Written by Sam Fraser, ADAPTOVATE Singapore

Is your organisation set up to deliver your strategy?

Most operating models are built on legacy org charts rather than on the strategy they're meant to deliver — and that mismatch is a common, fixable cause of stalled execution. Drawing on ADAPTOVATE's work advising enterprise clients across banking, ecommerce, and pharmaceutical sectors on organisational redesign, this guide examines why traditional functional and hierarchical structures tend to produce misalignment, silos, duplicated effort, and disengaged teams — even when the underlying strategy is sound.

As businesses scale and markets grow more complex, the way work is grouped and resourced has a direct, measurable bearing on whether strategy actually gets delivered — not just planned. The guide identifies six distinct structural approaches enterprises use to organise teams around strategy, each suited to different business contexts, along with the trade-offs leaders need to weigh between them.

Rather than prescribing a single "right answer," it sets out the design principles that separate operating models that hold up under real business complexity from those that don't.

Download the full guide to see all six operating model types and the design principles behind them.