A paper lands on your desk on Monday morning. One of your divisions has been struggling for months; the plan to put it right brings two functions together, strips out a layer of hierarchy, and moves the manager who runs both functions sideways. The plan is clean, costed, and it is on your desk for a signature. The one thing it does not account for is what has really happened in that division since the last restructure, twelve months ago.

That restructure made working across the two functions harder, not easier. The manager has made it work anyway, by absorbing the friction every week. Because she has been effective, the cost has been invisible to you, which is exactly why it took a rupture to surface a string of HR complaints and a series of ultimatums. When you open the hood, the division does not reflect what the paper describes. There is little clarity on who is responsible for what, trust is low within the teams, the good people are leaving, and there is a revolving door of people signed off sick. Those who do come to work take pride in doing the bare minimum.

The paper suggests that the division lacks talent and productivity. In truth, many of their failures are attributable to poor org design at the last restructure. Unclear roles result in the daily friction that eventually results in disengagement when raising concerns changes nothing. That is internal damage, and a restructure will not fix it. What will is repairing the damage, and you can only do that once you have looked honestly at the true condition of those two functions while everyone is still in the room.

So the order of operations matters. A restructure is, before anything else, a financial decision. When you put people who are already strained and mistrustful through a challenging process it is experienced as a burden: more uncertainty, more disruption, and ultimately more work. If you also move the manager, you lose the only person who holds the context, the history of what has already been tried; they are the only person the workforce you are about to snip actually trusts. Worst still, the institutional memory and the relational capital will walk out of the door with her if her response to the restructure is to leave.

To those who have been on this journey since the start, I know I sound like a broken record: repair the damage first. Let the repair show you what is genuinely wrong in the design and what was only ever the strain of good people doing their best to make something unworkable work. Decide on the structure from there. You may find it needs far less surgery than the plan assumed; you may find the saving was never going to survive contact with the people asked to deliver it. And when the repair begins, let the data confirm that the manager the paper proposes to move is not the problem to be solved. She is where it starts, because she is the one person who has the buy-in to rebuild the trust in both teams; so begin there, and remember to thank her.

If a plan like this is on your desk, or you redrew the org chart last quarter and you're watching the death by a thousand cuts begin, email [email protected] and we'll give you the data you're missing, so the next decision doesn't make things worse.

I’ll be in Manchester on 16 November for the Restorative Justice Council Annual Conference 2026 where I’ll be speaking about what organisations miss when they believe a complaint has been handled but the person who complained does not.

At The WayFinders Group we believe that repair asks more of an institution than getting to the end of a process: honest acknowledgement, a real account of what went wrong, and a willingness to change. That means brokering accountability when systems and institutions fail, and we dismantle the power structures and behaviours that stand in the way of repair using a data-led approach. 

Address the harm®️ was formed from our 2025 white paper to help organisations and the people they serve understand harm, learn from complaints and find pathways to repair. Our charitable work involves developing the people's test for resolution, a free public framework for judging whether a complaint has been meaningfully resolved rather than merely closed — built with people who have been through a complaints process.

If you're attending, come and find us. If you'd like to hear more about our repair work, reply to this email. 

The WayFinders Group deals with the elephant(s) in the room after an investigation, inquiry, or tribunal, when the findings land 🐘

In the week where Jeffrey Archer died at 86, the day before his final novel was published, Green leader Zack Polanski fell short in the Holborn by-election, the BBC axed a string of Radio 4 programmes to find £500m in savings, the average five-year mortgage rate hit 6% for the first time in three years, diesel topped £2 a litre for the first time, and the British Chambers of Commerce found inflation was still the worry firms named most, the question is whether things will get worse before they get better.

investigation of the week🕵🏽‍♀️

Ofcom opened its first Online Safety Act investigation into Meta, examining whether it properly risk-assessed a new Instagram image-sharing feature for illegal content and harm to children before launching it in May. The regulator can fine firms up to £18m or a tenth of global turnover, and it said significant changes to a platform must be risk-assessed before they go live.

tribunal finding of the week 👩🏾‍⚖️

The Employment Appeal Tribunal sent an anonymised disability discrimination claim back to be reheard against Birmingham City Council, finding the original tribunal had failed to consider whether the council knew of the claimant's PTSD while its disciplinary process was still running. The council had already admitted unfair constructive dismissal.

regulator of the week 👸🏽

After hackers pushed an "ASOS HACKED" message to shoppers through the retailer's own app, the Information Commission stepped in to steady customers, urging anyone who received the message to stay alert and to change passwords only by logging in through the official site or app. The newly re-named regulator had not confirmed a formal breach report when it issued the advice. What a strange way to do damage: hack the customer messages themselves and let doubt do the rest.

boardroom drama of the week👩🏽‍🔧

The chair of Grafton Group plc, Ian Tyler, told the board he intends to step down, citing other commitments, with the senior independent director now leading an external search for a successor. The announcement names no replacement and sets no timetable which is curious for a listed company.

stakeholder revolt of the week ⚔️

Ariel Investments, which holds 5.4% of Mattel, wrote to the Barbie maker's board urging it to explore a sale or break-up, saying the shares are significantly undervalued and the turnaround has stalled. The push lands while Mattel is mid-leadership change, with a new chief executive due to take over next month.

surprising intervention of the week 💡

Reform UK published its own investigation into the undercover Channel 4 News broadcast on its donations, clearing the party of any breach of electoral law and turning the charge back on the broadcaster for splicing together conversations recorded months apart. It conceded that some of what its own officials said "were wrong" and are not defended, while a police inquiry and a polling-standards inquiry both remain open.

Leah Brown FRSA is Britain’s leading workplace repair expert, fixing the things everyone else would rather sweep under the rug 🧹

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