The operating model won’t save you

An operating model is a framework that supports how an organisation delivers its strategy.

It typically covers:

Structure: how teams and functions are organised and who reports to whom

Processes: how work flows across the organisation

Technology: the systems and tools where data is captured and stored

Governance: how decisions are made and performance is measured

It’s important to understand this because in times of crisis or poor performance, leaders often conflate structure (the visible, easy-to-change part) with the operating model as a whole and then mistake restructuring or process redesign for cultural transformation.

New teams. New reporting lines. New titles for the same people doing the same things in the same way. A new role for a person that they don’t know what to do with. It feels productive yet it’s not.

Changing the operating model in a broken culture is the organisational equivalent of rearranging furniture in a damp house. The room might look different but you can still smell the damp.

Performance lives in an organisation’s culture and in order to improve results, then it’s behaviour, communication, collaboration and innovation that need to be addressed, not boxes on a chart in PowerPoint or processes in a Word document. 

Culture is how teams work together, how work gets prioritised, how conflict gets handled, how much time is made for creativity and how people treat each other on a Tuesday afternoon when nobody more senior is watching. None of that appears on an org chart, which is precisely why redrawing one changes nothing.

Of course, the perception is that changing the culture is harder than changing the operating model, when in reality, doing the latter actually makes the former even harder to achieve.

If you want to improve the way a team or organisation performs then stop avoiding the real work and have the courage to address the culture first.