Five Signals Your Operating Model Needs to Change

Most operating-model failures don't show up as a single alarming metric. They show up as a pattern of small frictions that each look explainable on their own — a project that keeps slipping for a "one-off" reason, a decision that takes three more meetings than it should, a team that keeps rebuilding the same workaround.

We look for five recurring signals: decisions escalating further than their stakes justify, the same workaround appearing in multiple teams independently, delivery timelines that are consistently wrong in the same direction, roles whose actual work no longer matches their title, and metrics that keep improving while customer or employee sentiment doesn't.

None of these are damning on their own. Together, they're usually the clearest evidence available that the operating model — not the people running it — has stopped fitting the work.