Operating model redesigns expose how organizations handle risk
An operating model redesign changes more than structures and reporting lines. It creates a transition in which continuity, talent, and communication risks have to be managed while the organization is still expected to deliver.
That makes the way an organization responds to transition risk part of the redesign itself. In “The new rules for getting your operating model redesign right”, McKinsey & Company reports that only a small percentage of surveyed executives took a proactive approach to risk management. Those who did were twice as likely to report a successful redesign.
The finding doesn’t establish that proactive risk management caused those redesigns to succeed. It does, however, surface an important association: organizations reporting success were more likely to anticipate and manage transition risks rather than wait for those risks to become active problems.
The response begins during the transition
Operating model redesign is often described through the future state. The organization defines how it intends to work, then begins moving roles, structures, and responsibilities toward that design.
The transition introduces a different demand. The organization has to recognize where the change could disrupt continuity, affect talent, or create communication problems, then decide how those risks will be handled. This work may be less visible than the formal redesign, but it shapes the conditions under which that redesign proceeds.
McKinsey’s finding is notable partly because proactive risk management was uncommon among respondents. The reported pattern suggests that many organizations may enter redesigns without making transition risk a sufficiently explicit part of the work.
Failure containment is part of the operating model
Viewed through the structural dimension of failure containment, proactive risk management is more than a supporting project activity. It reflects whether an organization can anticipate potential transition failures and contain their effects while change is underway.
That is a theoretical interpretation of the survey finding, not a causal conclusion from it. McKinsey surveyed 2,000 executives across 16 sectors and six regions in February 2025. Its research examined 21 redesign levers and used regression analysis to identify practices correlated with redesign success. The evidence supports an association between proactive risk management and reported success, but it does not isolate the practice as the cause.
Even with that limitation, the pattern gives leaders something useful to examine. A redesign creates risks before the future operating model is fully in place. If those risks are handled only after they become visible failures, the organization is relying on reaction during a period when its existing coordination arrangements are already changing.
The observable pattern is reactive handling
The survey doesn’t provide the exact proportion of respondents using proactive risk management, nor does it define all the practices included in that approach. What it does report is a sharp difference in the likelihood of success between the small share taking a proactive approach and the broader respondent population.
This makes the practical pattern worth noticing. During a redesign, continuity, talent, and communication risks can either be treated as explicit transition concerns or left to emerge through events. The distinction matters because an organization’s ability to contain disruption is being tested at the same time as its structures are being changed.
Leaders can therefore examine how transition risk appears in the actual conduct of the redesign. Are continuity, talent, and communication risks being identified and managed proactively? Or does the organization mainly respond once those risks have become immediate operational concerns?
A redesign has to survive its own transition
The reported association doesn’t offer a complete recipe for redesign success. It points to a more focused organizational implication: designing the future operating model is not enough if the organization cannot manage the risks created while getting there.
A successful redesign has to remain deliverable through the transition. That requires the organization to make potential failures visible early enough to manage and contain them, rather than treating disruption as something to address after it has already affected the work.
