussed. That is why management must once again become a function of collective design and not just supervision (Manager, c’est designer).

Bottom Line

The maturity of an organization is not measured by its degree of automation or the sophistication of its indicators, but by its ability to connect what it promises with what it does. Taking back control of enterprise design means giving management back responsibility for this living link between intention and execution.

A coherent business is not one that controls everything, but one that understands itself. It knows why it acts, how it acts, and what it is and wants to become by acting.

While technology tends to impose its own rhythm, this shared understanding gives a rare advantage: an organization that still thinks before being thought by its systems.

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Image credit: Image generated by artificial intelligence via ChatGPT (OpenAI)

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