Chapter 1: The Problem Reference Models Solve
You already know the Lakeshore story. You watched a leadership team go from forty-seven ideas to a disciplined strategy. But here is something you may not have noticed: at every critical moment, the team was slowed by the same invisible problem. They did not have a shared vocabulary for describing what their institution was, what it did, and what it needed to be great at. Every conversation started from scratch. Every handoff required translation. This chapter names the cost of that missing language, traces it back to the four strategy-execution gaps, and introduces the solution: reference models.
Learning Objectives
By the end of this chapter, you'll be able to:
- Diagnose situations where the absence of shared vocabulary causes organizations to reinvent solutions, miscommunicate across boundaries, and fail to transfer knowledge between teams
- Connect the four strategy-execution gaps from COR-BA-100 to the presence or absence of reference models
- Explain the six objectives of reference models, distinguish between the primary objectives (comparison, responsibility, accelerate change) that enable strategic decisions and the supporting objectives (communication, education, norms and standards) that create the conditions for them, and give an organizational example of each
- Assess the cost of operating without reference models in a specific organizational scenario
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