The organisation had been running a target operating model programme for over a year. A major consulting firm had led it. The costs had escalated significantly. The board made the decision to bring it in-house and exit the prime relationship.
When we arrived, the first question was simple: show us the TOM.
There wasn't one. Not a written, agreed version. What existed were multiple oral versions — different people in different rooms describing different futures, each of them broadly consistent with their own team's interests, none of them reconciled with each other. The prime had produced documentation, but it had never been tested against operational reality and had never achieved buy-in below director level.
The second problem was the internal team. The organisation had identified a group of people who would own the TOM work going forward. Committed, capable people — but completely new to process design and discovery. They had not run a stakeholder interview. They had not mapped an end-to-end process. They had never built a corridor map. The methodology that would be needed to complete this work was entirely unfamiliar to them.
"The prime had been doing the work to the organisation. We needed to do it with the organisation — in a way that left them able to continue without us."
There was also an atmosphere to navigate. The previous prime relationship had left some residue — a combination of fatigue with external consultants and, in some parts of the organisation, genuine scepticism about whether any version of the TOM would actually land. People had seen this before. They were waiting to see if this time was different.
The engagement ran on two parallel tracks from day one. The first was delivering the TOM — discovery, design, change management, governance. The second was building the internal team's capability to do all of it themselves.
This sounds straightforward. In practice it is one of the most demanding ways to run an engagement. Every activity has two purposes: producing the output and teaching the methodology behind it. Every session is simultaneously a working meeting and a training exercise. Every deliverable is produced by the internal team, with our guidance, rather than by us alone.
"The measure of success was not the TOM document. It was whether the team could run the next design sprint without picking up the phone."
The capability transfer slowed the TOM work down. There is no way around that. Teaching someone to run a process mapping session takes longer than running it yourself. Reviewing their interview notes and coaching them on what they missed takes longer than conducting the interviews directly. For the first six months, we were operating at perhaps 60% of the speed we could have achieved working alone.
That trade-off was the right one. But it required managing the client's expectations actively. A programme that is simultaneously delivering a TOM and building a team is a different proposition from a programme that is simply delivering a TOM. The timeline, the resource model and the governance all need to reflect that from the start.
The prime relationship residue was real. Some parts of the organisation had concluded, reasonably, that TOM programmes produced documentation and not change. The early discovery sessions involved a lot of listening to scepticism that was entirely earned. The response was not to argue. It was to demonstrate — in the first three months — that this programme would do things differently. That meant involving the sceptics in the design, not briefing them on it. It meant publishing findings that were uncomfortable. It meant being visibly honest about what the previous work had not achieved and why.
The internal team also went through a confidence curve that was steeper than expected. In months one to three, they frequently deferred to us in sessions — even when they had the answer. Building confidence alongside capability required deliberate effort: structured feedback after every session, visible public acknowledgement of what they were doing well, and — at a specific point in month five — declining to answer a question in a client meeting that they were capable of answering themselves.
"There was a moment in month five where the lead asked me a question in front of the client. I told him I thought he knew the answer. He did. That was a turning point."
A single written TOM, agreed across the organisation, owned by the internal team. Not a consultant document — a working reference the organisation uses.
The internal team can run discovery, process design, corridor mapping and change management without external support. The CN approach — their approach now.
The organisation no longer requires an external firm for this work. The capability is in-house, the methodology is documented, and the team has done it.
The test we set ourselves at the start: could the internal team run the next design sprint without calling us? They did not call. That was the finish line.
The broader lesson from this engagement shaped the way CN thinks about capability transfer as a distinct delivery model. Not every organisation needs or wants to build internal capability — some want an expert team to do the work and leave. But for the organisations that do want to own this work themselves, the delivery model has to be designed for that from day one. You cannot retrofit capability transfer onto a conventional consulting engagement and expect the team to absorb it.
The two-track model — delivering and teaching simultaneously — is harder and slower in the short term. The organisations that choose it get something most consulting engagements do not leave behind: a team that can do what you did, without you, indefinitely.
That is what "we leave you stronger than we found you" means in practice.
If you want an external firm to do the work while building the capability of your team to own it themselves — so that when we leave, you are genuinely stronger — that is a different engagement model. One CN is specifically designed for.
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