Mandating a new structure does little to help people at all levels of the organization understand the spirit of their new roles. Without such an understanding of assigned entrepreneurships, it is unreasonable to expect them to evolve toward excellence. Mandated structures do little to change the way an organization actually does business, i.e., its processes and culture. For structural change to bring about meaningful cultural change, the design and implementation process must educate people in a new way of doing business. People must learn new relationships with others, both within and outside the organization, and new modes of operation that engender high-performance teamwork.
Effective structure depends on cultural change.
The separation of the building blocks requires effective collaboration, since no one function alone can produce the organization's products. However, if people in the organization can't work well with one another, then each small group must fulfill all the functions on its own, and the organization will slip back into isolated islands of self-sufficient generalists. People must learn to collaborate well across boundaries to make the organizational system as a whole work. To build effective teamwork, people must view the organization as an interdependent set of dynamic systems, and learn new processes of teamwork. It is difficult to obtain commitment to a mandated structure.