myBusinessArchitectmyBusinessArchitectmyBusinessArchitectmyBusinessArchitectEight months after the crisis, the government announces $200 million in funding with a sixty-day deadline. Marcus consults the HERM on his own, and the leadership team makes a disciplined decision in two weeks. Not sixty days. Two weeks. A year later, Fiona makes the HERM Lakeshore's own. This chapter shows you how to apply reference models under real-world pressure: consulting versus instantiating, assessing fitness for context, planning adaptations, and using reference model evidence to answer the governance questions that keep strategy honest.
By the end of this chapter, you'll be able to:
Eight months after the crisis that nearly broke them, Lakeshore got a different kind of test.
The provincial government announced $200M in funding for skilled trades and clean energy programs. The deadline: sixty days. Institutions that could demonstrate readiness, alignment, and a credible delivery plan would be funded. Those that could not would watch the money go elsewhere.
In the old Lakeshore, this would have triggered another forty-seven-ideas meeting. Every faculty would have scrambled to stake a claim. Proposals would have been written in isolation, evaluated on the basis of who made the most persuasive presentation, and submitted with fingers crossed.
In the new Lakeshore, Marcus had something he did not have before. He had the HERM. Lakeshore hadn't adopted it; nobody had the time. But Marcus had downloaded it, and he used its Business Model Canvas to show where clean energy fit (and where it did not) in the institution's business model, and its capability model as a lens on the funding requirements: what Lakeshore could deliver and what it could not. He also had a leadership team that had practised thinking this way through the Design4 cycle.
The result was a disciplined decision in two weeks. Not sixty days. Two weeks.
Four months later, Fiona read the record of that decision in her first week. "You consulted it," she told Marcus. "Now we make it ours."
This chapter is about that moment and what came after it. Chapters 3 through 5 showed you how to read, interpret, and assess reference models at three levels. This chapter shows you how to apply them: consulting versus instantiating, assessing fitness for context, planning adaptations, using reference models under real-world pressure, and governing through reference model evidence.
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