We are living in an era defined by uncertainty. Technology is shifting faster than leadership teams can write their strategies, cyber threats evolve daily, and global events continue to reshape the landscape in ways few organisations can anticipate.
In this environment, the organisations that thrive will be those willing to embrace a fundamentally different way of working – a dynamic operating model.
Many organisations still cling to the comfort of old habits: long-term plans, fixed structures, and detailed operating models that attempt to map out years of activity in advance. Wanting certainty is natural. And yet, in today’s environment, it has become one of the biggest risks for any organisation. As one organisation memorably reflected after a major transformation failed, “We created a gâteau of false certainty, and we ended up eating it for two years.”
The uncomfortable truth is that the future is increasingly unclear – in AI adoption, cybersecurity, service delivery and certainly in geopolitics. So, rather than trying to predict the unpredictable, organisations need something far more powerful: the ability to adapt quickly to whatever reality emerges.
In this climate, what matters most is the speed of your feedback loop: how rapidly you can learn what works, what doesn’t, and adjust accordingly. This enables changes to services, processes or technologies to occur ten times faster, cheaper and more easily. Most existing operating models simply aren’t designed for the world we now live in. They were usually optimised for a steady-state business environment, with efficiency dominating over adaptability.
To respond to this real-world uncertainty, then, you need the operating model itself to become dynamic. You need an organisation-wide ability to constantly adapt, to test and learn from what’s working for your customers, including all your own internal functions and processes. And you need to do this without everything descending into chaos.
Empowering every team to continuously adapt both what it does and how it does it needs to become a normalised, daily activity across the organisation, rather than all change being delivered only through a portfolio of months-long programmes imposed on those responsible for ‘business as usual’. With a dynamic operating model, there is no ‘business as usual’ – there is only constant adaptation.
The dynamic operating model in action
What does a dynamic operating model mean in practice? In short, it means equipping everyone in your organisation with the skills, capabilities and confidence to embrace test and learn, evidence-based, feedback loops. It means leaders focusing on outcomes, not outputs, or the features of solutions. It means having technology, processes and ways of working that allow changes to happen quickly, safely and cheaply. Often, it means redesigning your organisational model around the end-to-end services, with those services being defined by the real experience of your customers rather than internal structures or historical logic. And it means changing how work is funded, with money supporting multi-disciplinary teams who are empowered to discover how best to deliver the outcomes they’ve been set.
This isn’t a small change. But the rewards can be remarkable. At the start of the COVID lockdowns, with demand for welfare support increasing tenfold, and while many welfare systems around the world faltered under the pressure, the UK’s Universal Credit system was near enough the only one that continued to function effectively. That’s because the supporting team had responded to a disastrous first three years by adopting a dynamic operating model, optimising their ability to test and learn from reality on the ground. They were able to make dozens of significant changes to the design and operation of welfare every day, keeping ahead of the unprecedented demand and disruption.
Adopting a dynamic operating model isn’t easy, and it doesn’t happen overnight. But if the largest department in the UK government can embrace this way of working while under extreme pressures, what’s stopping your business or organisation? The world isn’t getting any more predictable, but you can become far better at navigating whatever comes next.
Tom Loosemore is a partner at Public Digital
Read more: Who owns the intelligence layer of your AI model?
