A new framework connects organizational structure with revenue expansion, operational efficiency, synergy capture, AI, automation, and measurable business performance.
A strategy and innovation consulting firm, Stonehill, has announced the release of its MODERN™ Organizational Design Methodology — a proprietary approach aimed at assisting CEOs, private equity firms, and management teams in building organizations based on how work actually occurs and the value the business intends to generate.
This new methodology enhances Stonehill's Organizational Design Consulting capabilities and departs from conventional organizational design, which typically starts with reporting lines, org charts, and span‑of‑control benchmarks. Instead, Stonehill begins by identifying how the business creates value, setting clear ownership and measurable performance targets, and then shaping the organizational structure needed to deliver those results.
The approach is outlined in Stonehill's latest white paper, “Earning the Org Chart: A Value-Creation Approach to Organizational Design.”
“An organizational chart should be the result of organizational design, not the starting point,” said Doug Pace, CEO of Stonehill. “We believe you first need to understand how the business works, determine who owns the outcomes and how those outcomes will be measured, and then design the organization around those requirements. Once you have that design, you can use AI, automation and process improvement to enhance it and quantitative modeling to determine whether it can actually deliver the expected results.”
The Stonehill MODERN™ Organizational Design Methodology comprises six interconnected stages:
MAP — Outline the operational journey and grasp how work, decisions, and value move across the enterprise. Stonehill's broader Process Improvement capabilities support this work by examining workflows, handoffs, bottlenecks, and opportunities to improve how work gets done.
OWN — Establish cascading ownership, responsibilities, decision rights, and measurable KPIs that link enterprise objectives with functional, team, and individual performance.
DESIGN — Create the roles, capabilities, organizational structure, reporting relationships, management layers, spans of control, and matrix responsibilities required to execute the work.
ENHANCE — Elevate the organization through process redesign, artificial intelligence, automation, and technology to boost productivity, scalability, and operating performance. Stonehill's Technology, Analytics & AI practice works with organizations to identify and deploy technology and AI opportunities tied to measurable business outcomes.
RENDER — Construct a quantitative representation of the organization and stress‑test it against revenue, workload, capacity, headcount, cost, synergy, and EBITDA assumptions.
NAVIGATE — Implement the future organization through leadership alignment, talent decisions, communications, governance, training, technology adoption, and Change Management.
The methodology is intended to directly link organizational decisions to enterprise value. For growth‑oriented companies, the approach can help determine whether commercial and operational capacity is sufficient to reach revenue targets. For companies involved in mergers and acquisitions, it can identify overlapping responsibilities, duplicate capabilities, and opportunities to accelerate synergy realization. For companies pursuing margin improvement, the methodology evaluates where work can be eliminated, simplified, standardized, centralized, automated, or augmented through AI.
These principles are especially relevant to Stonehill's work with private equity firms and portfolio companies, where organizational design, synergy realization, and operating‑model improvement can directly influence the value‑creation thesis.
A distinguishing feature of MODERN™ is Stonehill's Render stage, which uses operational KPIs and business assumptions to quantitatively pressure‑test the proposed organization.
Rather than depending solely on organizational benchmarks, Stonehill can model relationships between business performance and organizational requirements. Depending on the business, this can include translating revenue and demand into workload, capacity, automation requirements, roles, FTEs, management load, and organizational cost.
“We want management teams to be able to demonstrate why an organization should look the way it does,” Pace said. “If a company expects significant growth, we should be able to determine whether the organization has the capacity to support it. If an acquisition has a synergy commitment, we should be able to see where those savings are reflected. And if AI and automation are expected to improve productivity, those assumptions should ultimately show up in the organizational model and financial performance.”
The MODERN™ methodology is especially applicable to rapidly growing businesses, private equity portfolio companies, acquisitive organizations, post‑merger integrations, corporate restructurings, operating‑model transformations, and companies seeking to improve management effectiveness and scalability.
For acquisitive companies, MODERN™ also complements Stonehill's Post-Merger Integration capabilities, helping organizations connect future‑state organizational design with synergy capture, process integration, technology consolidation, and long‑term value realization.
About Stonehill
Stonehill is a nationally recognized strategy and innovation consultancy serving Fortune 1000 companies, private equity, and government clients. The firm specializes in helping organizations navigate their most complex and sensitive challenges, combining design thinking, business strategy, and advanced analytics to identify opportunity, create change, and accelerate growth. Known for handling its clients’ boldest ideas, Stonehill has facilitated billions of dollars in mergers and delivered solutions that have touched millions of lives. For more information, visit stonehillinnovation.com.
##
Julie Stollings
Stonehill Innovation
+1 813-444-1984
email us here
Visit us on social media:
LinkedIn
Facebook
