Delivery vs Control: Who’s Actually Doing the Work?

Editor’s note: This piece sits within the Cultivated library on organisational design and Idea → Value flow. It explores how organisational structure reveals what leaders truly value — and why many companies end up optimised for control rather than delivery.

Delivery vs Control: Who’s Actually Doing the Work?

I once worked with a client who had a delivery problem — as many organisations do.

Work wasn’t moving.
Value wasn’t reaching customers.
Leaders couldn’t understand why.

So I suggested a simple audit.
Not of people — of roles.

Identify which roles were actually creating value.
Because financial value is always created outside the business, not inside it.

We grouped roles into four categories:

1. Building the product or service — work that directly creates customer value.
2. Supporting the product or service — customer care, pre-sales, operations.
3. Organising people or work — managers, coordinators, planners.
4. Admin — finance, reporting, back-office functions.

In small companies, most people sit in categories one and two.
In large organisations, the numbers often flip.

The Cost of Control

Large organisations tend to hire for control.
Managers hire managers.
Layers accumulate.
Admin expands.

Delivery quietly shrinks.

In this organisation, the breakdown looked like this:

• 20% delivering the product
• 10% supporting delivery
• 60% organising people and work
• 10% admin

Most of the salary bill was spent organising work rather than doing it.

This pattern is more common than leaders like to admit.
Many organisations end up with more people reporting, organising, managing, aligning and more, on the work than creating value through the work.

Why This Matters

This simple audit reveals three things.

Where your money is going.
Salaries are typically the largest cost in most organisations.
Structure reveals priorities.

What leaders truly value.
Often, they value control — even when that control is largely illusory.
(You can see this in performance theatre, dashboards, and Watermelon Reporting.)

How complexity creeps in.
The more layers you add, the slower value moves.
Red tape grows. Meetings multiply. Decisions stall.
Delivery becomes an afterthought.
And with a larger, lagging, gap between an idea and the value it generates, the more costs a company typically incurs.

This is not a people problem.
It is a system design problem.

The Shift: From Control to Delivery (or flow)

Instead of hiring more people to control work, focus on enabling work.

Start with clarity and alignment:

• Create a compelling, shared future to aim toward.
• Identify the problems stopping people from doing good work — and remove them.
• Build the team to get it done — including addressing low performance with care and clarity.

Then empower delivery:

• Delegate real responsibility.
• Train and support decision-making.
• Teach communication and problem-solving.
• Coach people to improve the system, not just follow it.

Oversight still matters.
But when organising work outweighs doing work, the system is already misaligned.

A Simple Organisational Check

Map your roles.
Classify them.
Look at the ratio.

If most people are organising, coordinating, approving, and reporting — you have an Idea → Value problem.
Your organisation is optimised for control, not flow.

The principle is simple:

Invest in people who create value, not just those who manage it.

When you rebalance toward delivery and flow, work moves, customers feel it, and organisations become lighter, faster, and more human.

Final Thought

Control feels safe.
Delivery creates value.

Organisations that confuse the two build elaborate maps — and lose the territory.

If you want ideas to become value, design your system around doing the work, not watching the work.