Most organisations are not blocked by a lack of Agile frameworks. They are blocked by the operating model that those frameworks are dropped into.
You can introduce Scrum, Kanban, and DevOps practices, yet your organisation quietly reverts to the Industrial Operating Model (IOM) while saying the right words about agility. The missing discipline is what I call operating-model hygiene. And it is hard work.
Two operating models, one uncomfortable truth
The Industrial Operating Model assumes a stable environment. It optimises for efficiency, standardisation and control. Work is planned upfront, divided into functions and managed through hierarchy and predictive plans.
The Agile Product Operating Model (APOM) assumes a dynamic environment. It organises persistent, cross-functional teams around products or value streams, distributes decision-making to those closest to customers and relies on empiricism, short feedback loops and technical excellence.
Most leaders intellectually agree with the APOM. Their structures, governance and incentives are still wired for the IOM. That gap is what operating-model hygiene must expose and correct.
What operating-model hygiene really is
Operating-model hygiene is the continuous practice of:
Making the system of work transparent, not just team-level practices.
Identifying structures, processes and behaviours that no longer fit the APOM.
Systematically abandoning those that add delay, handoffs or local optimisation.
Pairing abandonment with purposeful innovation in structures, metrics and capabilities that support empirical product development.
This is not a one-off transformation. It is ongoing, uncomfortable maintenance of your organisational design.
In practical terms, hygiene work inspects and changes things like:
How funding decisions are made and revised.
How many layers work must pass through to reach a decision.
How managers are measured and promoted.
How product goals, Sprint Goals and value measures are set and used.
How risk, compliance and governance actually operate in the flow of work.
Scrum, Kanban, Evidence-Based Management and Nexus are only effective if they live inside a system that is being actively cleaned up.
Why operating-model hygiene is so difficult
Leaders struggle with hygiene for predictable reasons:
Familiarity of the Industrial Operating Model
Most leaders grew up in IOM environments. Under pressure, they default to more sign-offs, more steering, more up-front certainty.Local optimisation and role protection
Functions optimise for their own utilisation, budget and headcount. Removing a gate, a committee or a layer can feel like removing someone’s identity and influence.Metrics that reward the old model
If you still measure success by individual utilisation, project “on time/on budget” and volume of output, you are rewarding IOM behaviour. Scrum will simply expose the tension.Lack of explicit accountability for the system of work
Scrum defines clear accountabilities at the product level. Many organisations have nobody clearly accountable for the operating model itself. Hygiene work becomes “everyone’s job” and therefore nobody’s priority.Fear of transparency
Scrum as a social technology, Kanban as an observability pattern and EBM as a measurement approach all increase transparency. Hygiene then forces leadership to act on what becomes visible. That can be politically expensive.
How Scrum helps you practise hygiene
Scrum does not redesign your org chart, but it gives you powerful enabling constraints that make operating-model problems visible:
The Product Goal and Sprint Goal expose misalignment between strategy, portfolio and team-level work.
A single Product Backlog and a real Product Owner expose fragmented stakeholder governance and project-centric funding.
A cross-functional Scrum Team exposes functional silos, matrix resourcing and manager-driven task assignment.
The need for a Done Increment every Sprint exposes weak engineering practices, manual release processes and technical debt.
If you pay attention, every Sprint Review and Sprint Retrospective surfaces hygiene work: decisions, approvals, handoffs and policies that prevent the Scrum Team from operating as a genuine product team.
Your job as a leader is not to push that information back down. It is to change the system.
OpenSpace Agile as a mechanism for hygiene at scale
Hygiene is not achieved through a central transformation office writing target-state diagrams. It requires participation from the people doing the work.
OpenSpace Agile offers a practical mechanism:
Leadership sets clear outcomes and constraints, aligned with the Agile Product Operating Model.
The organisation uses a cadence of Open Space events to surface impediments in the operating model, propose experiments and self-select into work.
Volunteers design and run short-cycle experiments that change policies, structures, metrics and practices.
Successful changes are amplified, unsuccessful ones are stopped quickly, without blame.
OpenSpace Agile aligns well with Scrum’s ethos. Leaders provide intent and constraints. Teams and stakeholders design the path, within those constraints, through empirical change.
A hygiene backlog, not a transformation programme
For organisational leaders, operating-model hygiene should look less like a programme and more like a Product Backlog for the system of work.
Concretely:
Create an explicit hygiene backlog
Populate it from Sprint Retrospectives, Nexus Sprint Retrospectives, flow metrics and EBM insights.
Treat each item as an experiment: hypothesis, expected impact on flow, value, or Ability to Innovate.
Make someone accountable
Nominate a senior leader as the steward of the operating model, supported by Scrum Masters and other system-level change agents.
Their accountability is to remove systemic impediments, not to dictate team-level practice.
Link hygiene to Evidence-Based Management
Use EBM’s Key Value Areas (Current Value, Unrealised Value, Time-to-Market, Ability to Innovate) to prioritise hygiene work.
Ask: which constraint, if removed, would most improve our ability to deliver?
Use existing Scrum events as your inspection points
Use Sprint Reviews to inspect whether governance, funding and decision-making helped or hindered progress toward the Product Goal.
Use Sprint Retrospectives to capture hygiene items, not just local team tweaks.
Change manager work, not just team work
Redefine management as system stewardship: designing teams, clarifying goals, simplifying governance and enabling flow, not task control.
The uncomfortable leadership shift
Real agility is not blocked by teams. It is blocked by operating-model decisions that only leaders can change.
If you want clarity, flow and product-centric accountability, you must be willing to:
Retire structures that made you successful in a previous era.
Remove roles, layers and committees that no longer serve the Agile Product Operating Model.
Change what you, personally, are measured on.
Stand behind Scrum Masters and Product Owners when they challenge the system of work.
Operating-model hygiene is not glamorous. It is the disciplined, repeated act of aligning your organisation’s design with the conditions it actually competes in.
What operating-model constraint are you personally prepared to remove in the next 90 days to make agility real rather than rhetorical in your organisation?
Extracted from Why Most Companies' Operating Models Fail in Dynamic Markets