Nobody sits down and deliberately designs a bad org chart. Most get built one hire at a time, each addition reasonable in the moment, until the overall shape is something nobody would have chosen if they'd designed it on purpose.
How accidental structure happens
A role gets created to solve an urgent problem, not to fit a deliberate plan. Six months later, that urgent-problem role has become a permanent fixture, reporting lines drawn around whoever happened to be available at the time, not around what the structure should logically look like at the business's current size. Multiply that by a dozen hires over a few years, and the org chart becomes an artifact of hiring history, not a designed system.
Why this matters more than it seems
A system built by accident tends to have the same failure patterns as any other accidental system: unclear ownership in the gaps between roles, duplicated responsibility in some places, gaps in others, and decisions that require five people because nobody was ever explicitly given the authority to make them alone.
The diagnostic question
For every function that matters (sales, delivery, finance, product), can you point to exactly one person who owns it, with the authority to decide without needing a group consensus for routine calls. If the honest answer is "sort of, a few people share it," that's the accidental structure showing.
What deliberate redesign actually looks like
Not necessarily new hires, and not necessarily fewer people. Usually it's just naming, explicitly, who owns what, and fixing the two or three gaps where ownership has quietly gone missing or doubled up. Small structural change, disproportionate reduction in daily friction.
The honest caveat
Org design isn't a one-time fix. It drifts back toward accidental the moment nobody's watching it, the same way any system does without periodic maintenance. Worth revisiting on a real cadence, not just once.