The forces around the model: customers receive the value it delivers, leadership owns it and exercises governance, and culture conditions everything — the finest target operating model fails against a culture that will not carry it.
At A Glance
Concept
Definition
Customers
The reason the machine exists: the recipients of the value proposition and the ultimate judges of the model.
Leadership
The owners: an operating model without a leadership owner is a consulting deliverable, not a way of operating.
Culture
How things really get done: the unwritten rules that either carry the designed model or quietly defeat it.
The Forces Around The Model
Unlike the other domains, context and people are not designed — they are worked with. Customers judge the model by the value it actually delivers, leadership owns it and exercises the governance that steers it, and culture conditions how faithfully the designed model is followed in practice. All three sit outside the design dimensions, but none of them are optional extras: get any one wrong and a well-designed operating model still fails.
Customers, leadership, and culture surround the operating model rather than sitting inside it — which is exactly why they are easy to leave out of a design that otherwise looks complete.
Breaking Down Each Concept
Each concept below sets out what it is, exactly what an architect needs to do to work with it well, the inputs it depends on, the outputs it must produce, and the mistake most likely to undermine it.
1. Customers
What it is: the reason the operating model exists — the recipients of the value proposition, internal or external, and the ultimate judges of whether the model is actually working.
What you need to do:
Identify who the real customer is for each value stream, including internal customers where the model serves other parts of the organisation rather than an external buyer.
Bring genuine customer voice into target operating model design, not just into value proposition work. Customers experience the value stream, not the org chart, and can tell you where it actually breaks.
Measure the model, at least in part, through customer-experienced outcomes. A model that hits every internal target while customer satisfaction falls is measuring the wrong things.
Revisit who the customer is when the value proposition changes. A shift in target customer segment is a signal the operating model may need to change with it, not just the marketing.
Inputs: the value proposition, value stream maps, and direct customer feedback or research.
Outputs: a clear, current understanding of who the model's customers actually are and what outcomes they judge it against.
Watch for: designing the operating model around the customer the organisation used to have, rather than the one the current strategy is actually targeting.
2. Leadership
What it is: the ownership that makes the operating model a real way of operating rather than a consulting deliverable — leadership owns the model as a whole and exercises the governance that steers it.
What you need to do:
Name an accountable owner for the operating model as a whole, distinct from the owners of individual capabilities or dimensions. Someone has to own the coherence of the whole design, not just their own slice of it.
Have leadership actively exercise governance, rather than delegating it entirely to a programme office. Governance without leadership attention becomes process without authority.
Make leadership visible in the trade-offs the design principles force. When a design principle costs a leader something in their own area, their support for it in public is what makes the principle real elsewhere.
Sponsor the transition roadmap's funding and resourcing decisions directly. A roadmap leadership has not actually resourced is an aspiration, not a plan.
Inputs: the target operating model, the design principles, and an honest view of where leadership attention and sponsorship currently sit.
Outputs: named, accountable ownership of the operating model, with leadership actively exercising the governance that steers it.
Watch for: an operating model with a leadership sponsor at the launch event and no leadership attention six months later. This is the most common way a well-designed target operating model quietly reverts to how things were.
3. Culture
What it is: how things really get done — the unwritten rules that either carry the designed model or quietly defeat it, regardless of how well the model itself was designed.
What you need to do:
Assess the current culture honestly against the target operating model's demands. A model that requires cross-functional collaboration will not survive a culture that rewards protecting departmental territory.
Shape culture through leadership behaviour, incentives and the stories the organisation tells about itself, not through a values poster. Culture is designable, but only slowly and only through what people actually see rewarded.
Watch for the gap between what the model says should happen and what people actually do. That gap is where culture is telling you something the design documents will not.
Include security culture explicitly in this assessment. Whether people report incidents, follow controls, or quietly route around them is a direct signal of whether the operating model's control design will actually operate as intended.
Inputs: staff feedback, observed behaviour against the target operating model's demands, and honest input from the people who will have to work the new way.
Outputs: an honest assessment of the cultural gap between current behaviour and what the target operating model needs, with a realistic plan for closing it slowly rather than pretending it can be closed by launch day.
Watch for: treating culture as a communications exercise. A memo announcing the new way of working is not the same thing as changing what people actually do when nobody is watching.
Who, What, When, Where, Why
Who
Customers, internal or external, are the ultimate judges of the model. Leadership are its named owners, accountable for the model as a whole rather than delegating ownership away. Culture belongs to everyone — it is a property of the whole organisation, not a function or a team.
What
The human and behavioural forces that surround the formal, designed model: who it is for, who owns it, and the unwritten rules that determine whether people actually work the way the design says on paper.
When
Always present, but most decisive at go-live and in the months immediately after, when the designed model meets real behaviour under real operational pressure.
Where
Leadership ownership and governance sit centrally. Culture is often local — a target operating model can succeed in one team or region and quietly fail in another because the local culture differs, even though the design was identical.
Why
The finest designed target operating model fails against a culture that will not carry it. Genuine leadership ownership and customer-centred design are what let a model survive contact with reality; culture determines whether people follow the model or route around it.
For Security Architects
Security culture — whether people report incidents, follow controls, or quietly work around them because they are friction — determines whether a well-designed control framework actually operates as designed. Leadership visibly owning security decisions, rather than delegating all of them, and a clear understanding of customer and user trust expectations are strong forces shaping how much friction the model can impose before people find a way around it.