Hack:
Org structures - Moving from Pyramid to concentric circles

One of the key reasons why organizations are not able to adapt to the changes around them quickly is because the very people who decide on these things are usually the last people in the organization to know about the change. 

• The strategy is designed by the C-suite and cascaded down for execution. 
• The KPI's are defined (annually, in most cases) and cascaded down. 
• Bonus structures are defined (annually, in most cases) and cascaded down. 

The real people who actually do the work,

• the sales executive who sells your products and competes with your competitor or
• the support executive who supports your customers when something breaks down or
• the engineer or product/service developer who designs and produces the products

are the one's who get to know if something in your business environment has changed. 

Not many organizations spend time training these folks to identify such shifts and escalate them to the guys who matter - the CEO or anyone who can actually change something in response to the shift in the environment. 

What would help organizations become very adaptable would be: 

• Move from a pyramid shaped organization structure to a concentric circles shaped structure, where, the customer is at the core of the organization, surrounded by the customer facing employees (sales execs, support engineers, product development folks, etc). Each outward circle represents a layer of people who shall support these customer facing employees in serving the customers needs in the best way possible.
• The core employees are trained in identifing trends and insights and create the strategy with the guidance from the other execs in the organizations. 

Just like in a theatre performance, the actors (in front of the customer) are the most important people when it comes to the audience (as they execute the vision of the writer and the director). Every one else is there to enhance or complete the experience. 

So should organizations realize that the true heroes or stars for your customers are the folks who perform in front of them. The role of the others is of support cast and need to find, train the best actors and put them in the spotlight. 

Also allowing the actors to improvise (if needed) has the potential to improve the overall experience for the audience substantially, similarly empowering your frontline employees to improvise can improve the ability of the organization to adapt to any situation that they can come up with.