Your Operating Model is Just How Work Moves

I’ve spent a fair amount of time working on operating models for organizations, and I’ve watched them turn esoteric fast. They become committee-led artifacts with dense language, elaborate boxes, and enough arrows to qualify as modern art. They look impressive. They also tend to become less useful with every additional layer of “sophistication.”

An operating model is simply how work moves through the business. That’s it. Full stop.

If you accept that definition, a lot of fog clears immediately. You don’t need an encyclopedic diagram of the enterprise. You need to understand the path work takes, from the moment it enters your world to the moment value leaves your hands. So what does that path include?

It starts with how work shows up. Who are your customers? What triggers them to come looking? How do they find you, and how do you find them? What happens between “interest” and “engagement?” In other words: how do you meet, and what happens next?

Then you get to the exchange. What services do you provide? What products do you offer? For each one, what does the customer have to provide in return? That might be payment, information, approvals, access, data, decisions, or simply agreement on what “done” means. Whatever the inputs are, they matter, because they shape the workflow that follows.

From there, the operating model becomes a story about movement. How does that work travel through your organization so it turns into an outcome the customer actually wants? That flow inevitably crosses functions. It might touch finance for invoicing and payment terms. HR for staffing, onboarding, policies, or training. Development for building and changes. Operations for fulfillment and reliability. Legal. Support. Sales. Delivery. Sometimes it’s a straight line. Usually it’s more like a river system. The point isn’t to label every pebble on the riverbed. The point is to make the current visible.

And this is where operating models often go wrong: we try to include too much. We confuse completeness with clarity. We turn the model into a “map of everything,” which is like handing someone a globe when they asked for directions to the grocery store. It becomes hard to read, hard to explain, hard to manage, and it loses the very value we were hoping it would create.

My favorite test for an operating model is brutally simple: show it to someone new. Someone smart, capable, and completely unfamiliar with your organization. If they can look at it and say, “Oh, I see where I fit,” or “I understand how work gets done here,” you’re probably on the right track. That’s the moment the operating model becomes useful, not as a document, but as a shared language. Because that’s the real purpose of an operating model: to make it clear how we all work together.

At its heart, an operating model is just a chart that describes how value flows through the organization. Or even more plainly: how work moves, so customers get what they came for.

You do not need a giant transformation program to improve your operating model. You need clarity on how work enters the business, how it moves, and where it gets stuck. If you want help mapping that flow and identifying the biggest opportunities to simplify, get in touch.