Organisational Performance & Design

Understand the opportunities to lift performance across your organisation.

Openloop helps leaders identify practical ways to improve how their organisation performs, using evidence-based organisational development approaches. With deep experience across the public, not-for-profit and private sectors, we co-design solutions your organisation can put to work immediately, and partner with you to make the change stick. Our focus is how your organisation is designed and run, and how well its structure, processes and people settings work together to deliver today and hold up over time.

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Every performance challenge has a cause worth understanding.

Performance problems rarely have a single cause. They can sit in structure, process, capability or culture, and often a mix of all four. We call these open loops, and we start by finding what is genuinely driving the challenge so we can fix it at the source, closing the loop and delivering lasting benefits. The signs of poor performance can often be structural: a resourcing model that no longer fits the strategy, processes that have not kept pace with the work, unclear accountabilities, or a poor culture that quietly erodes delivery.

We diagnose before we design.

We work closely with you to understand what is influencing performance, then co-design solutions that fit your people, purpose and environment. You bring deep knowledge of your organisation; we bring the evidence, expertise and an outside perspective. Together we shape change that works in practice and is owned by the people who live it. Because performance is influenced by many factors, we connect this work with our leadership development, change and communication services where they add value.

Performance at every level.

We look at organisational performance through three connected lenses: strategic, operational and individual, tailoring each engagement to the challenge:

Strategic

Aligning the organisation with its mission and setting the direction for performance.

Business and organisational performance reviews
Strategy development and implementation
Operating model
Governance and decision-making frameworks

Operational

Configuring the structures, processes and ways of working that turn strategy into delivery.

Organisational design and structural reviews
Process review and ways of working
Service delivery model design
Performance measurement and success frameworks

Individual

Setting people up to perform through clear roles, accountabilities and expectations.

Role and position design
Work value assessment and job evaluation
Accountabilities and decision rights
Span of control and reporting line design

Our work in practice

Small government authority

Designing an organisation built to perform, and last

The challenge

A small government statutory authority engaged us to help it build a genuinely high-performing organisation. As a relatively new agency with a challenging history to move beyond, it faced a demanding starting point: a small workforce carrying significant responsibility, delivering high-profile projects under constant public and political scrutiny. Leadership knew that lasting performance could not be assumed or asserted. It needed to be measured honestly, understood, and deliberately built with evidence the board and the wider sector would trust.

What we delivered

Openloop designed and led the organisational development and change program, grounded in a causal diagnostic model (Burke-Litwin) and one clear discipline: measure what genuinely drives performance, then act on it. We ran live, in-the-room workshops where staff got to see the results in the room and start talking about actions, closing the gap between measurement and change. Over successive cycles we redesigned the operating structure and built organisational development into board-level governance and reporting. The partnership has run for eight years, sustained through multiple CEO and board transitions.

The outcome

Organisational performance rose 33%, lifting most measured factors into the top performance band. Independently verified by a whole-of-sector employee survey, the agency now ranks at or near the top of its sector for trust (91% against a 57% benchmark) and innovation (93% against 55%). Crucially, those gains held firm through a major restructure, an organisation redesigned to last.

Tools & partnerships

We use proven diagnostics and frameworks to understand how your organisation actually works, from the way structure and process influence delivery, to where roles, accountabilities and effort really sit. This gives us a clear, shared picture to design from, so our recommendations are grounded in what is genuinely happening. We use assessment tools to gain objective, evidence-based insights into your people and teams, giving us a deeper, data-led view of how work and performance connect across your organisation, sharpening how we design roles, accountabilities and ways of working.

Rapid Response assessments

Let's uncover the opportunities to uplift your performance.

Whether you know what needs to change or are still working out where to start, reach out to discuss how we can help enhance your organisational performance.

Start a conversation hello@openloop.com.au