New approach links company structure to revenue expansion, operational efficiency, synergy realization, AI, automation, and quantifiable business outcomes
Stonehill, a consultancy focused on strategy and innovation, has announced the launch of its MODERN™ Organizational Design Methodology — a proprietary system aimed at helping CEOs, private equity firms, and management teams structure their organizations around actual work processes and the value the enterprise is expected to generate.
This new methodology broadens Stonehill's Organizational Design Consulting offerings and departs from conventional organizational design, which typically starts with reporting lines, org charts, and span‑of‑control benchmarks. Instead, Stonehill first identifies how the business creates value, sets clear ownership and measurable performance targets, and then builds the organizational structure needed to achieve those outcomes.
The approach is outlined in Stonehill's recently released 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 phases:
MAP — Map the operational journey and grasp how work, decisions, and value flow across the enterprise. Stonehill's broader Process Improvement capabilities support this phase by examining workflows, handoffs, bottlenecks, and opportunities to enhance how work is carried out.
OWN — Establish cascading ownership, responsibilities, decision rights, and measurable KPIs that link enterprise objectives to functional, team, and individual performance.
DESIGN — Create the roles, capabilities, organizational structure, reporting relationships, management layers, spans of control, and matrix responsibilities needed to execute the work.
ENHANCE — Improve 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 — Build 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.
This methodology is intended to directly link organizational decisions to enterprise value. For growth‑oriented companies, it can help determine whether commercial and operational capacity is adequate to meet revenue targets. For firms involved in mergers and acquisitions, it can identify overlapping responsibilities, duplicate capabilities, and opportunities to accelerate synergy realization. For companies focused on 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 improvements can directly affect the value‑creation thesis.
A distinctive feature of MODERN™ is Stonehill's Render stage, which uses operational KPIs and business assumptions to quantitatively test the proposed organization.
Instead of relying only on organizational benchmarks, Stonehill can model the relationships between business performance and organizational requirements. Depending on the business, this may involve translating revenue and demand into workload, capacity, automation needs, 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 suited for rapidly growing businesses, private equity portfolio companies, acquisitive organizations, post‑merger integrations, corporate restructurings, operating‑model transformations, and companies aiming to improve management effectiveness and scalability.
For acquisitive companies, MODERN™ also complements Stonehill's Post-Merger Integration capabilities, enabling organizations to 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 that serves Fortune 1000 companies, private equity, and government clients. The firm specializes in helping organizations tackle 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.
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Julie Stollings
Stonehill Innovation
+1 813-444-1984
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