Signs Your Operating Model Is Broken

An operating model is the invisible wiring of a company: how decisions get made, how work flows across teams, who owns what, and how the pieces connect. When it works, nobody thinks about it. When it is broken, everyone feels it but few can name it — so they blame individuals, add another process, or reorganise the boxes on a chart. The tell-tale sign of a structural problem is that it persists no matter who you put in the roles. Below are the symptoms we see most often.

Decisions take too long and don't stick

In a healthy model, most decisions are made once, by someone with clear authority, and then hold. In a broken one, decisions get made, unmade, escalated, and re-litigated. Nobody is quite sure who owns the call, so everyone weighs in and no one commits. The cost is not just speed — it is the slow erosion of trust, as people learn that a decision is only ever provisional.

• Simple choices routinely climb three levels to get resolved.
• Decisions get reopened weeks after they were "made."
• Nobody can say who actually owns a given call.

Work falls between the seams

The most expensive failures rarely happen inside a team — they happen in the gaps between teams, where accountability is ambiguous and each side assumes the other has it. If your recurring problems all live at the handoffs, the fault is structural, not personal. No amount of individual heroics fixes a model where the seams are wider than the roles.

Everything requires a meeting

When coordination can only happen synchronously — when nothing moves without getting everyone in a room — it usually means the model lacks clear ownership and shared information. Meetings become the connective tissue the structure should provide. A calendar full of alignment meetings is not a sign of collaboration; it is often a sign that the operating model is quietly failing and people are compensating with their time.

• Progress stalls whenever a key person is on leave.
• The same coordination meeting recurs without ever resolving.
• People attend meetings defensively, to protect their turf.

None of these symptoms mean your people are the problem. More often they are working hard to compensate for a model that no longer fits the business — one designed for a smaller, simpler, or different company than the one you have become. The fix is not another reorg for its own sake, but a deliberate redesign of how decisions, work and accountability actually flow.