Companies reorganise expecting the pace of work to change, and it usually does not. Reporting lines and workflow are different structures, and only one of them is being redrawn.
Reporting lines govern people, not tasks
An organisation chart records who evaluates whom, who approves spending and who resolves disputes. It is a map of authority rather than a map of production.
The path a piece of work takes is set by which steps must happen, in what order, and who is qualified to perform each one. That path is largely independent.
Changing the chart therefore alters the political geography while leaving the sequence of handoffs, queues and approvals exactly where it was.
Queues are the real determinant of throughput
Most of the elapsed time in any workflow is spent waiting rather than working. Items sit in queues between steps, and the queues set the pace.
A reorganisation that moves two teams under one leader does not shorten the queue between them unless it also changes how items are admitted and sequenced.
Where it does help, the mechanism is usually that a shared manager now resolves the queue dispute faster, which is a small effect compared with the disruption.
The transition itself costs a quarter or more
New reporting relationships take time to establish. Managers learn unfamiliar work, informal escalation routes break, and people spend attention on their own position rather than the work.
During that period output usually falls. If the reorganisation delivers a modest improvement, the improvement has to run for a long time before it repays the transition.
Companies that reorganise frequently never leave the transition period, which is why repeated restructuring often correlates with declining rather than improving performance.
Reorganisation is attractive because it is available
Redrawing the chart is something a leadership team can do unilaterally, quickly and visibly. Redesigning a process requires the cooperation of the people who run it.
That asymmetry makes structure the default intervention even where the diagnosis points at process, because structure is the lever within immediate reach.
The visibility also matters. A new chart demonstrates decisive action to a board in a way that a shortened approval step never quite does.
Structural change works when it removes a specific handoff
Reorganisations that improve throughput usually do so by eliminating a boundary that work was crossing repeatedly, so a step that required negotiation now requires none.
That effect is real but narrow, and it can be identified in advance by tracing where work actually waits rather than where the chart looks untidy.
Where no such handoff exists, the honest conclusion is that the problem sits in the process, and no arrangement of boxes will reach it.