Target operating model
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A target operating model (fondly known to all as the TOM) is the desired state of an organisation’s operating model.
“Desired”, “wished-for”, in a perfect world.
Desired by whom?
Subject matter experts don’t usually have the time to contemplate the eternal verities, much less the inclination. To the extent they have a desired state beyond being on the train home, it would be a workplace absent any middle managers banging on about target operating models.
Thus, a target operating model is only the aspiration of she whose role in the organisation is to wish for perfect things: middle managers. Therefore, a TOM trucks in terms of unicorns, rainbows, and popular delusions of the management mob. There is no space in it for human foible, unexpected contingency, nuance, shade of meaning or obstinacy. A target operating model will look awesome on a Powerpoint deck. It will swoon the steerco. But it will bear no resemblance to anything the organisation actually does.
On Plato and perfect worlds
A target operating model is thereby a kind of Platonic ideal. While it is hard to persuade a chief operating officer of this, the fact remains that we subject matter experts do not inhabit an abstract realm of essential beauty.[1]
No. We inhabit a grubby, tedious cave, in which we are shackled together and forced to look at the same craggy walls. We have no ideal forms; we see only their shadows, thrown by guttering candles against those misshapen walls. The ideals are perverted. Disfigured. Monstrous. The world we know is of the shadows: It is intractable, messy, irritating and prone to outbreaks of Sod’s law.
Life in it is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short, and made immeasurably worse by these fellows with yard-sticks and protractors, getting under your feet while you try to get on with breaking your rocks.
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References
- ↑ Well, I certainly don’t.