The operating model gap: why good strategies fail at the org chart
Ask an organisation about its sustainability strategy and you’ll usually get a confident answer. Ask who has the authority to change a product specification, a procurement standard or a capital allocation decision because of that strategy, and the answer gets vaguer. That vagueness has a name: the operating model gap.
An operating model is simply how an organisation turns intent into work: who does what, who decides what, how information flows, what gets measured, and how money moves. Every organisation has one, whether it was designed or just accumulated. And here is the uncomfortable truth: your current operating model is perfectly designed to produce your current results.
A new strategy laid over an unchanged operating model doesn’t produce a new outcome. It produces friction, and then, quietly, it produces the old outcome again.
Where the gap shows up
Decision rights. The sustainability team can recommend, but line functions decide; and nothing in their objectives, budgets or incentives changed when the strategy launched. The strategy asks people to make different decisions while every structural signal tells them to make the same ones.
Data and reporting. The strategy commits to outcomes the organisation cannot currently measure. Emissions data lives in spreadsheets owned by one person; social value evidence is collected inconsistently, contract by contract. Without reliable flows of information, progress cannot be managed; only asserted.
Capability. The strategy assumes skills — carbon accounting, climate risk analysis, stakeholder engagement, change management — that exist thinly or not at all. One over-stretched sustainability manager becomes the organisation’s answer to everything, which is a single point of failure dressed up as a function.
Governance. Sustainability reports into a committee that meets quarterly, has no budget authority and escalates nowhere. Issues are noted. Noting is not deciding.
Money. Business cases are still appraised on rules written before the strategy existed. If the investment framework doesn’t recognise carbon, resilience or social value, the strategy loses every time it meets a spreadsheet.
Designing the model to fit the strategy
Closing the gap doesn’t usually mean restructuring the organisation. It means making a deliberate set of design choices:
Clarify roles and responsibilities, not just for the sustainability team, but for the functions that actually control emissions, resources and impacts. Define governance that can decide, with clear escalation routes and authority over money, not just airtime. Build data and performance frameworks that make progress visible in the same systems leaders already use. Plan capability deliberately; what to hire, what to build, and what to buy in. And align incentives and investment rules so the strategy wins some arguments by default.
None of this is glamorous. It rarely makes the front page of a sustainability report. But it is the difference between a strategy that changes an organisation and one that decorates it.
A simple test
Take one commitment from your strategy; a target, a pledge, a priority. Now trace it: who owns it, what budget delivers it, which decisions it changes, where progress is reported, and what happens if it slips. If the trace goes cold at any point, you’ve found your operating model gap.
Business architecture and operating model design is one of our core services precisely because this is where strategies live or die. If the trace went cold, let’s talk — or start with our maturity assessment for a structured view of where the gaps are.