The organisation had been working with a Big 4 firm on its target operating model programme. Costs had escalated significantly. The return on that investment was not visible. The decision was made to exit the prime relationship and bring the work in-house.
The problem: there was no written TOM. What existed were multiple oral versions — different understandings of the target state held by different senior leaders, none of them aligned, none of them documented in a way that could be tested or implemented.
And the internal team designated to own the work had never done it before. Not inexperienced in a general sense — genuinely new to process design, discovery methodology and operating model design as disciplines. They were capable people who had been handed a brief they did not yet have the tools to deliver.
Deliver a credible, agreed, implementable target operating model. And leave the internal team capable of owning and continuing the work without external support. Both, simultaneously, in a single engagement.
Conduct genuine discovery across a complex defence organisation. Surface the multiple oral versions of the target state, test them against each other and against the organisation's actual operating context, and produce a written TOM that senior leaders could agree, own and implement.
In a defence context, with all that entails for access, sensitivity and the pace at which decisions move.
Teach the internal team how to do this work — discovery methodology, process design, stakeholder mapping, operating model design — while doing it. Not a training programme followed by a handover. Embedded, live, on the actual programme.
The team needed to come out the other end capable of running the next phase independently. That outcome had to be designed from day one.
The tension between these two jobs is real. Doing the work yourself is faster. Teaching someone to do it while doing it is slower and harder. In an engagement with a sceptical audience — an organisation that had already had one expensive external partner not deliver — there was no room for the visible uncertainty that comes with learning on the job.
The approach had to produce a credible TOM at a credible pace while making the internal team genuinely more capable. Not one or the other.
Discovery was conducted by the CN practitioner alongside the internal team — not for them. Every interview was preceded by a briefing on what we were listening for and why. Every debrief became a methodology session: here is what that finding means, here is how it changes the corridor map, here is the decision it creates for programme design.
The internal team members conducted interviews themselves within the first four weeks — observed, debriefed, coached. Not when they were ready. Before they felt ready. That discomfort was the learning.
The multiple oral versions of the target state were not a problem to be resolved quickly. They were a diagnostic. Each version reflected a genuine view about what the organisation needed to become. The work was to surface them explicitly, test each one against the current state discovered in Phase 1, and facilitate the conversations that produced a single agreed direction.
This required the internal team to be present and capable in senior leadership conversations — not as note-takers but as participants with a view. Building that confidence was as important as building the technical methodology.
By the process design phase, the roles had deliberately shifted. Internal team members led the workshops. CN challenged the outputs rather than producing them. The shift was uncomfortable for the team initially — they wanted the external practitioner to run the sessions where the stakes were highest. That request was declined, with support offered instead.
The principle: if the internal team is always watching someone else do the hard work, they learn to watch. They needed to do the hard work with someone alongside them. Not instead of them.
The written TOM was produced jointly — with sections owned by internal team members who had designed the relevant layers. This was not administrative. It meant that when a senior leader questioned a design decision in a review session, the internal team member who had made it could explain the reasoning. Not read from a document. Explain it.
That capability — the ability to defend a design decision under pressure, in the room, in front of sceptical senior leadership — is what genuine ownership looks like. It takes time to build. It cannot be transferred in a handover session.
The final phase was explicitly about removal of the external resource. CN stepped back from sessions progressively, then from days, then from weeks. Each withdrawal was tested: could the internal team run the next phase without support? When the answer was yes, the external resource was not reinstated.
The organisation knew the prime was exited. The measure was not just whether the TOM existed — it was whether the internal team could answer that question themselves.
At the end of the engagement, the internal team ran the final TOM review session without CN present. Not because CN was unavailable. Because they did not need CN there.
When a senior leader challenged a design decision in that session, an internal team member who had designed that layer answered the challenge. Clearly. With the evidence from the discovery that had informed the decision.
That is what "we leave you stronger than we found you" means in practice. Not a deliverable handed over. A capability that stays.
The principle of embedded capability transfer — not a separate training programme, not a handover at the end, but genuine methodology transfer happening in parallel with delivery — is now a core part of how CN works. The approach tested in this engagement, in a defence context, with a team starting from scratch, became the foundation for how CN thinks about building lasting internal capability rather than creating external dependency.
The specific techniques — running discovery with the internal team rather than for them, shifting ownership of design sessions progressively, testing independence through deliberate withdrawal — are in the CN methodology because they worked here first.
The case studies in this section are drawn from the personal experience of CN's founders and senior practitioners — engagements that shaped the CN methodology before the firm existed under this name.
They are presented to demonstrate the depth of the work CN's practitioners have done — not as firm credentials, but as practitioner experience. The approaches used in these engagements are the approaches CN brings to every programme today.
All case studies →"The measure is not whether the TOM exists. The measure is whether the organisation can defend it, adapt it and continue it when the external resource has gone."
Operating model design. Internal capability transfer. Exiting an underperforming prime. We should talk.