Thomas KrauseOrganizations need adaptive capabilities, not fixed targets.
Lately, I've been thinking more often about what organizations actually need to stay relevant – given the technological leaps we're witnessing and the crises we're dealing with in parallel. In the process, I stumbled again over a term that hasn't sat right with me for a while.
Target Operating Model.
Three words. For decades, the centerpiece of every major transformation program. What do I actually hear in them?
Target.
A goal. A destination. Something worth working towards.
Nothing wrong with that. Organizations need direction, ambition, a sense of where they want to go.
Operating.
How work actually gets done. How we coordinate, decide, plan.
It sounds technical – but it isn't. At its core, "Operating" is about agreements: the way we currently choose to work together. Some are explicit, many are not. But they are agreements – not laws of nature.
Model.
And this is where it gets interesting.
A model is a representation of something. A snapshot. A blueprint. By definition, it freezes a point in time.
Put together, the picture is this: a target that – once reached – becomes a fixed image of how things are supposed to work.
The ambition is built in. So is the stasis.
The problem isn't the ambition. It's the assumption that you can stop once you get there.
The TOM was designed for a world that no longer exists.
The thinking behind the TOM has its roots in IT architecture of the early 2000s. Jeanne Ross, Peter Weill, and David Robertson described in Enterprise Architecture as Strategy (MIT CISR, 2006) how companies should define their Operating Model – as a foundation for aligning IT investments with organizational structures. From there, the idea spread into general strategy language. The machine metaphor isn't accidental – it's baked into the origin.
A world where strategy was formulated at the top, handed down as a blueprint, implemented over 18 months, and then held. Where the environment was stable enough for the model to remain valid long enough to take effect.
That world is over.
And yet TOM thinking persists – occasionally dressed in new language. "Agile" came along. "Digital" came along. Now "AI-first" is coming. The decoration changes, the underlying assumption stays: there is a target, and it's enough to get there.
Some organizations speak of transformation, some of the Target Operating Model. They don't mean the same thing – but I wonder whether the same mental model is behind both. Transformation describes the movement from A to B. The TOM describes only B – not even the path to get there. Perhaps it's transformation thinking in new packaging: C-level speak on one hand, practitioner speak on the other. But the underlying assumption remains: there is a B. And it's enough to get there.
Practices instead of a master plan
What we need are practices – routines, rhythms, habits – that make it normal and possible:
- to coordinate differently when coordination stops working
- to plan differently when plans no longer reflect reality
- to decide differently when decision rights are in the wrong place
- to question and change structures when they create friction instead of flow
This is not the absence of structure, not change for the sake of change, not the exhausting permanent revolution that "agility" has sometimes promised. It is the capability to change – reliably, without heroics – whenever a tension becomes visible or an opportunity emerges.
This capability is built through repetition – through routines that allow an organization to correct itself before external pressure forces it to.
It's like physical fitness: you don't train so that you can eventually stop training. You train so your body can respond when it's called upon.
Organizations don't need a better destination. They need the capability to keep moving.
The term shapes the thinking.
"Target Operating Model" tells an organization: there is a target. Reach it. Then operate from there.
What we need instead is a term – and a practice – that says:
Your operating model is never finished. It is always sufficient for now. And always open to revision.
Agreements, yes. But agreements with an expiration date – after which we deliberately review them. Not because we want to get rid of them, but because we take them seriously.
Those who regularly question their agreements no longer need transformation.
Perhaps we need a different term for this – Adaptive Operating Model is one proposal.
What's behind it: not perfecting the model itself, but building the foundations so that we can adapt the way we work more easily than before, with less effort than before, more regularly than before – when a tension demands it or an opportunity suggests it.
A second-order operating model, if you will. Not: here are all the structures, roles, and interactions as we envisioned them. But rather: here is the capability to change exactly that.
That's the direction I'm thinking in. What's missing?