A CFO I worked with at a global professional services firm had a problem she could not get underneath.
Sales numbers were being hit. Bonuses were being paid. And yet the company kept missing its overall revenue targets, quarter after quarter. The data showed her the gap but could not tell her where it was coming from. She could see the numbers were wrong. She could not see why.
It took months to untangle. The answer was not in the financials. It was in the operating model.
The way the business was structured, the way work flowed between functions, the way performance was measured and reported, all of it had been built for a different version of the company. It could not surface what was actually happening. It could not connect the activity to the outcome. And because no one could see clearly, no one could fix anything.
That is what a broken operating model does. It does not announce itself. It just makes everything harder to see, harder to decide, and harder to execute, until the gap between what the business should be delivering and what it actually delivers becomes impossible to ignore.
What an operating model actually is
Most people, when they hear “operating model,” think of an org chart. Sometimes a process map. Occasionally a governance framework.
Those things are part of it. But the operating model is the whole system: how the organisation makes decisions, how work moves between teams, how strategy connects to execution, how information flows to the people who need it, how accountability is assigned and enforced, how the business scales without breaking.
When it works, it is invisible. Nobody talks about the operating model when things are running well, because they do not need to.
When it breaks, you feel it everywhere. In the meetings that go in circles. In the initiatives that never land. In the decisions that take three rounds of escalation and still do not get made. In the results that do not match the effort.
The problem is that most organisations do not recognise it as an operating model problem. They see the symptoms and reach for the nearest solution: a restructure, a new hire, a change programme. Sometimes that helps. Often it does not, because the structure was not the issue in the first place.
The signs
The Seven Signs are not a checklist. They are patterns: the ways a broken operating model tends to surface in organisations where complexity has outgrown the system underneath it.
Leaders often describe the right symptoms but reach for the wrong solutions. The signs are useful because they point past the surface. Each one has a visible face and a structural root, and the root is rarely where the organisation is looking.
Here are the seven.
Sign 1: Strategy-Execution Gap
What it sounds like: “We agree the strategy every year and then nothing really changes. Transformation fatigue.”
What is actually broken: There is no execution infrastructure connecting strategy to operations. Initiatives start but do not finish. Priorities shift constantly. Teams are working hard, but results do not materialise.
The business cost: You invest in initiatives that never land, and teams stop believing the plan.
Sign 2: Decision Gridlock
What it sounds like: “Decisions take forever now. Everyone escalates everything. Unclear who owns what.”
What is actually broken: No decision architecture. RACI hell, shadow decision-makers, unclear decision rights, missing escalation paths, no framework for making trade-offs. Governance exists, but it is performative rather than enabling.
The business cost: Decisions slow to a crawl, no one owns outcomes, and everything gets escalated.
Sign 3: Divisions Operating in Parallel Universes
What it sounds like: “Different divisions feel like separate companies. What works in one part of the business doesn’t land in another. Teams in different units circumvent shared processes. Constant tension between central direction and unit autonomy.”
What is actually broken: No coherent operating model connecting the organisation’s parts. Missing governance forums that balance central direction with unit autonomy, priority alignment mechanisms across divisions and markets, and clarity on where end-to-end accountability actually sits. For multinationals, this often shows up as global-local tension. But the same pattern appears wherever different parts of a business are making decisions that undermine each other.
The business cost: Duplication, local workarounds, and inconsistent customer experience.
Sign 4: Cross-Functional Breakdown
What it sounds like: “Product, Sales, and Operations do not talk to each other. Same work gets done twice, or not at all. Finger-pointing when things fail.”
What is actually broken: No cross-functional operating infrastructure. Work is flowing around the organisation, not through it. Roles look clear on paper; they are messy in reality.
The business cost: Rework, missed handoffs, and friction that looks like a people issue but is a design failure.
Sign 5: Invisible Work
What it sounds like: “Leadership has no idea what people are actually working on. Surprises always arrive late.”
What is actually broken: No information architecture. No or limited dashboards, no portfolio visibility, no demand management. Data, but no insight. Operating cadence is inconsistent: too many forums, no ownership.
The business cost: Flying blind on priorities, with no early warning system.
Sign 6: Misaligned Incentives and Metrics
What it sounds like: “Sales are hitting their numbers but we’re still missing revenue targets. Teams are doing what they’re measured on, but it’s not adding up to what the business needs.”
What is actually broken: The measurement and reward architecture has not kept pace with the strategy. Individual functions are optimising for their own metrics, which made sense at an earlier stage but now actively works against enterprise outcomes. People are doing exactly what the system is asking them to do. The system is asking for the wrong things.
The business cost: Strategic investments deliver functional results but fail to generate enterprise value. The organisation keeps hitting targets and missing goals.
Sign 7: Scaling Chaos
What it sounds like: “We are growing, but everything feels harder, slower, and more political than it should. Adding people is slowing things down.”
What is actually broken: Infrastructure designed for a different scale. The business has scaled headcount without scaling decision architecture. Complexity compounds faster than the system can absorb it.
The business cost: Growth increases overhead faster than revenue, and leaders become bottlenecks.
Why they cluster
In practice, the Seven Signs rarely appear alone. They tend to group into patterns. For example:
Growth-induced breakdown: Signs 2, 6, and 7. The organisation scaled headcount without scaling decision architecture.
Strategy-execution gap: Signs 1 and 5. There is no execution spine connecting intent to operations.
Structural change that did not stick: Signs 3 and 4. The structure changed, but the system underneath did not.
If you are experiencing one of these signs, you are probably experiencing others. That is not bad luck. It is how operating models fail.
What to do with this
I will be honest, recognising the pattern is only the beginning. The harder work is diagnosis, understanding which of these signs is actually primary, what is driving it, and what the right intervention is. Not every sign has the same root cause, and the same symptom can point to very different problems depending on the organisation.
But the starting point matters. Most of the organisations I work with have been trying to solve the wrong problem, not because they lack intelligence or commitment, but because the symptoms point in one direction and the actual failure sits somewhere else in the system.
If any of this resonates with what you are navigating, I would be glad to hear about it.