The outgoing chair has gifted the incoming chair with a new structure. A structure which aims to make the organisation ‘more innovative, faster at decision making and bolder'. If the big reorganisation falls flat who would the new chair fire? Not the chief executive since the new structure doesn't employ anyone with that title. Nor will it be either of the executive directors previously responsible for the two businesses that make up the partnership because these posts have gone along with a third of the senior management posts. This leads to the question of who is in charge apart from the new chair?

This is at John Lewis  - one of those organisations local authorities are frequently encouraged to emulate /view as a model of good practice. I have worked in a local authority that replaced the chief executive with a post of head of paid services. I believe the aim in this case was for the new administration to send out a clear message that this was a member-led authority. All well and good until social services went into special measures and the inspectorate identified a lack of leadership (and they weren't referring to the director of social services).

I worked in large housing association which had three separate business streams; sheltered housing, residential and nursing care homes, and elderly retirement communities. This was a national organisation and the new chief executive wanted to integrate the business steams at a local level. Matrix management was trendy at the time and the new structure chart had lots of dotted lines showing the relationship between managers and senior managers. New regional directors replaced the old service directors' posts. It didn't work. One reason was the question of who other than the chief executive was in overall charge of the sheltered housing and who was leading on the residential and nursing care home business? Middle managers ended up answering to multiple senior managers and senior managers found themselves responsible for services but not the managers running the services.

Local authorities have in the past experimented with neighbourhood management in which each area had a senior manager responsible for all the local authority services in that locality. The idea was to  improve the coordination of council services and increase accountability to local residents. It didn't work. Local authorities couldn't take the risk of having  child protection services or services to vulnerable adults without clear lines of management responsibility and accountability. Such a structure inevitably led to constant questions about who was really in charge.

Changes to an organisation's management structure whether to make for  faster decision making  and better support to innovation or to be more responsive to customers are attractive  - but not at the expense of clarity about who's in charge.