A major funding announcement lands. Two hundred million dollars for programs your organization could deliver. The deadline: sixty days. Institutions that demonstrate readiness get funded. Those that can't watch the money go elsewhere.
In most organizations, this triggers a scramble. Every division submits a proposal. There's no shared framework for comparing them. The loudest voice or the most connected leader wins the internal competition. The submission is a collection of ideas rather than a coherent institutional response. Weeks are consumed by internal negotiation. The deadline arrives with a bid that's either rushed or unfocused or both.
Now imagine the same announcement landing at an organization that has something most don't: a shared vocabulary for describing what it does, what it's capable of, and where the gaps are. A structured model of the business. A capability map. A way to assess readiness against requirements in days rather than weeks.
That organization doesn't scramble. It assesses. And the assessment that would normally consume months happens in two weeks — not because anyone is working faster, but because the vocabulary and framework already exist.
Why Decisions Take So Long
Most strategic decisions are slow for a reason that has nothing to do with the decision itself. They're slow because the organization has to build shared understanding before it can evaluate options.
What do we mean by "ready"? What capabilities do we actually have? Where are the gaps? How does this opportunity connect to our strategy? These aren't trivial questions, but they're the same questions the organization answered last time. And the time before that. And the time before that.
Without a persistent, shared model of the business, every decision starts from scratch. Every assessment begins with definitions. Every evaluation begins with debate about what the words mean. The decision itself might take an hour. The vocabulary-building that precedes it takes weeks.
This is the reinvention tax applied to decision-making. And it's most expensive precisely when speed matters most — when an opportunity is time-limited, a crisis demands response, or a competitor is moving faster than your planning process allows.
Two Modes: Consulting vs. Building
Here's a distinction that most organizations miss, and it's the one that makes speed possible.
There are two fundamentally different ways to use a structured model of your business. You can consult it, or you can build it. Confusing the two causes most organizations to either move too slowly or not move at all.
Consulting means using a model as a diagnostic tool — a lens you hold up against your organization to ask, "What does this tell us?" You're not committing to adopt it as your official model. You're extracting insight from the comparison. It's fast, it's low-risk, and it's immediately valuable.
Building (or instantiating) means adapting a model to become your organization's own — customizing it to fit your vocabulary, your priorities, your context. That's more durable, but it takes time. It requires stakeholder engagement, governance, and ongoing maintenance.
The mistake organizations make is jumping to building before they've established value through consulting. The result is a months-long project that produces an artifact nobody uses.
The better sequence is almost always: consult first. Demonstrate that the model reveals something useful. Then decide whether to invest in making it your own.
The organization that responded to the funding announcement in two weeks was consulting. It didn't need to have formally adopted a complete organizational model. It needed a structured framework it could hold up against the opportunity and ask: "Do we have what this requires? Where are the gaps? What can we deliver, and what would require prototyping?"
That assessment took two weeks. Without the framework, the same assessment would have taken the full sixty days — if it happened at all.
Fitness Before Adoption
Before consulting or building, there's a prior question: does this model fit your context?
Not every structured model works for every organization. A model built for research-intensive universities won't fit a community college. A model designed for manufacturing won't work for professional services. The model needs to cover the right territory.
Four criteria determine fit:
Scope: Does it cover your domain? A model built for your sector is likely adequate. One built for a different sector won't be, regardless of quality.
Language: Can your organization adopt the vocabulary? Every organization has its own terminology. If the model's language conflicts with deeply embedded local terms, adoption will face resistance. The concepts might be sound; the labels might need translation.
Strategic alignment: Does the model's emphasis match your priorities? A reference model reflects the priorities of the community it was built for. If your priorities differ significantly, the model may emphasize the wrong things. This is about reweighting, not rejection.
Connectivity: Does it connect to what you already have? Most organizations have existing frameworks, classifications, and governance structures. A model that connects to those will be adopted more readily than one that requires abandoning everything in place.
Perfect fit isn't the standard. Useful starting point is. And the places where the model doesn't fit are often the most revealing — because they force you to articulate what's different about your organization, which is itself a strategic conversation worth having.
Four Moves When You Adapt
When you decide to make a model your own, the adaptation follows four moves. Understanding them prevents the two failure modes: over-customizing (which destroys the model's value) and under-customizing (which makes it feel irrelevant).
Adopt as-is: Elements that match your reality without modification. These are the common patterns — the reason the model exists. Keep them.
Rename: Elements where the concept is right but the label doesn't fit your vocabulary. Change the label. Preserve the meaning. Don't let terminology debates become concept debates.
Add: Elements that are specific to your context and not present in the model. These represent your uniqueness. An organization whose competitive advantage depends on employer partnerships might add a sub-capability for employer co-design. The model didn't include it because it's not universal. For this organization, it's essential.
Exclude: Elements present in the model that don't apply to your context. A polytechnic might exclude research commercialization capabilities if its research is applied and partner-funded rather than commercially exploitable.
Every adaptation should be documented with a brief rationale. Not because documentation is virtuous, but because six months from now, when someone asks "Why did we add this?" or "Why did we drop that?", the rationale provides the answer without requiring institutional memory.
And here's the rule of thumb that separates adaptation from reinvention: if your customization changes more than twenty to thirty percent of the model, you're probably not adapting. You're building something new that happens to share ancestry with the reference. The value of the reference — comparability, community knowledge, external benchmarking — is lost.
The Governance Shift
The deepest change that structured models produce isn't faster decisions or better assessments. It's a shift in how governance works.
Most governance meetings follow a predictable pattern. Someone proposes an initiative. Someone else questions it. Opinions are offered. The person with the most authority, the most data, or the most persuasive rhetoric wins. Decisions are made, but the basis for those decisions is difficult to reconstruct afterward.
Structured models change this by converting governance from opinion-based debate into evidence-based assessment.
Instead of debating whether an initiative is strategically aligned, you map it against your business model and show the alignment — or the misalignment. Instead of asserting capability readiness based on one leader's knowledge of their domain, you show the capability assessment: green here, amber there, red in this critical area. Instead of claiming operational integration, you show which capabilities are producing connected outcomes and which are operating in silos.
The models don't replace judgment. They structure it. The leadership team still interprets the evidence, weighs trade-offs, and makes choices. But the evidence is visible, shared, and traceable — which means the decisions can be explained, challenged, and improved over time.
This is the difference between governance as argument and governance as inquiry. Both involve smart people debating important questions. But in one, the debate is grounded in shared evidence. In the other, it's grounded in whoever has the best story to tell.
Multiple Cadences, Same Evidence
Governance isn't a single event. It operates at different speeds for different purposes.
Strategic governance (quarterly or semi-annual): Has the external environment changed? Do your strategic choices still hold? Is the business model still sound?
Capability governance (quarterly): Are priority gaps closing? Are new gaps emerging? Has the strategy produced any commitments that have no capability behind them?
Operational governance (monthly): Are capabilities integrating to produce outcomes, or are they operating in silos? Are experience gaps widening or narrowing?
Crisis governance (as triggered): When an unexpected opportunity or threat arrives, can you assess it quickly?
The key isn't adding more meetings. It's integrating better evidence into the meetings you already have. Most organizations already have quarterly reviews, monthly operational check-ins, annual planning cycles. Structured models slot into those existing rhythms. The capability assessment becomes part of the portfolio review. The business model check becomes part of the strategy discussion.
No new meetings. Better evidence in the meetings you already run.
The Decision That Proves the Investment
The two-week decision isn't impressive because it was fast. Speed alone is easy — you can make fast decisions by being reckless.
It's impressive because it was disciplined. The assessment distinguished between capabilities the organization had (process capabilities for curriculum design, employer partnerships, grant management) and capabilities it didn't (subject matter expertise in the new field, specialized infrastructure). It led to a nuanced response: full confidence in one area, a pilot approach in another. It avoided the trap of overcommitting to something the organization couldn't deliver.
That kind of discipline under time pressure is rare. It's rare not because leaders lack intelligence or courage, but because most organizations lack the vocabulary and framework to convert intelligence into structured assessment when the clock is running.
The two-week decision didn't happen because the team was unusually talented. It happened because the shared vocabulary was already in place when the opportunity arrived. Building that vocabulary during a crisis is too slow. Having it before the crisis arrives is the investment that pays off when you least expect it — and most need it.
This post is drawn from Building the Common Language, a self-paced course that shows how structured reference models turn months of assessment into weeks of disciplined decision-making — and why the organizations that invest in shared vocabulary before the crisis are the ones that respond best when it arrives.