Every operating model transformation programme I've reviewed includes, at some point, a target operating model slide — a clean diagram of the intended future state, presented to a steering committee with confidence. In my experience, a meaningful proportion of the people in that room privately doubt the diagram will ever fully materialise, and rarely say so.
This scepticism is frequently well founded. Target operating model diagrams are aspirational by design, and the gap between the diagram and the eventually implemented reality tends to widen in direct proportion to how much the diagram glossed over genuine decision-rights conflicts that hadn't actually been resolved when the slide was built.
A target operating model slide that shows clean reporting lines without having resolved which of two competing functions actually owns a contested decision is describing an aspiration, not a plan — and the people closest to that contested decision usually know it, even while nodding along in the steering committee meeting.
The programmes that actually deliver on their target operating model are, consistently, the ones that resolved the genuinely contested decision-rights questions before finalising the diagram, even though this makes the diagram's development take longer and feel less clean during the process. An operating model diagram that reflects resolved decisions is boring to look at and reliable. One that papers over unresolved conflict is elegant and will not survive implementation intact.
If a target operating model presentation gets unusually easy, unanimous agreement in the room, it's worth asking whether the hard conversations happened before the slide was built, or whether they're still waiting, unaddressed, behind a diagram that looks more resolved than it is.