Most organisations do not plan their operating model. It accumulates. A process is introduced to solve an immediate problem, a spreadsheet is created to track something that was previously remembered, and a coordination habit forms around a particular person who happens to know how things work. Individually, each decision is reasonable. Collectively, they become the way the organisation runs.
This works well at a certain size. The difficulty appears when volume increases. The same processes now require more coordination, the same reporting now requires more consolidation, and the same decisions now require more meetings. Management responds by adding effort — more staff, more follow-up, more supervision — because effort is the fastest available lever.
An operating model is simply the answer to a set of practical questions. Who owns each part of the process? Where does information enter the organisation, and in what structure? What happens automatically, and what requires a person? How does management see performance without asking for it? When those answers are explicit, growth is absorbed by the system. When they are implicit, growth is absorbed by people.
Redesigning an operating model does not mean replacing everything. In most engagements, the highest-value change is narrow: structuring how work is captured, clarifying ownership of a handful of critical processes, removing two or three manual handoffs, and making one management view trustworthy enough that people stop maintaining private versions of the truth.
The practical test is straightforward. If the organisation doubled its volume next year, which parts of the operation would require double the people? Those are the parts where the operating model, not the market, is the constraint.