Strategic plans are refreshed every three years. Operating models, in most organisations, are not. The result is predictable: a strategy that describes where the organisation wants to go, and an operating model that describes where it came from.

The gap is structural, not behavioural

When strategy and operating model drift apart, the symptoms are consistent. Execution slows. Effort shifts away from customer-facing work. Leadership spends more time on alignment and less on direction. None of these are caused by the people. They are caused by structure.

“Direction without structure creates ambiguity. Structure without direction creates inertia. The value is in the alignment.”

Three questions that reveal the gap

• Where does the current operating model constrain the execution of the stated strategy?
• Which structural decisions were made for a previous market reality and no longer serve?
• What would need to change, at the work design and decision rights level, for the strategy to execute at the pace assumed?

These questions are uncomfortable because their answers usually require structural change. Leaders who ask them early, and who commission evidence-based diagnostics to answer them, typically navigate transformation more cleanly than those who treat operating model as a downstream consequence of strategy.

Designing for the strategy you have

The organisations that execute best are not the ones with the most ambitious strategies. They are the ones whose operating models were deliberately redesigned to support the strategy in place. The redesign is rarely dramatic. It is surgical, evidence-based, and sequenced. And it is the difference between a strategy that lives in a document and one that shows up in the numbers.