Supporting Concepts
The Supporting Concepts add depth and perspective to the Operating Model.
They are not separate building blocks, but lenses that help you design, tailor, and evolve the model with greater coherence and balance.
While the building blocks describe what makes up the organisation, the supporting concepts explain how those parts connect, interact, and create value together.
They encourage holistic thinking, help prevent local optimisation, and ensure that change happens in harmony rather than in isolation.
Supporting concepts make the operating model come alive, turning structure into flow, and principles into practice.
How the Supporting Concepts Work
Each supporting concept influences multiple building blocks at once:
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Product Thinking focuses on delivering continuous value and long-term ownership. It connects teams, governance, and funding around shared outcomes
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Systems Thinking helps to see the organisation as a connected whole, making sure that improvements in one area don’t create new problems elsewhere
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Customer Centricity (coming soon) will focus on aligning every part of the operating model around the customer experience and real value creation.
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Together, these concepts form the mindset layer of the operating model, guiding how you design, make decisions, and adapt over time.
Why they matter
Most organisations focus on the visible part of their operating model, structures, processes, systems, and KPIs.
But beneath those tangible elements lies a deeper layer of thinking: how people perceive the system, define value, and make trade-offs.
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Supporting Concepts help you manage that deeper layer consciously.
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They align thinking patterns across the organisation, so that leadership, teams, and governance share the same mental model of how value flows through the system.
Product Thinking
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Focuses on continuous value delivery, shifts the mindset from short-term projects to long-term ownership and measurable outcomes.
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Aligns strategy and execution, connects funding, governance, and delivery around shared value streams.
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Creates accountability and flow, empowers teams to own the full product lifecycle, from idea to operation.
Systems Thinking
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Sees the organisation as an interconnected whole, every change in one area influences others, often in unexpected ways.
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Prevents local optimisation, ensures improvements in one building block don’t create friction elsewhere in the system.
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Promotes holistic decision-making, helps leaders design and evolve the operating model as one coherent, adaptive system.
Customer Centricity
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Keeps the organisation’s purpose clear, every decision, process, and role ultimately serves the customer.
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Connects internal efficiency to external value, ensures that well-designed systems actually improve the customer experience.
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Builds empathy and alignment, encourages all teams, not just customer-facing ones, to understand and act on real customer needs.