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About the guest
Haris Ahmed is the Founder and CEO of Pragmatium Consulting Group, Inc., with over 25 years of experience in management consulting and organizational change. He specializes in strategy clarification, organization design, and transformational change, and has advised numerous global companies on leadership challenges. Haris holds an MBA (cum laude) from the University of Notre Dame and a BA in economics and politics from NYU, alongside advanced leadership certifications, making him a recognized expert in the organizational design community. Learn more about him on his expert page.
Summary
In this candid and compelling episode of the Org Design Podcast, recorded live at the Festival of Org Design 2024, hosts Tim Brewer and Damian Bramanis sit down with Haris Ahmed, founder of Pragmatium Consulting Group, to uncover three decades of wisdom in organizational transformation.
Haris shares how he stumbled into org design during the Y2K era and evolved into a strategic advisor trusted by mid-market powerhouses and ambitious startups alike. From diagnosing dysfunction to architecting adaptive systems, Haris explains why getting the strategy-structure-capability triangle right is crucial—especially when the market moves faster than your 5-year plan.
This episode is packed with practical advice for founders, leaders, and change agents—from identifying cultural silos to unlocking high-performance through clear leadership dynamics. Haris also reveals the surprising power of crucial conversations, the value of external perspectives, and why org design is no longer a luxury—it’s a leadership imperative.
Show Notes
https://www.linkedin.com/in/harisahmedusa/
https://pragmatiumconsulting.com/
Transcript
[00:00:00] Tim Brewer: Welcome to the Org Design Podcast.
[00:00:02] Damian Bramanis: Welcome to the Org Design Podcast.
[00:00:04] Tim Brewer: My name's Tim Brewer. We've got,
[00:00:05] Damian Bramanis: my name's Damian.
[00:00:08] Tim Brewer: Luckily we can edit this stuff. Hi everyone.
[00:00:11] Damian Bramanis: And Haris Ahmed.
[00:00:13] Haris Ahmed: Thank you guys.
[00:00:14] Tim Brewer: Great to have you along, really good.
[00:00:16] Damian Bramanis: And we're at the Festival of Org Design 2024, ODF, and really excited to spend a bit of time chatting with Haris today.
[00:00:24] Haris Ahmed: I'm delighted to be here.
[00:00:26] Tim Brewer: Haris, maybe tell us a little bit about how you ended up in Org Design?
[00:00:29] Haris Ahmed: Not by design. I was purely a function of an accident. I was in the insurance industry for the first five years of my career, boring stuff. And I knew I didn't want to do that. And when a boss moved over into consulting, he pulled me in, said there's something about some change management stuff, and this was in the 1990s, and about the time when Y2K, if you guys remember, was in the big mix. So there's a whole bunch of stuff going on. I was with the big four . That point, they were not calling it transformations. If that's a sexy word today, change types of things.
And then, it just came into a lot of org design. I didn't know what it was, started to do it, and then as it happens in life, you begin to form a reputation for, "Oh, anything to do with org and change, go call Haris". And so I built a little reputation within that space and then moved on to many other consulting firms. And that's how I fell into it.
[00:01:30] Tim Brewer: That's super cool. We always, we've asked this question to a lot of people. And the surprising number studied law and then decided they didn't want to do that, went into org design. Did you do, what did you study before you, you had that career trajectory and what did you study?
[00:01:45] Haris Ahmed: I did an an undergrad and politics and economics. Yep. I was a dreamer. I wanted to go change the world. When I realized that's not that easy. And then that's how I fell into into the world of consulting.
[00:01:58] Damian Bramanis: Changing the world one organization at a time.
[00:02:00] Haris Ahmed: That matters.
[00:02:02] Tim Brewer: Haris, maybe tell us a little bit about what you do today. I know that you still active and you're consulting how the people listening to the podcast know, "Oh, Haris is probably a good fit for our organization", how would they know what's your specialization now? Cause just anything to do with org design is so broad.
[00:02:21] Haris Ahmed: It is very broad.
[00:02:22] Tim Brewer: Where's your best work being done at the moment?
[00:02:23] Haris Ahmed: No, that's a great question. I look at my life and sort of two chapters. The first was 15 years with the big guys and doing just about a little bit of everything.
And that's what you have to do experientially to land where you do. So the last 15 years that I've owned and run my firm, which is called Pragmatium Consulting Group. We focus primarily at the intersection of strategy and organization. So just around when a company knows which direction they want to go, northeast 45 degrees, how are you going to figure out how you're going to organize the people, the capabilities to get there? That's our sweet spot.
[00:03:01] Damian Bramanis: And so when you say strategy tell us what what's important for strategy to get started there.
[00:03:05] Haris Ahmed: Most cases it's just not there in its full form, it's often half baked. It's unclear. So I just go in and do a simple test of asking people, what do you think the strategy is? I get six different answers. So then our first step in the org design project is to really clarify, what the heck it is they're wanting to do because without that, you're just playing a lot of games.
[00:03:25] Tim Brewer: Yeah. Some other really good conversations actually that have gone on is around the people in the organization and how org design affects them. And I'm sure walking through organizations for the last 30 years as an org designer, you see a lot of of the impacts of poor org design or where org design wasn't very considered, maybe reactive.
Tell us about how, what's your sense when you walk through an organization for the problems that relate to structure and how do you help leaders see the problems that they're experiencing or the pain they're experiencing? What does it look like and how do you help them go, "Oh, it's an org design problem?"
[00:04:06] Haris Ahmed: Yeah. I mean, you see this all the time. So there's a client of ours, they in their infinite wisdom way back when they said to limit liability between the different departments and stuff, we're going to just have a bunch of different groups. Separated by legal names and stuff. So it's a large company.
And what they didn't realize is that you just created a bunch of different silos. So there is no unifying culture, no unified organization. Everyone's got their own view. They've got an affinity to that particular group and have nothing to do with the rest of the organization. So that just creates a lot of isolation, silo mentality. So when I talk to them and ask them about things, they have no understanding of the next unit. And that's just not a smart way to design, and when the founders created the organization, they said this is a good way to keep everything neat and tidy. 30 years later, it results in just a confluence of different ways, they cannot even define what the rest of the company does. So that just requires a lot of unraveling.
[00:05:10] Tim Brewer: What size organizations do you typically work with?
[00:05:13] Haris Ahmed: I've focused on the middle market, which is about a hundred million to about a couple of billion in size, but increasingly a lot of startups have started to come to us and, maybe I wasn't looking at them before because they had no money and they would pay me in all kinds of strange things that didn't equate to money, but you know what? But I think some of the smart founders are realizing that if they don't get the foundation right, it is just very hard to scale up. So just before getting here, I was in Toronto for a startup, and of course, every founder thinks that they've got the next unicorn. So he's, " I want you to help me establish the blueprint and organization of a billion dollar company".
Now, this is a startup that has got seven people. Three full time for part time. They're just sitting around. But that leadership team is their organization. So while they don't have scale, they have all the complexities, role clarity, not knowing, the interdynamics, how their decisions will be made. So, it forces you to really apply a lot of the principles, but in a very microcosm of a way.
[00:06:21] Damian Bramanis: Yeah. It's interesting you talk about that because the instant reaction is that's thinking a long way ahead. Yes it is. That's thinking from seven people to a billion dollar company. There's a lot of space in between those two things. Usually. Sometimes that happens very quickly. But so what, how far in advance do you think that it makes sense to be to be planning and doing org design? And How far ahead of your skis should you be getting?
[00:06:45] Haris Ahmed: If you asked me the question a few years ago, we would have said, five or 10 years out, but entire sectors and markets are getting eviscerated in years.
So it's got to be longterm enough, but at the heart of what I think what the work that and how we have changed as advisors and consultants is just building enough adaptability in the design feature, that even if it starts to shift, they can make those pivot changes. We still like to think in terms of three to five years, because that's still valid. In some of the technology sectors, they're just looking at six month horizons, especially if funding is an issue.
[00:07:21] Damian Bramanis: Yeah. I put myself in the shoes of a startup founder, maybe a smaller organization who isn't isn't able to bring on consulting expertise. What should that person do to think about org design just at the very basics, in a way that they can make some progress?
[00:07:36] Haris Ahmed: I think the biggest thing for them is to think in terms of the capabilities that they need to embed in the organization. They may not have those needs right now, but unless they have thought through what is needed to, to germinate and then scale the business, it's gonna be very difficult to go there.
And then it's just classic things, in terms of being clear, on their leadership operating model because that's all they've got initially before they get to a large size. So if those things are not set in the foundations, it just gets very hard to add that stuff in. And the underpinnings of all that is the culture that gets formed by a NewCo.
[00:08:15] Damian Bramanis: Yeah. That makes a lot of sense to me. Should that person be finishing up their day, putting on some headphones, grabbing some paper and starting to write down, Here's all the capabilities I need sitting at home one evening or is there a better way to go about that?
[00:08:28] Haris Ahmed: No there, there is a slightly better way to do this. It is to listen and pay attention to people outside the organization and inside the organization in terms of what they require. And typically it's a set of things that emerge. And then for that leader, to identify how are we going to acquire that.
In most cases, it is a development aspect. So give your people the opportunity, put them in situations where they're going to be stretched to develop those abilities. And that's how I do this in an incremental basis. You can't quite bring all that stuff in early into a startup because it'll just collapse.
[00:09:06] Tim Brewer: Haris, a question actually about the conference. It's been a great three days, a lot of org designers getting together. What do you think is changing in the org design industry? And for those that are listening to the podcast that might be in an organization, where a lot of their job is org design, but aren't able to get out or maybe don't even realize that they are an org design geek or just early on in that journey of discovering that. What's important for them to capture from what you've heard this week, listening to some of the leaders in the org design industry.
[00:09:35] Haris Ahmed: It's an inflection point happening within the field itself. I think, there was a focus on just getting clear on what the work is. We've thankfully gone beyond that stuff.
So we're not debating, is this org design or that org design, the differences and all that. The lexicon is something that consultants used to get really wrapped around the axel on. But what really matters is, if you take the broadest lens on this, the ability to impact at the end of the day, it probably is one of the more strategic things that any organization is dealing with, is how they go around organizing its skills and capabilities to execute on their strategy.
And, we've got a whole earful and a head full of various thoughts on this stuff. But I think of all the things, you can't underestimate the impact of having access to data to make those decisions. So, many of those decisions really visceral on the part of leadership teams that they're thinking that it's a logical decision, but they're really going by intuition. Now you've got the ability to perhaps look at this from a data perspective and inform your decision on making changes to either direction or the way that you really even go about organizing your people.
[00:10:57] Damian Bramanis: I'd love to talk a bit about dysfunction.
[00:10:59] Haris Ahmed: My favorite word.
[00:11:01] Damian Bramanis: So many people say that where they work is dysfunctional. But seldom is it 10/10 dysfunctional. It might be a 2/10 or a 3/10 or maybe a 6/10. Where do you see that org design has the most impact? And how dysfunctional do you need to be to be really worth your time investing into this?
[00:11:17] Haris Ahmed: I was taught that the very smart Clients perhaps don't need consultants, right? They can solve those things and it's not really true. I think the bigger thing is what we bring as outside advisors is a sense of objectivity.
Any team has got some degree of dysfunction, like any family does, but the biggest advantage that we bring is that we are outside the jar. If they are not being able to see the label, just from the vantage point of where we sit, are able to bring some clarity to them. And, degrees of dysfunction in an organization there are plenty.
But, the one that rises up to me is the inability to just address those issues. And, most leaders are conflict averse, so they will just do the, their darndest to just push this down or not address it. And then it just festers and results in all kinds of issues later on.
[00:12:12] Damian Bramanis: Yeah. You mentioned the inability of leaders to address something. We often hear about resistance that a leader is trying to address something, but there's real resistance from the part of the parts of the organization to that change. But I think what you're talking about is something a little bit different. There is something more inate to the leader themselves.
[00:12:29] Haris Ahmed: Absolutely. Everyone's looking for this high performing organization. To me, high performance lives between a leader and the person who reports to that leader and if they're able to get that dynamic right in terms of what is expected and what are the consequences of doing it right or not doing it right, that is the microcosm. If you can get that situation right, that gets replicated and that creates a better performing group, department or a company.
[00:12:59] Damian Bramanis: When you start an engagement, you talked then about the leader and their direct reports. That's a set of stakeholders. Where would you go first? Who are the people that you first talk to as stakeholders to understand the change, understand the organization, and where do you get the most insights from about what needs to happen here?
[00:13:19] Haris Ahmed: Yeah, ours is a pretty diagnostic heavy process. So we like to speak to as many people as we can, and ideally a cross section across the organization and frankly, outside the organization, a lot is made about the culture of our
[00:13:35] Tim Brewer: customers?
[00:13:36] Haris Ahmed: Absolutely. Customers too, because you can tell me you've got this culture. To me, culture is what somebody experiences outside the company. With their permission, especially their more dear customers, and we'll tell them that, we'll behave ourselves. We love to get a few data points outside, either from customers, or in some cases, their partners, because increasingly, these companies are operating in an ecosystem. So to get some of that sort of richness of that, coupled with internal data that gives us a pretty rich narrative of what actually is taking place within a particular company.
[00:14:14] Tim Brewer: I wanted to come back to having those hard conversations and we often talk about doing hard things or having courageous conversations. Is that something you often find part of org design is that someone's not having the courageous conversations they need to and you're actually just helping the leader call out or observe something that just doesn't seem right in the organization or doesn't seem right to achieve its strategy.
[00:14:36] Haris Ahmed: Absolutely. Yeah. I think, the, I think the biggest thing that we bring as org designers is helping articulate things that have not been articulated. So it's in their heads. It's in the ethereal C suite and the extended team. By listening intently and helping put those in words, just helps and then to certainly assist them and having a good, we call them crucial conversations that need to be added. And there's typically about four or five crucial conversations that an organization for some reason is avoiding having. So setting the table and holding that space for them to have that conversation often results in magic.
[00:15:19] Tim Brewer: Thank you so much for joining us, encouraging everyone out there in the audience to have crucial conversations in your organization. Damian, thank you so much again for joining and leading the podcast today as a co-host.
Haris, great to have you along just before we leave. Yes. We did get you to search through the org design Oracle facilitation cards, and you found one that you liked, the organizer.
[00:15:42] Haris Ahmed: Yes.
[00:15:43] Tim Brewer: You're still liking the organizer card.
[00:15:45] Haris Ahmed: I do. It sounds like the Terminator but in a more, kinder, gentle way, but I mean, I think that's the fundamental role that we play as advisors to companies is to help them organize their set of capabilities in a good way, and you've listed a few things there and yeah, that's what I see as our role and purpose.
[00:16:06] Tim Brewer: Awesome. We're going to give you a set of the cards to take away with you. Thanks so much for coming along. We'll see you all next time. Thanks for joining us from all the podcasts at ODF.
[00:16:17] Damian Bramanis: Thank you.
[00:16:17] Haris Ahmed: Thank you.
Functionly empowers organizations to navigate the complexities of organizational design by providing a clear framework that aligns strategy with structure. By leveraging data-driven insights, Functionly helps leaders identify and articulate their organizational needs, enabling them to create adaptable structures that support growth and efficiency. This not only fosters a cohesive culture across departments but also encourages open communication and collaboration, addressing common challenges such as silos and role clarity. With Functionly, organizations can build a foundation for success, ensuring that they are prepared for rapid changes in the market while effectively scaling their operations.e
