For years, businesses have been chasing the elusive “new” marketing operating model. Yet, time and again, these so-called innovations merely reinforce outdated, siloed, and functionally constrained concepts of marketing, PR, and marcomms. The reality? Marketing as a standalone function no longer makes sense in today’s complex, interconnected commercial landscape.
A truly new approach requires deconstructing or abandoning traditional frameworks—not repackaging them under different labels. The real challenge isn’t about refining marketing as a discipline but about redefining how businesses create, manage, and deliver commercial and customer value across their entire operation.
From Departments to Disciplines: A Radical Rethink
Success today demands a shift from rigid, departmental thinking to a more process-driven, discipline-led approach that integrates strategy, operations, creativity, and commercial execution. This is about flows, roles, interdependencies, and outcomes—not arbitrary functional boundaries. The disciplines are not marketing, PR and Marcomms, these are functional groupings. The disciplines are the component processes that underpin these functional groupings, the shared processes that support commercial strategy and operations.
Instead of trying to retrofit an “updated” marketing model into an evolving commercial world, we need to focus on value creation and delivery, complexity management, innovation, and intellectual capital development.
Why Starting with a Functional View Is a Critical Mistake
Building an operating model from a functional, organisational perspective is a fundamental misstep because it prioritises internal structures over external value delivery. Traditional functional models assume that value is created within rigid departmental boundaries—marketing, sales, product, customer service—when in reality, value flows across interconnected processes, roles, and disciplines. This outdated approach leads to inefficiencies, misalignment, and siloed thinking that obstructs innovation and agility.
A far smarter strategy is to reverse the logic: start with a deep, process-driven understanding of how customer and commercial value are actually created, delivered, and sustained. From this foundation, an organisational model can be designed to support and optimise these flows—ensuring every role, capability, and discipline is aligned to value creation rather than arbitrary functional outcomes. This shift isn’t just theoretical; it’s the difference between businesses that adapt and thrive versus those stuck endlessly reorganising themselves without ever solving the core problem.
The Myth of Simplicity - the 'Reductionist' Trap
Most operating models built from a functional or organisational standpoint are inherently reductionist and self-fulfilling—they define structures first, assuming the whole is just a sum of the parts and then force-fit operations into them, rather than evolving to meet real-world demands, disaggregating or re-arranging to find new or emergent opportunities. This rigid approach assumes a level of predictability and stability that simply doesn’t exist in today’s volatile, complex, and ambiguous commercial environment. Markets shift unpredictably, customer behaviours evolve rapidly, and operational economics are anything but linear—yet many operating models are still designed as if businesses operate in a world of static best practices rather than one of constant emergence and adaptation.
To remain competitive, businesses must embrace complexity theory, designing modular, agile, and adaptive models that can flex with shifting dynamics, respond to emergent challenges, and optimize for evolving value flows—not just predefined functional efficiencies. This requires a paradigm shift from rigid hierarchies to fluid, intelligence-driven systems that recognize uncertainty not as a risk to be minimized but as a reality to be navigated.
It's a messy business, outcomes are not guaranteed
Deductive, outcome-based operating models are fundamentally futile in a world that refuses to be predicted. They assume a linear cause-and-effect relationship between inputs and results, as if businesses operate in controlled environments where certainty and repeatability reign. But reality is far messier—markets are chaotic, customer behaviour is shaped by irrationality, biases, and randomness, and competitive landscapes shift in unpredictable ways. The problem isn’t just that these models fail; it’s that they’re built on a false premise—that businesses can set a fixed course and execute their way to success.
What’s truly needed are agile, adaptive, modular, and configurable systems—"always-on" operating models that morph in response to unforeseen challenges, nonlinear processes that evolve organically, and sensing mechanisms that continuously explore, listen, interpret, and recalibrate. These models thrive on collaboration, coalition-building, and dynamic shifts, rather than rigid hierarchies and preordained best practices. Yet, we are psychologically wired to resist this reality—our innate inability to grasp probability, randomness, and uncertainty leads us to oversimplify decision-making, ignore science, and cling to illusions of control.
Most organisations still undervalue the expertise required to interpret complexity, failing to recognise that the unpredictability of markets and customers isn’t a flaw in the system—it’s the system itself. The challenge isn’t in finding the perfect plan; it’s in building a framework that thrives in uncertainty rather than being blindsided by it.
AdaptomyDNA: A Value Management Framework for Commercial Strategy and Operations
This is exactly what AdaptomyDNA has taken over 20 years to solve. It isn’t a “new marketing model” because the entire premise of structuring businesses around traditional marketing concepts is flawed. Instead, it’s a value management framework designed to map, integrate, and optimize 70 interconnected disciplines that collectively drive commercial performance.
All of the above—the failure of rigid, function-based models, the illusion of predictability, and the need for adaptive, intelligence-driven systems—is exactly why AdaptomyDNA was built. Over 20 years ago, it began as a metrics and measurement project designed to calibrate marketing effectiveness. But as the complexity of commercial operations became clearer, it evolved into something far more powerful: a framework and methodology for commercial strategy and operations that goes beyond traditional marketing or sales models.
Today, AdaptomyDNA (learn more at www.adaptomy.com) defines over 70 interconnected disciplines, providing a structured yet flexible system that supports strategy, brand building, marketing communications, sales, performance improvement, and operations. Unlike outdated, function-based approaches, it is designed to embrace complexity, enable agility, and drive commercial value in an unpredictable world. Instead of imposing rigid structures, it provides a modular, configurable framework that helps organisations interpret signals, adapt to change, and optimise for long-term growth and resilience.
For businesses still clinging to function-based operating models, the question isn’t whether they will become obsolete—but how soon. AdaptomyDNA offers the alternative: a system built for the realities of modern business, not the outdated assumptions of the past.
You won’t find any mention of marketing in AdaptomyDNA. What you will find are the fundamental processes, structures, and mechanisms that underpin commercial success—without the baggage of function-based thinking. It’s a platform for capability building, a system for managing complexity, and a framework for strategic agility.
Sources
Complexity Science & Adaptive Systems
Holland, John H. – Emergence: From Chaos to Order (1998)
Kauffman, Stuart A. – At Home in the Universe: The Search for Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity (1995)
Snowden, David J. & Boone, Mary E. – "A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making," Harvard Business Review (2007)
Organisational & Operating Model Design
Galbraith, Jay R. – Designing Organizations: Strategy, Structure, and Process at the Business Unit and Enterprise Levels (2001)
Osterwalder, Alexander & Pigneur, Yves – Business Model Generation (2010)
Ashby, W. Ross – An Introduction to Cybernetics (1956) – Law of Requisite Variety (explains why businesses must match complexity with adaptable systems)
Decision-Making, Probability & Uncertainty
Taleb, Nassim Nicholas – The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007)
Kahneman, Daniel – Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)
Tetlock, Philip E. & Gardner, Dan – Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction (2015)
Marketing, Strategy & Commercial Value Creation
Christensen, Clayton M. – The Innovator’s Dilemma (1997)
Drucker, Peter F. – The Practice of Management (1954) (on customer-centric value creation)
Sharp, Byron – How Brands Grow: What Marketers Don’t Know (2010)
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