Most strategy reviews fail at the diagnosis, not the execution.
The CEO can feel the misfit. The board cannot yet see it. The Structural Misfit Method closes the gap.
Thirteen questions. Scored output ready in five minutes. Shareable with your board chair.
You can feel your operating model has stopped fitting. The board cannot yet see what you see. The gap between those two positions is where every failed strategy review lives.
The Structural Misfit Method was developed to close that gap. It gives the CEO and the board the same structural diagnosis, scored against the conditions in which the organisation has to operate.
The external problem
Systems once mastered are tuned to a world that no longer exists.
From The Regenerate Leap, Chapter 3.
Span of control designed for hierarchical decision flow. Workflow architecture designed for human execution. Governance designed for deterministic tools. The conditions those models served have moved. The models have not.
The failure record
The failure record is not an execution problem. It is a diagnosis problem.
- •88 per cent of large change programmes fail to deliver the change they were designed to produce. (Bain, 2024)
- •70 per cent of organisational change efforts collapse before producing the change they were designed to deliver. (McKinsey, ongoing research)
- •Only 35 per cent of digital reorganisation programmes meet their stated goals. (BCG, 2021 — study of 825+ companies)
Five minutes
The diagnostic tells you whether your organisation is in this pattern — and how far in.
Thirteen questions. A scored structural diagnosis. Shareable with your board chair.
Take the 13-question diagnosticWhat changes when the method works.
The board governs structural fitness alongside programme performance. You and the board chair look at the same diagnosis for the first time. The redesign is planned, not forced. Capability released by decommissioning funds the next model rather than propping up the current one. The mission survives because the model fitted to deliver it was redesigned in time.
In practice
"For the first time, I had the language to show the board what I could already see."
— Chief Executive, UK infrastructure organisation
The CEO-board gap
You can feel the misfit but have not had the instrument to name it in governance language. The board sees reserves and programme data, not structural fitness. The gap between what you see and what the board can see is the structural reason most strategy reviews fail.
The leadership condition
Linda Hill, Faculty Chair of the Leadership Initiative at Harvard Business School, spent more than two decades studying this pattern. Her finding is that conventional leadership works for change management but not for structural redesign. The leaders who succeed create the conditions for others to co-create the answer.
Hill asks a question most boards have never been asked: is leadership the problem? Are leaders getting in the way of the redesign the organisation needs?
Hill, L.A., Tedards, E. and Weber, K. (2026). Genius at Scale. Harvard Business Review Press.
The Operating Model Fitness Index surfaces this question in the scores, and resolves it in the leadership reading the respondent receives privately.
Resilience as the wrong response
Resilience assumes a prior state worth restoring. Under compound shock, the prior state is no longer available as a destination.
| Resilience | Regeneration |
|---|---|
| Restores the prior operating model | Designs the next operating model |
| Returns to a baseline that has moved | Accepts the baseline has shifted |
| Absorbs shock to preserve structure | Uses shock as the trigger to redesign |
| Funded as a recovery cost | Funded as a redesign investment |
The ecological anchor
Regeneration isn't theory. It's the governing rhythm of life itself.
From The Regenerate Leap, Chapter 2.
Natural systems have stress-tested regeneration over 3.8 billion years.
What is still true. What is no longer. What principle must guide what comes next.
From The Regenerate Leap, Chapter 3.
The Operating Model Fitness Index surfaces the answers across thirteen scored dimensions. Five minutes.
Start the Diagnostic