An operating model design primer.

Operating model redesign is one of the most consequential decisions a leadership team can make. It touches power, accountability, resource and culture simultaneously. It asks people to change not just what they do, but how they coordinate, where they defer and what they are responsible for. Done well, it unlocks pace and clarity that a well-funded technology programme cannot replicate. Done poorly, it produces a new org chart, a set of governance artefacts that nobody uses, and the same operational friction as before.

This guide is not a methodology. It is a primer: a structured orientation for senior leaders who are approaching operating model redesign and want to understand what the work actually entails, what the common failure points are, and how to create the conditions for a design that holds in practice.

In this guide

• What an operating model is, and what it is not

• Why redesign gets triggered, and the framing mistake that follows

• The mistakes leaders make before the work starts

• The logic of a sequenced design process

• What effective executive sponsorship looks like in practice

• How to assess whether a redesign has actually worked

• Why timing matters more than most leaders expect

What an operating model is, and what it is not

The term "operating model" is used widely and defined inconsistently. For many leaders, it has become a proxy for organisational structure: reporting lines, headcount ratios, team shapes. That definition is too narrow to be useful, and designing to it produces the wrong outputs.

An operating model is more accurately understood as the system of decisions, accountabilities and behaviours that determines how work gets done at scale. It answers a distinct set of questions: who decides what, and at what level? Who is accountable for delivery across which organisational boundary? Where does coordination happen formally, and where does it happen informally? What does the organisation do when those two things diverge?

Org charts are an output of operating model design, not a proxy for it. The same is true of technology. When technology or structure is used to compensate for unclear accountability or broken governance, the underlying design problem is not solved. It is obscured. The informal workarounds remain, the friction remains, and the escalation patterns remain. The difference is that there is now a new system or a new chart sitting on top of the old behaviour.

A useful distinction. The formal operating model is what the governance documents and org chart describe. The actual operating model is what people do when they need to get something done. In most organisations, these differ materially. The gap between them is where the real diagnostic work begins.

This distinction matters because it changes what the design work is actually doing. If operating model redesign is understood as "drawing a new structure", the scope is narrow, the timescale is short, and the failure mode is predictable: a new chart with the same underlying behaviour. If it is understood as "designing how decisions get made and how work flows across the organisation", the scope is broader, the design process is more demanding, and the outcomes are more durable.

A well-designed operating model makes three things legible that were previously ambiguous: who decides, who delivers, and who is accountable when something goes wrong. When those three things are clear, the organisation moves faster, escalation reduces, and the cost of coordination falls. When they are unclear, the organisation spends significant energy compensating, through informal networks, shadow governance, and the personal authority of individuals who have learned how to navigate the system.

Why the question comes up when it does

Operating model redesign is rarely triggered by a desire for better design. It is triggered by pain.

The most common triggers are growth that has outpaced the organisation's ability to coordinate effectively; mergers, acquisitions or geographic expansion that have introduced structural complexity without resolving accountability; a strategic pivot, towards product, digital, or services, that the existing model was not designed to support; persistent execution failure, where decisions are made but not acted on, initiatives launched but not landed, and accountability shared but owned by no one; and cost pressure that requires a structural step change rather than incremental headcount reduction.

What these triggers share is that the pain is operational, not structural. Leaders feel it in delayed decisions, repeated escalations, duplicated effort across teams, and a growing sense that the organisation is consuming more energy on coordination than on delivery. The volume of steering groups and cross-functional meetings is often a useful indicator. When coordination itself has become an industry, something in the underlying design is wrong.

When coordination itself has become an industry, something in the underlying design is wrong.

When the pain becomes acute enough to justify intervention, the question that follows is usually framed too narrowly: "should we restructure?" The more productive frame is: "does our current model reflect how we need to work to deliver our strategy, and if not, what specifically needs to change and why?"

The restructuring frame leads to a structural solution. The second frame leads to a diagnostic process that may or may not conclude that structural change is needed, but will understand the problem clearly enough to make that judgment with evidence rather than instinct.

The mistakes leaders make before the work starts

Operating model redesign fails more often in the setup than in the execution. The design work itself is demanding, but the conditions for failure are usually established before anyone has facilitated a workshop or produced a design artefact.

Treating it as a structural exercise

Redesigning reporting lines without addressing decision rights produces a new org chart and old behaviours. Structure is a consequence of how the organisation intends to make decisions and coordinate work. When structure is designed first, before those questions are answered, it becomes a political negotiation about hierarchy rather than a design exercise about capability and accountability. The sequence matters: decision design precedes structural design, not the other way around.

Underestimating what sponsorship requires

Operating model work surfaces uncomfortable truths about where the organisation actually works and where it does not. It reveals informal power structures, dysfunctional governance, and accountability gaps that have been papered over for years. A sponsor who is not prepared to make and sustain difficult decisions will find the work stalls, drifts into compromise, or produces a design that is politically safe but operationally inert.

Active sponsorship in operating model redesign is not the same as being available for escalation. It means making explicit trade-off decisions when the design work surfaces genuine tension between stakeholders. It means holding the frame of the work when parts of the organisation push back against findings or recommendations that challenge their current position. And it means being willing to commit to a direction before there is consensus, because in operating model work, consensus is rarely achievable on the decisions that matter most.

Rushing the diagnostic phase

Leaders under pressure want to move quickly to solutions. The instinct is understandable and usually counterproductive. Designs built on an incomplete understanding of how the organisation actually operates tend to address the problem as presented rather than the problem that exists. The diagnostic phase is where the real operating model is surfaced: not the one described in the governance documents, but the one people actually use. Skipping it or compressing it means designing against a fiction.

Letting consensus erode ownership

Operating models that are designed by committee, where every major stakeholder must agree before a decision is taken, produce models in which accountability is shared. Shared accountability is, in practice, unclear accountability. Some design decisions create genuine winners and losers, functions that gain authority and functions that cede it, decisions that move up and decisions that move down. The work of sponsorship is to make those decisions clearly and hold them, not to search for a formulation that leaves everyone equally satisfied.

Confusing alignment with agreement

In operating model design, tension and disagreement are frequently productive. They surface the genuine trade-offs that the organisation needs to confront. Organisations that achieve alignment too quickly have usually avoided something important. When the room agrees on everything, it is worth asking what has not been said, and what will resurface later at greater cost. Surfacing disagreement early is not a failure of the process. Suppressing it is.

The logic of a sequenced design process

Good operating model design follows a logical sequence. Each stage depends on the one before it. Skipping stages, or treating them as optional, typically produces fragile designs that hold together in the workshop but fail under the pressures of implementation.

The sequence is not complicated, but it is frequently violated.

Establish shared intent before starting

Before any diagnostic or design work begins, there must be explicit clarity about why the work is being undertaken now, what problem it is intended to solve, and what it is not trying to address. These boundaries matter more than most sponsors recognise. Without them, scope expands to fill the available time and politics. Questions that were settled in week two are relitigated in week ten. The anchor that should be holding the work in place is absent, and the work drifts.

This means agreeing, in writing, on the specific operational problems the redesign is expected to solve, the decisions that are explicitly out of scope, the criteria by which a good outcome will be recognised, and the level of authority the sponsor is prepared to exercise when trade-off decisions arise.

Understand how the organisation actually operates

The diagnostic phase is concerned with behaviour, not with formal structure. The question it is answering is not "what does the org chart say?" but "what actually happens when work needs to get done across an organisational boundary?"

Most organisations have developed informal mechanisms to compensate for weaknesses in their formal design. These compensations are rational responses to design gaps, not failures of culture or professionalism. Understanding them is essential to designing a future model that works in practice. A redesign that ignores how the organisation is actually operating, and designs against the formal model instead, will produce a new formal model with the same informal compensations running underneath it.

The diagnostic typically surfaces the same patterns in different forms: decisions being made at the wrong level, accountability that is nominally shared but practically unclear, coordination costs that are absorbed by individuals rather than resolved by design, and informal escalation paths that bypass the formal governance structure. Mapping these patterns with precision, rather than describing them at a conceptual level, is what gives the subsequent design work its grounding.

Define the constraints that will govern design choices

Before design options are generated, the organisation needs to agree on the principles that will arbitrate between them. This is frequently skipped, because it requires the leadership team to make explicit commitments about trade-offs they would prefer to leave open.

The trade-offs in operating model design are real and recurring: consistency versus local responsiveness, speed of decision versus quality of decision, cost efficiency versus delivery capability, global coherence versus market proximity. Each of these has a right answer for a specific organisation in a specific strategic context, and that answer changes as the strategy evolves.

The purpose of establishing design constraints is to give the design work a framework for making choices. Without this framework, design options become a negotiation between the preferences of whoever is in the room, and the strongest voice wins. With it, design options can be evaluated against an agreed standard, disagreements can be resolved by reference to principles rather than seniority, and the resulting model is more coherent and more defensible.

A practical test. If a design principle cannot be used to say no to something, it is not doing its job. Principles that describe aspirations rather than constraints are common and are usually worthless as design tools. The test of a useful principle is whether it can be used to settle a disagreement between two reasonable people.

Design the model, in the right sequence

The design phase is where the future operating model is defined: the structure, the decision rights, the governance mechanisms, the capability ownership, the accountability framework. The emphasis should be on clarity and internal consistency rather than theoretical optimisation. The goal is a coherent and workable model that leaders understand and are prepared to reinforce, not a perfect model that cannot survive contact with the organisation.

Decision rights precede structure. Capability ownership precedes governance design. The governance mechanisms are designed to support the decision rights, not the other way around. When this sequence is violated, which is common, the design becomes a set of disconnected choices that cannot be held together by any coherent logic.

Every capability in the target model should have a single accountable owner. Not a lead, not a sponsor, not a co-owner. An owner. This is frequently uncomfortable, because it requires explicit choices about where authority sits and where it does not. Those choices are the design. Everything else is description.

Test the design before committing to it

A design that holds together in the workshop may not hold together under realistic operational pressure. Before transitioning to a new model, it should be tested against the conditions the organisation is actually likely to face: rapid growth, cost reduction pressure, a significant operational incident, a leadership change, an acquisition or integration.

The purpose of this testing is not to prove the design is correct. It is to surface the conditions under which it breaks, while the cost of changing the design is still low. A model that fails a stress-test in the workshop can be refined before implementation. A model that fails under live conditions is far more expensive to correct, and the organisation has already been disrupted by the transition.

Good stress-testing is uncomfortable. Leaders who are invested in the design will instinctively defend it rather than observe how it behaves. The facilitator's job is to hold the observational frame: the purpose is not to win an argument about the design, but to discover where its weaknesses are.

Plan the transition with the same rigour as the design

The transition from current model to target model is where most operating model work either lands or fails to. A transition plan that focuses primarily on structural change, on when the new org chart takes effect and how the reporting lines change, will produce a new chart and old habits. The behavioural and governance changes that make a new operating model real are harder to plan and take longer to embed.

Effective transition planning sequences the changes deliberately. It pilots the new decision forums before the structural changes take effect. It identifies where the new model requires different management behaviour and makes those behavioural expectations explicit. It builds in reinforcement mechanisms, including performance measures and escalation protocols, that are aligned with the new design rather than the old one. And it monitors adoption at a behavioural level, not just a structural one.

What effective executive sponsorship looks like

Operating model design cannot be delegated. It can be supported by a skilled external team, by a strong internal programme office, by excellent facilitation. But the decisions that the work surfaces, and the authority required to make them, are leadership decisions. No methodology resolves them. No consultant can make them on the organisation's behalf.

Effective executive sponsorship in an operating model engagement has a number of characteristics that are worth understanding before the work begins.

Committing to the difficult decisions. The work will surface trade-offs that cannot be resolved through further analysis. At a certain point, someone needs to decide where accountability sits when reasonable people disagree. That is a leadership decision, and the sponsor needs to be prepared to make it clearly and hold it when it comes under pressure.

Protecting the diagnostic phase. The instinct to move quickly to solutions is understandable and usually counterproductive. Sponsors who compress the diagnostic phase to reduce timescales typically find themselves revisiting the same questions later, at greater cost, because the design was built on an incomplete picture of the organisation.

Being willing to hear uncomfortable findings. The diagnostic phase will surface things about the organisation that are not comfortable to hear. Accountability gaps that everyone has been working around. Governance structures that exist on paper but not in practice. Informal power dynamics that the formal model does not acknowledge. The sponsor's response to those findings shapes the rest of the engagement. A sponsor who defends the current state makes the design work harder and the design less honest.

Modelling the behaviour the new model requires. Operating models change through leadership behaviour, not through documentation. If the new model requires different decision forums, different escalation patterns, or different expectations of accountability, the senior leadership team needs to reinforce those behaviours before they become embedded. Leaders who continue to operate in the old way while asking the rest of the organisation to adopt the new one will not get the outcome they are looking for.

Holding the model when it comes under pressure. New operating models are tested hardest in the first few months of transition. The informal pull towards old patterns is strong. People default to the behaviours that felt safe and familiar, especially under operational pressure. Leaders who reinforce the new model when it is inconvenient, who redirect escalations to the right owner rather than resolving them personally, who decline to bypass the new governance even when they could, are the ones who actually change how their organisations operate.

How to assess whether the redesign has worked

Operating model redesign does not have a clean end state. Organisations evolve, strategies change, and the model that worked at one scale or in one context will not work indefinitely. The goal is not a permanent solution but a more intentional and coherent way of organising decisions and accountability.

A relatively small set of questions can be used to assess whether a redesign is taking hold.

Are decisions being made at the right level? If the pattern of escalation has changed, if decisions that previously required executive intervention are now being resolved below the top team, the decision rights are working. If the escalation pattern is unchanged, they are not.

Is coordination cheaper? If the volume of cross-functional meetings, the number of steering groups, and the amount of management time spent on coordination has reduced, that is a signal that accountabilities are clearer and the design is doing its job. If coordination costs are unchanged, or have increased, the design has not resolved the underlying friction.

Is accountability visible? Can people, at any level of the organisation, clearly state who is responsible for the outcomes that matter most? Can they identify who to go to when something is blocked? If the answer is consistently yes, the design is legible. If people cannot navigate it without personal relationships or insider knowledge, the design is not working in practice.

Is the organisation adapting? Operating models that survive contact with strategic change, new markets, new priorities, leadership transitions, without requiring fundamental redesign are well-constructed. Fragility under change is usually a signal of unresolved design weakness. A model that only works under stable conditions is not yet complete.

Are the informal compensations reducing? If the informal workarounds that were identified in the diagnostic phase are still present at the same intensity six months after transition, the new model has not displaced the old behaviour. It has been layered on top of it. This is one of the most common and least visible failure modes in operating model implementation.

A note on timing

Operating model redesign undertaken in the middle of a transformation programme is significantly harder than redesign undertaken before it. By the time a programme is in flight, structural decisions have often already been made, resource commitments are in place, and the appetite for further disruption is low. The programme has acquired momentum, and changing the model it is operating within feels like moving the foundations while the building is under construction.

If an operating model question is present in your organisation, the most valuable thing leadership can do is surface it early: before the programme plan is fixed, before the workstreams are mobilised, and before the design defaults become load-bearing. The operating model should inform the transformation programme, not follow it.

The operating model should inform the transformation programme, not follow from it. When the sequence is reversed, the programme institutionalises the problem it was meant to solve.

The cost of getting the model wrong does not announce itself immediately. It accumulates quietly, in delayed decisions, duplicated effort, frustrated leadership, and a programme that has created activity without creating the organisational clarity that was supposed to be the point. By the time the consequences are visible, unwinding them mid-delivery is expensive, disruptive, and politically difficult in ways that could have been avoided entirely.

The question of whether an organisation's operating model is fit for the transformation it is undertaking is worth asking before the transformation starts, not after it has already revealed the answer.

If this is a challenge your organisation is facing, I may be able to help. hello@medasi.com