If We Want GBR to Work, Let’s Not Start With an Org Chart

Everyone’s Waiting for the Big Reveal: It’s Not the Right Place to Start

Want to understand why top-down restructures so often fail and what that means for Great British Railways? Let me tell you about the restructure that shaped how I think about restructures...

My National Express experience

It was when I was Head of Network Strategy at National Express, and the big bosses at National Express Group decided that instead of having a separate bus, coach and rail division (the latter of which then consisted of nine train companies), they would have one, single integrated UK division.

So they went into conclave and emerged with a huge new organogram, which was unveiled in a big reveal.

Let me tell you about some of the effects this had.

Note the grey stripes at the back. This is a legacy of the “UK division” concept. Originally they were applied to everything in NX UK division (coaches, buses, trains) but they’ve gradually disappeared, except from the coaches.

First, the short-term effects:

1) Useful work stopped

For the rest of the year, everyone was focused on applying for and getting jobs in the new structure. This is unproductive work. But the productive work of making the business better for customers stopped.

2) As no-one knew who’d be doing which job, budget discipline collapsed.

The new teams cost much more than the teams they replaced, to be balanced by revenue. The new centralised revenue team could have pushed back but - of course - they didn’t yet exist. As a result, a business that had historically typically grown by around 5% each year was forecast to grow by (from memory) around 12% the next year, purely because the new org cost more to run. Obviously, this didn’t come true, sowing the seeds for the next crisis.

Now, the medium-term effects.

1) Relationships ceased to work.

I actually did quite well out of the new structure. I got a (newly created!) job as “Product Development Director” which involved… well, developing the product across the newly created UK division. Now, the UK division included all of what used to be the old rail division. The former MD of the rail division was a chap called David Franks. He was still in charge of operating the rail businesses but no longer in charge of everything else. Like product development. The new org structure told me to go and… develop his products. Turned out he didn’t really want me to. Which he made, umm, clear. I don’t know if any of my readers remember David Franks, but doing things David Franks didn’t want doing (especially those that seemed like a waste of effort that got in the way of operations) was generally a bad idea. I left to join Chiltern Railways less than a year later.

2) The new structure didn’t work.

I mean, why would it? It was created by a tiny gang of people who didn’t know the difference between peoples’ job titles and the work they actually did.

GBR - A Restructure So Big You Can See it From Orbit

The now-notorious NHS reforms of 2013 were described by David Nicholson, the chief executive of the NHS in 2011, as a restructure “so large you can see it from space”. It was, of course, a disaster: inflating costs, reducing quality of outcomes and sowing the seeds for the NHS’s pandemic failures.

The NHS is Britain’s largest public sector employer: when created, GBR will only be the second-largest. So if that could be seen from space, let’s say that this is a restructure “so big you can see it from orbit”.

If this is done the same way as the NHS restructure in 2013 (and the National Express restructure of a few years earlier), it is likely to go the same way: inflated costs, reduced quality and an exodus of good people.

The Tube Map analogy

Planning a company by creating an organisation structure is rather like planning a city by creating a tube map. Yes, the metro map is a pretty decent guide to roughly what goes where, but the real action happens in the streets and squares. It’s much better to plan the tube based on the city, than the city based on the tube. And that leads me to my main point…

There are almost no cities that are planned exclusively by creating a tube map.

The metro service is mapped onto a city based on how the city already works but with an aim to encourage more of certain things in certain areas. It is both reactive and constructive. You can have extensions into new areas (Metroland, Golders Green or Canary Wharf) but the core city was already a living organism.

In the same way, an org structure is a good indication of how an organisation works but it’s a terrible way to plan how the organisation should be created in future. So this is my plea to whoever is in charge of creating the new org structure for GBR:

Stop it.

Yes, I mean it - right now, creating an org structure for GBR isn’t the priority.

Let me explain…

Scenario 1 - create an org structure for GBR now

If the priority, right now, is creating an org structure, then normal work will stop.

Anyone impacted by the structure (including all senior leaders) will be focused on positioning for roles.

For the next few years, a huge amount of effort and energy will be expended on landing the new structure.

At the end, everyone will be exhausted but the work will have been fundamentally unproductive. Nothing will be better for passengers. All the hard work will still be to do.

At this point, the Government will get very grumpy. Even if, in 2025, they were very keen for GBR to be seen to exist, in 2028, they’ll suddenly realise that the election is next year and passengers have seen no benefit. There will be no prizes for having created GBR.

Scenario 2 - Focus on the True Problems and Allow GBR to create itself

As both Andrew Haines and Alex Hynes have consistently pointed out, the railway’s core challenge has been misaligned incentives. Network Rail has had the long-term view but no direct customer contact. TOCs have owned the customer relationship but been incentivised to extract short-term value over seven-year contract cycles. Good, well-intentioned people have been forced to talk past each other.

The solution to that isn’t a restructure: it’s better incentives. In fact, changing the structure makes it harder to know what’s working: if everything changes at once, you lose the ability to make meaningful ‘before’ and ‘after’ comparisons so you don’t know what’s working.

Yet there’s a persistent idea that the real problem is the split between wheel and rail, and that if we just integrate them, everything else will fall into place.

That assumption doesn’t hold up.

Take London. TfL’s highest-performing railways (Overground, DLR, the Elizabeth Line) are all operated by contractors, separate from the infrastructure owner. Meanwhile, the vertically-integrated London Underground consistently performs mid-to-low in international benchmarking studies of global metros.

Or take Chiltern Railways. We had a deep, effective relationship with Network Rail because of shared goals and personal relationships, not structural integration. Network Rail’s John Salmon, who worked on both sides of the wheel-rail divide, was embedded in our team as NR’s Area Manager. He personifies the flaw in the idea that the wheel-rail divide is the issue. After Network Rail / Chiltern Railways, he then became Head of Performance at Arriva Rail London. ARL isn’t the infrastructure owner or the client. But it runs an outstanding service - I can personally vouch for a local train that I use weekly and that my daughter takes twice a day. If the Overground is the problem, I’m worried about the solution.

*John Salmon exemplified working across the wheel-rail divide on two of the country’s best performing networks*

If the industry had followed the logic underpinning GBR, ARL should be a failure. It isn’t. Because what matters is how people work together, not where they sit on a chart.

So let’s fix the incentives first.

Here’s the good news: we can. Network Rail exists. So do the TOCs. So does RDG. Imagine a world where they’re all working to the same set of customer-oriented goals. Where RDG now longer has to work through convoluted governance and the risk of owning group votes. Where TOC MDs, the CEO of Network Rail and the RDG MD are all pointing in the same direction.

That would change everything. Middle managers would naturally reach across silos. Silos would start to break down. Collaboration would emerge not because of a structure, but because of shared purpose.

And at that point, a new GBR could start to emerge: not from an organogram, but from the work itself.

Over time, it would become clear that the old TOC/NR/RDG split no longer reflects how people actually collaborate. That’s when a new org model could be shaped around real, working relationships. In other words: we’d be planning the Tube Map based on the city, not the other way around.

Now, by the way, I’m not saying GBR shouldn’t exist. We do need the directing mind over the top, and the Government needs to be able to point to GBR existing. But on day one (and two), it can simply be an integration layer.

Let’s Focus on what Matters

My work and background mean I know a lot of people in the rail sector.

Everyone’s waiting for the big reveal.

No-one’s looking forward to it.

If you’re working on the new structure, I give you a word of warning: you’ll struggle to satisfy anyone - because no top-down structure can account for the nuance of how the industry actually works. And when no-one’s really happy, you won’t be able to use the BBC impartiality argument (“if no-one’s happy we’re probably doing something right”); it’ll be because no-one can centrally plan a restructure so big that you can see it from orbit. It just doesn’t work.

So my strong suggestion is… stop.

Tell the sector that there is to be no big restructure this side of the next election. Instead, appoint a CEO of GBR to sit over the existing organisations, whose mandate is gradual evolution. But for everyone else, the job now is to get on and deliver a punctual, reliable, cheaper railway that delivers great outcomes for customers. Work with whoever you need to work with to make it happen. And empower the frustrated leaders of our existing organisations to make it happen.

In summary…

Focus on outcomes.
Fix the incentives.
Let people work out their new working relationships to achieve the outcomes based on the new incentives.
Only then do the restructure
In summary - city first, tube afterwards.

I help organisations move faster by fixing things that slow them down.
That includes untangling decision-making, unblocking innovation, designing better ways of working and turning customer insight into action.

If that sounds like what you need, we should talk