Models, frameworks and concepts

A target operating model is the mechanism that connects what your organisation exists to do with how it creates value - the cascade from purpose, through the people you serve and the services you deliver, to the work that makes delivery happen.

The ADKAR model is a five-stage framework for managing change at an individual level - Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability, and Reinforcement. It helps organisations understand what people need at each point in a change process and where things are getting stuck.

Kotter's 8 Step Change Model is a structured framework for leading organisational change, from building urgency through to embedding new ways of working. It gives leaders a clear sequence to follow when the change is big and the stakes are high.

The Iceberg Model is a systems thinking tool that helps you look beneath surface-level events to find the patterns, structures, and mental models driving them. It's a way of seeing the deeper causes behind what's happening in your organisation.

A PESTLE Analysis is a framework for scanning the external environment across six areas - Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal, and Environmental. It helps organisations understand the bigger forces that could affect their strategy and planning.

The RASCI Framework maps five roles in any project or decision - Responsible, Accountable, Supportive, Consulted, and Informed. It helps organisations clarify who does what, reducing confusion and speeding up delivery.

The Change Curve maps the emotional stages people move through during organisational change, from shock and denial through to acceptance and commitment. It helps leaders understand where people are in the process and what support they need.

A Theory of Change is a strategic planning tool that maps out how and why you expect a desired change to happen. It connects your activities to your outcomes, showing the logical path from what you do to the impact you want to create.

A LogFrame is a structured planning and evaluation tool that helps organisations set clear goals, define how they'll measure progress, and track what's actually being achieved. It's widely used in the nonprofit sector for programme management and impact reporting.

Belbin's Team Roles identify nine distinct roles that people naturally take on in a team. Understanding these roles helps you build more balanced teams and get the best from each person's strengths.

The Mendelow Power-Interest Matrix is a stakeholder mapping tool that helps you work out who matters most during a change or project. It plots stakeholders by their level of power and interest so you can plan how to engage each group.

Six Thinking Hats is Edward de Bono's framework for structured thinking and decision-making. It gives teams six different perspectives to work through - facts, feelings, caution, optimism, creativity, and process - so decisions are more balanced and thorough.

Edgar Schein's Culture Model explores organisational culture at three levels - visible artefacts, stated values, and the deeper underlying assumptions that really drive behaviour. It helps organisations get beneath the surface of what their culture actually is.

Project Oxygen is Google's research into what makes a great manager. It identified key behaviours - from being a good coach to supporting career development - that consistently lead to better team outcomes.

The STAR method is a structured storytelling framework that uses Situation, Task, Action, and Result to create clear, compelling narratives that demonstrate impact and engage audiences through concrete examples rather than abstract claims.

VUCA Prime is a leadership response framework for navigating Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity. It pairs each challenge with a counter-strategy - Vision, Understanding, Clarity, and Agility - to help leaders act effectively in turbulent environments.

The Galbraith Star Model is an organisational design framework that maps five interconnected elements - strategy, structure, processes, rewards, and people. It helps leaders see how these elements need to align for the organisation to work well.

Wicked Problems are complex challenges that resist straightforward solutions - where the problem itself shifts as you try to solve it. Understanding wicked problems helps organisations stop looking for simple fixes and start working with the complexity instead.

The Cultural Web is a model for understanding and mapping organisational culture across six interconnected elements. It helps you see how stories, rituals, symbols, power structures, controls, and organisational structures shape the way things are done.

The Burke-Litwin Change Model maps how different parts of an organisation connect and influence each other during change. It helps leaders see which factors are driving performance and where to focus their effort for the biggest impact.

The POLISM Canvas is an operating model tool that maps how an organisation actually functions across seven areas - from its value proposition to its management systems. It helps leaders visualise and redesign how work gets done.

The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety is a framework that maps how safe people feel to be themselves, learn, contribute, and challenge the status quo. It helps leaders understand what conditions people need before they'll speak up and take risks.

An Organisational Maturity Model maps how developed your organisation's processes and capabilities are across five stages - from ad-hoc and reactive through to optimising and continuously improving. It helps you see where you are and what the next step looks like.

The CEDAR Feedback Model is a structured framework for leading feedback conversations that feel collaborative rather than top-down. It walks through Context, Examples, Diagnosis, Action, and Review to turn feedback into genuine development.

Audience personas are detailed profiles of the people you're trying to reach, built from real research into their needs, behaviours, and motivations. They help organisations design services and communications that actually resonate with the people who matter most.

The Competing Values Framework is a model for understanding organisational culture by mapping it across two dimensions - flexibility versus stability, and internal versus external focus. It reveals which of four culture types your organisation leans towards.

The Bridges Transition Model focuses on the human side of change - the psychological transition people go through rather than the external change itself. It maps three phases: Endings, the Neutral Zone, and New Beginnings.

The T7 Model is a framework that identifies seven factors driving team effectiveness - five internal (like trust and talent) and two external (like team-leader fit and organisational support). It helps you diagnose where a team is strong and where it needs work.

The Eisenhower Matrix is a time management and prioritisation tool that sorts tasks into four categories based on urgency and importance. It helps teams focus on what actually matters instead of just what feels most pressing.

A Narrative Strategy is a plan for how your organisation tells its story in a way that connects with people and advances your goals. It goes beyond individual stories to create a consistent, compelling narrative that runs through everything you communicate.

Lewin's Change Model breaks organisational change into three stages - Unfreeze, Change, and Refreeze. Before anything can shift, the conditions holding the current state in place need to soften. Then the change happens. And then the new patterns need to solidify, or the organisation drifts back.

Project Aristotle is Google's research into what makes teams effective. It found that psychological safety - feeling safe to take risks and be vulnerable - matters more than who is on the team.

A strengths-based approach to organisational change. The 5D cycle - Define, Discover, Dream, Design, Deliver - helps teams build on what's already working rather than fixating on what's broken.

The 2x2 Scenario Matrix is a strategic planning tool that helps organisations explore different possible futures. By mapping two key uncertainties against each other, it creates four distinct scenarios you can plan and prepare for.

Kaizen is a Japanese continuous improvement philosophy built on the idea that small, ongoing changes add up to significant results over time. The Kaizen Cycle gives teams a structured way to identify improvements, test them, and build them into everyday work.

DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyse, Improve, Control) is a structured problem-solving method from the Six Sigma toolkit. It gives teams a clear five-step process for improving existing processes using data and evidence.

The Cynefin Framework is a decision-making model that helps leaders understand what kind of situation they're dealing with - clear, complicated, complex, chaotic, or confused. The right approach depends on the context, and this framework helps you match the two.

The Satir Change Model maps the emotional journey teams move through during change - from familiar stability through resistance and chaos to integration and a new way of working.

The PDCA Cycle (Plan, Do, Check, Act) is a continuous improvement framework for testing and refining processes. It creates a repeating loop of planning a change, trying it, checking whether it worked, and adjusting before the next round.

The Nonprofit Business Model Canvas is a visual planning tool that helps charities and social enterprises map out how they create, deliver, and sustain impact. It adapts the traditional business model canvas for organisations driven by mission rather than profit.

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team is Patrick Lencioni's framework for understanding why teams struggle. It maps five connected problems - from absence of trust to inattention to results - that build on each other when left unaddressed.

Contextual inquiry is a user research method where you observe and interview people in their actual work environment while they perform real tasks. It uncovers insights about real behaviour and needs that surveys and interviews in meeting rooms simply can't reach.

The BPM Lifecycle is a five-stage cycle for designing, modelling, implementing, monitoring, and optimising how work flows through an organisation. Each pass through the cycle - design, model, implement, monitor, optimise - refines the process further.

The 5 Whys is a simple root-cause analysis technique that drills into problems by asking "why?" repeatedly. It helps teams get past surface-level symptoms to find the real cause of an issue.

Organisational Architecture maps the full stack of design decisions an organisation needs to make, from vision and strategy through to people, process, and technology - showing how each layer depends on the one above it.

An empathy map is a collaborative visualisation tool that captures what we know about a user's behaviours, thoughts, feelings, and motivations, helping teams develop deeper understanding and more human-centred solutions.

The 5 Conflict Styles model (Thomas-Kilmann) maps five different ways people approach conflict - from avoiding it to collaborating through it. It helps teams understand their default patterns and choose more effective approaches.

The 8 Wastes of Lean give you eight categories for finding where effort, time and resources leak from a process. Use the DOWNTIME acronym to work through each waste type systematically and build a clear picture of what to improve.

The DiSC model is a behavioural profiling tool that maps four personality styles - Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, and Conscientiousness. It helps teams understand how different people communicate, make decisions, and approach work.

The ORCA framework helps you assess whether your organisation is ready for change by examining three dimensions - evidence, context, and facilitation.

The McKinsey 7-S Model is a strategic framework that maps seven interconnected elements of an organisation - from strategy and structure to skills and shared values. It helps leaders understand how changing one part of the organisation affects everything else.

The DACI Framework is a decision-making tool that clarifies who plays what role in a decision - Driver, Approver, Contributors, and Informed. It cuts through ambiguity about who owns what, especially when decisions involve multiple people or teams.

The 6 Team Conditions for Team Effectiveness is a research-based framework that identifies what high-performing teams actually need to thrive. It covers everything from having a clear direction to getting the right coaching and support.

The TESI model (Team Emotional and Social Intelligence) is a framework for understanding how emotions and relationships affect team performance. It helps teams recognise their patterns and build stronger ways of working together.

A problem statement is a clearly written summary of a problem you're facing, expressed in the simplest possible terms. It helps teams align around what they're actually trying to solve before jumping to solutions.

The Hero's Journey is a timeless narrative framework that helps organisations tell compelling stories about transformation, change, and growth by positioning their experiences as archetypal adventures with challenges, mentors, and ultimate triumph.

A service blueprint is a detailed map of how a service actually works - what the user sees and experiences on the front end, and everything happening behind the scenes to make it possible. It helps organisations redesign services by showing the full picture.

Process mapping is a visual method for documenting how a process works from start to finish. It helps teams see the full picture - every step, decision point, and handoff - so they can spot problems and design improvements.

The OODA Loop (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act) is a decision-making framework designed for fast-moving, uncertain situations. It helps leaders and teams make quicker, better decisions by cycling through observation and action rather than getting stuck in analysis.

Hubert Joly's Heart of Business model identifies four pillars - noble purpose, people at the centre, stakeholder interdependence, and profit as outcome - that converge to create a purpose-driven organisation where financial performance follows from getting the foundations right.

A Gemba Walk is a Lean practice where leaders go to the place where work actually happens to observe, listen, and understand. It bridges the gap between how leaders think work gets done and how it really gets done.

A visual tool for tracing the complete customer experience - what they do, feel, and encounter at every stage, and what your organisation does behind the scenes to create it.

A six-dimension framework for understanding how national and organisational culture shapes values, behaviour, and expectations. Each dimension is a spectrum - use it to surface invisible differences before they become friction.

A diagnostic model that helps leaders see how their words, actions, priorities, and measures shape the culture around them - consciously or not.