Chapter 6: Applying Reference Models in Practice

Eight months after the crisis, the institution gets a different kind of test. The government announces $200 million in funding with a sixty-day deadline. In the old days, this would have triggered another forty-seven-ideas meeting. Instead, the leadership team uses its shared vocabulary to make a disciplined decision in two weeks. Not sixty days. Two weeks. This chapter shows you how to apply reference models under real-world pressure: consulting versus instantiating, assessing fitness for context, and using reference model evidence to answer the governance questions that keep strategy honest.