When to Call Me
The patterns that tell you something structural needs to change
Most operating model issues don't announce themselves. They arrive as friction
This is the strategy that looked clear on paper but hasn't moved, the decision that keeps coming back to the same meeting, the team that works hard but can't seem to get ahead of the workload. Leaders recognise the symptoms long before they identify the cause.
The cause is almost always structural. Not people, not effort, not strategy.
The execution infrastructure that connects strategy to reliable delivery has either never been designed for the organisation's current complexity, or it stopped working when the organisation changed and nobody redesigned it.
The signs below rarely appear in isolation. More often, two or three show up together, reinforcing each other in ways that make each one harder to fix independently.
The annual planning process produces clear priorities. Six months in, little has moved. Teams are busy, but the work that's getting done isn't necessarily the work that was agreed. There's no shared understanding of why the gap exists, and no mechanism for catching and correcting it. The strategy and the organisation's day-to-day operation have effectively decoupled.
Decisions that should be straightforward take weeks. The same questions come back to the same forums repeatedly. People at the right level of seniority aren't making calls, either because it's unclear who owns them, because the governance structure creates incentives to escalate rather than decide, or because the information needed to decide isn't reaching the right people in a usable form.
Projects that involve more than one function routinely take longer, cost more, and deliver less than expected. The problem is rarely any single team. It's the handoffs between them: unclear ownership at the boundaries, incompatible processes, different definitions of the same terms, and no mechanism for resolving the gaps. The seams between functions are where execution often breaks down.
In complex organisations, the tension between central direction and unit autonomy is permanent. But when different divisions, markets, or lines of business are consistently working at cross-purposes, duplicating effort, or making decisions that undermine each other, it's a signal that the operating model hasn't resolved the fundamental question of what gets decided where, and by whom. The tension itself isn't the problem. The absence of a designed answer to it is.
Sign 4: Divisions operating in parallel universes
Sign 3: Cross-functional work that never quite works
Sign 2: Decision gridlock and escalation loops
Sign 1: Strategy that stalls on contact with reality
Senior leaders don't have a reliable picture of what the organisation is actually working on, what progress looks like, or where the real constraints are. Reporting exists, but it doesn't produce the information needed to prioritise, resource, or intervene effectively. This isn't a dashboard problem. It's a data architecture and governance problem: the operating model hasn't been designed to surface the right information to the right people at the right time.
Teams are doing exactly what they're measured and rewarded to do. The problem is that what they're measured and rewarded to do doesn't add up to what the organisation is trying to achieve. Functions optimise locally. Shared goals get deprioritised. Behaviours that look rational at the team level produce outcomes that make no sense at the organisational level. The operating model has created the wrong system, and the system is working exactly as designed.
Growth is revealing the gaps. What worked at a smaller size isn't working now. Adding people is making coordination harder, not easier. New capabilities are being bolted on without a clear picture of how they fit into what already exists. The organisation is operating on execution infrastructure designed for a business it no longer is, and the distance between the two is widening.
Sign 7: Scaling without the infrastructure to support it
Sign 6: Incentives and metrics that work against strategy
Sign 5: Work that is invisible to people who need to see it
If any of these signs are present, the problem is most likely systemic.
Isolated fixes won't hold. Reorganisations, new hires, and technology implementations address symptoms but leave the underlying infrastructure unchanged.
What's needed is diagnosis first: a structured investigation into which structural failures are present, how they connect to each other, and what needs to change at the infrastructure level.
One context where these signs are becoming increasingly urgent is AI investment. Organisations committing to AI transformation are discovering that the patterns above don't pause while the technology is implemented. Decision gridlock, invisible work, and misaligned incentives don't get resolved by new tools. They get amplified by them.
But AI also presents a genuine opportunity. Deliberately designed, it can address coordination failures and seam issues that traditional operating model work has never been able to solve cleanly.
Whether your concern is protecting an AI investment from the infrastructure failures that will undermine it, or deliberately designing AI to solve coordination problems that traditional approaches haven't cracked, the starting point is the same.: diagnosis first.
That's where I start.