A New Operating Model Won’t Change an Organization. People Will.
How a Canadian insurance organization approached the people side of transforming its data capabilities.
Organizations spend considerable time designing their future.
New strategies. New operating models. New structures. New processes.
The intention is usually clear: improve performance, strengthen capabilities, increase consistency, and position the organization for what comes next.
But one challenge doesn’t always get the attention than it deserves.
Designing a better way of working doesn’t automatically change how people work.
A new operating model can clarify how an organization should function. But translating that model into everyday reality requires something more.
People need to understand what’s changing, why it matters, how their roles will evolve, and what they’ll need to succeed.
That was at the heart of a recent engagement in which Sellar Strategic Advisory supported a Canadian insurance organization in a significant transformation of its enterprise data capabilities.
The work reinforced an important lesson:
Organizational transformation isn’t simply about designing the future. It’s about helping people get there.
The Challenge: Moving Beyond the Way Things Have Always Worked. A New Operating Model Won’t Change an Organization. People Will.
Like many organizations preparing for future growth, the client recognized that its existing ways of working needed to evolve.
Data capabilities had developed across teams, with varying approaches to standards, processes, quality, and delivery.
While those arrangements had supported the organization historically, they were becoming less suited to its future ambitions.
The organization wanted to introduce a more integrated enterprise data operating model to strengthen collaboration, increase consistency, clarify accountability, and improve the quality and value of data-related work.
Talent was also a key dimension.
As data capabilities became increasingly important to organizational performance, the client wanted to establish a more structured professional framework for its data workforce.
That meant creating clearer roles, capability expectations, and career pathways to support employee development, attraction, and retention.
But the transformation wasn’t happening in a vacuum.
Established practices and relationships shaped how teams prioritized and delivered work. Teams brought different experiences, expectations, and perspectives on what needed to change.
For some, the new model represented an opportunity to introduce greater consistency and professionalism.
For others, it meant reconsidering familiar processes, responsibilities, and how they got things done.
Leaders accustomed to accessing data resources through established relationships needed to adjust to a more structured approach to prioritization and delivery.
The challenge wasn’t simply implementing a new model. It was helping the organization navigate the human and cultural implications of working differently.
The Approach: ENGAGE → DESIGN → ENABLE
Sellar Strategic Advisory became involved after the organization had established its future-state data operating model and secured executive support to move forward.
Over several months, the engagement connected that future-state vision to the people, roles, capabilities, and change activities needed to support implementation.
The work brought together change management, organizational design, workforce capability development, and practical execution support.
Three interconnected areas shaped the approach.
1. ENGAGE: Build Understanding and Commitment
People are more likely to support a future they can help shape.
One of the first priorities was understanding how the proposed changes would affect the people expected to work within the new model.
This involved engaging data leaders, professionals, project sponsors, and other stakeholders through interviews, workshops, working sessions, surveys, and change impact assessments.
The objective wasn’t simply to communicate decisions that had already been made.
It was to understand the existing environment, identify potential barriers, surface concerns, and create opportunities for meaningful participation.
The engagement also involved working closely with project leadership to support alignment, decision-making, communication, and change planning.
An encouraging observation emerged early on.
Despite the challenges associated with changing established practices, many leaders expressed a genuine desire to improve how the organization operated.
There was an appetite for greater maturity, stronger collaboration, and more consistent ways of working.
That willingness mattered.
People often resist change.
But resistance isn’t always opposition to the intended outcome.
Sometimes it reflects uncertainty about what the future will mean for an individual’s role, influence, responsibilities, or opportunities.
The less control people feel they have over their future, the harder change can be.
Creating opportunities for people to participate, ask questions, and influence the path forward can help turn uncertainty into commitment.
2. DESIGN: Translate Strategy Into Roles and Capabilities
An operating model becomes more meaningful when people can see where they fit within it.
A central part of the engagement involved translating the future-state data operating model into a clearer professional role and capability architecture.
This work combined external benchmarking, including insurance-sector practices, with input from internal leaders and stakeholders.
The objective was to establish a consistent approach to defining data roles, role families, capability expectations, and opportunities for career progression.
The resulting work included future-state role descriptions, capability requirements, role family structures, and career pathways.
This was important for two reasons.
First, it helped connect the organization’s strategic ambitions with the professional capabilities required to deliver them.
Second, it gave employees a clearer picture of how their careers could evolve as the organization matured.
Rather than viewing the transformation only through the lens of changing responsibilities or expectations, employees could begin to see opportunities for development and progression.
That became one of the most encouraging aspects of the engagement.
Data professionals expressed enthusiasm for having clearer, more structured opportunities to develop their careers.
It’s an important reminder that organizational change and employee development don’t need to compete for priority.
When approached thoughtfully, they can reinforce one another.
The organization strengthens the capabilities it needs.
Employees gain greater clarity about the skills, experiences, and opportunities that can support their professional growth.
3. ENABLE: Create a Practical Path Forward
Knowing what the future should look like is different from knowing how to get there.
After defining future-state roles and capability expectations, the next challenge was understanding the gap between the organization’s current capabilities and what the new model would require.
The engagement combined leadership capability assessments, stakeholder interviews, role mapping, and individual gap analysis.
This helped identify where existing experience and capabilities aligned with future-state expectations and where additional development would be valuable.
Importantly, the goal wasn’t to treat every capability gap as equally urgent.
The goal was to identify development opportunities that could create the greatest value and help the organization prioritize its investments.
The resulting development roadmap provided a more structured approach to supporting employees as they transitioned toward future-state roles and expectations.
This work also required close collaboration between technical data stakeholders, project leadership, and HR.
That connection was essential.
You can't implement a future-state operating model effectively through technical design alone.
It also needs to connect with the organization’s broader people practices, including role architecture, career development, and workforce planning.
The goal was to move beyond describing the future and begin building the organizational capability required to deliver it.
The Outcomes: Creating the Conditions for Sustainable Change
As the engagement neared completion, the organization had established several key foundations for continued transformation.
These included:
A defined future-state data operating model supported by a structured professional role architecture.
Greater clarity around roles, role families, capability expectations, and career progression.
A prioritized development roadmap to support the transition from current capabilities to future-state requirements.
Stronger understanding of the changes among participating leaders and data professionals.
An approach to role architecture that HR identified as a potential model for similar work elsewhere in the organization.
That final outcome was particularly encouraging.
What began as a focused effort to support the transformation of enterprise data capabilities also created an approach that could inform broader organizational development work.
Of course, the transformation's longer-term impact will depend on continued implementation, leadership commitment, and the organization’s ability to embed new practices over time.
But the engagement helped establish something essential:
A clearer connection between the organization’s future ambitions and the people and capabilities required to achieve them.
Three Lessons for Leaders Navigating Transformation
While this engagement focused on enterprise data capabilities, the lessons apply to many forms of organizational change.
1. Don’t Just Explain the Future. Help People See Themselves in It.
Leaders often spend considerable effort explaining why change is necessary.
But employees are also trying to understand what that change means for them.
How will my role evolve?
What will be expected of me?
Will I have the capabilities I need?
What opportunities might this create?
Those questions deserve meaningful answers.
In this engagement, connecting future-state roles with career development helped make the change more tangible.
When people can see a place for themselves in the future, they’re better positioned to help create it.
2. Don’t Overlook the Knowledge Already Inside Your Organization.
External benchmarking can provide valuable perspective.
It can introduce new ideas, challenge established assumptions, and help organizations understand emerging professional practices.
But it shouldn’t replace the knowledge of the people already doing the work.
Internal leaders and employees understand the organization’s operating realities, relationships, challenges, and opportunities.
The strongest solutions often emerge when you bring those perspectives together.
You may be surprised how much of the answer to what’s next already exists within your organization.
3. Don’t Wait for Perfect Conditions to Begin.
Organizations are rarely operating in stable environments.
Priorities evolve. Leadership changes. Technology advances. Business needs shift.
It’s tempting to wait until you've answered every question before moving forward.
But waiting for perfect conditions can delay the learning, engagement, and capability development needed to make progress.
That doesn’t mean moving forward without direction or discipline.
It means recognizing that meaningful transformation is often iterative.
You establish a clear direction, involve the right people, build momentum, learn from experience, and adjust as you go.
Progress creates learning opportunities that planning alone cannot provide.
The Bigger Lesson: Transformation Is Something We Build With People
People often think of organizational transformation as a sequence of activities.
Develop the strategy.
Design the operating model.
Define the structure.
Implement the change.
But organizations aren’t simply collections of processes, structures, and technologies.
They’re made up of people whose experiences, relationships, capabilities, and decisions determine how those systems actually work.
A new operating model can create the conditions for better performance. But it won’t deliver that performance on its own.
People need clarity. They need opportunities to contribute. They need the capabilities to succeed.
And they need leaders who are willing to address the organizational barriers that make change unnecessarily difficult.
One of the most important lessons from this engagement wasn’t new, but it was reinforced throughout the work:
The more people feel involved in shaping their future, the more willing they are to help deliver it.
And perhaps just as importantly, organizations shouldn’t underestimate the talent and insight they already have.
Sometimes the next step in transformation isn’t finding all the answers somewhere else.
It’s creating the conditions for the people already inside the organization to help build them.
Because sustainable transformation isn’t something we do to people.
It’s something we build with them.
A Question Worth Asking
A New Operating Model Won’t Change an Organization. People Will.
If your organization is preparing for a new strategy, operating model, or transformation:
Are you spending as much time preparing your people to succeed in the future as you are designing what that future should look like?
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