There is a specific moment in almost every Leadership Clarity Diagnostic when the leadership team in the room realises, collectively and for the first time, that the operating model they believe they are running is not the one the organisation is actually running. It is one of the more striking things to witness — not because it is dramatic, but because of how quiet it is.
The moment arrives differently each time. Sometimes it surfaces when RT maps the decision patterns the organisation is actually exhibiting against the decision rights the operating model formally assigns. The two don’t match — not slightly, but structurally. Decisions the model assigns downward are being made at the ExCo. Decisions the model places at the ExCo are being made in bilateral conversations that no committee structure captures. The model says one thing; the pattern says another.
Sometimes it surfaces when RT maps escalation patterns. In a well-functioning operating model, escalation occurs when a decision genuinely requires a higher level of authority — when it falls outside defined parameters, when it has cross-functional consequences that need coordination, when it carries risk that the assigned level cannot absorb. In a drifted operating model, escalation has become the default response to ambiguity — which means it occurs constantly, it consumes senior time disproportionately, and it rarely produces the clarity it is supposed to produce because the source of the ambiguity is structural, not informational.
The operating model that has drifted is still described in the same language as the one that was originally designed. The language didn’t change. The organisation did. And the gap between them has been widening quietly ever since.
What strikes RT practitioners most consistently is not the fact of the drift — operating model drift is essentially universal in organisations that have been through significant change — but the speed with which leadership teams recognise it once the structural evidence is in front of them. The recognition is almost always rapid. The model they have been describing and defending as current suddenly looks obviously historical. The question that follows is always the same: how long has it been like this?
The honest answer, in most cases, is: longer than anyone thought. Operating model drift accumulates gradually. Each individual adaptation — a workaround here, an informal arrangement there, a committee that stops being the real decision forum — seems manageable in isolation. The pattern only becomes visible when you look at the whole. And the whole is rarely mapped, because no one has needed to map it until something breaks.
The practical implication for leadership teams is this: the operating model description you use to onboard leaders, set expectations with the board, and explain the organisation to external parties is probably not an accurate description of how the organisation actually operates. The gap between that description and operational reality is not a communication problem. It is a governance one — and the longer it goes unexamined, the larger the structural consequences of finally examining it.
The leadership teams RT works with find the moment of recognition uncomfortable and, almost immediately afterward, clarifying. For the first time in the engagement, everyone in the room is looking at the same map — not the official one, but the real one. The work that follows is harder than the recognition. But the recognition is what makes the work possible.
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