Friction as Diagnostic: Building a Mission Operating Model
Or what biology has to do with cross-functional alignment
I tripped up on stage last week. I was presenting at the Audiencers Festival in Hamburg on the hairy topic of audience segmentation. I had a perfect line prepared. Instead, I heard myself say something I’d thought many times but didn’t think was prudent to share in public.
I said: If the newsroom thinks your segmentation isn’t detailed enough, and product thinks it’s way too in the weeds, you’ve probably hit the sweet spot.
It got a laugh, which was a relief. But the more I thought about it afterward, the more I realized I’d accidentally said something I believe is crucial. Understanding how fundamentally different parts of a news media organization think — and using those differences to the company’s advantage — is the whole game.
The reactions to my earlier essays on the Change Tax and the Mission Operating Model were encouraging. The follow-up question was often: OK, but how do you actually do it? What does a mission actually look like? Because yes, we have projects and initiatives. But we also have the daily grind — the never-ending production cycle, the standing meetings, the never-ending debates. How do you build missions on top of that?
My argument is simpler than you’d expect. There are three things to consider.
1. Start with what’s stuck, and start with an experiment.
Forget org charts. Forget department names. Start with the business goals or projects that keep stalling — the ones your organization can’t seem to deliver, no matter how many alignment meetings you throw at them.
Then ask: what competencies does this initiative actually need to materialize?
Strip it down, and the pattern is almost always the same. You need someone who thinks about the business case and manages the whole thing — a generalist who owns the P&L of the initiative. You need someone who builds the thing. You need someone who can handle the technical infrastructure. And you need someone to market it — which itself breaks into quantitative (data, targeting, measurement) and creative (messaging, positioning, brand).
That’s it. Every mission is an exercise in combining left-brain and right-brain talent around a defined outcome.
The reason this sounds simple but rarely happens is that news media companies have structural fault lines only a few have successfully removed. Let me walk through the big ones, if you’re struggling to think of a recurring alignment nightmare to start your Change Tax journey with — I doubt it, but just in case.
The first fault line: two product organizations. In a SaaS company, there’s one group that builds the product. In a news publisher, journalists think they build the product (the journalism) and product people think they build the product (the platform, the app, the paywall experience). Both are right. Neither has the full picture. And the organizational response is usually to let them compete for primacy — editorially led versus product-led — rather than designing a structure where they collaborate on shared outcomes.
The second: subscriptions P&L ownership. Advertising usually runs as a self-contained org — low Change Tax, because you can sell ads without talking to anyone else most of the time. (Unless you’re selling editorial partnerships and promising more newsroom resources than you have. Or telling a client you’ll take down the paywall. But I digress.) Subscriptions are different. P&L responsibility for subscriptions ping-pongs across departments and often lands in, with, or above marketing — which creates friction from day one. Because ideally, when “someone” decides to slap a new interstitial onto an article page, the editor, the SEO-savvy engineer, and the marketer should be in the room. They rarely are. Or they are, in a senior meeting, where they agree on something — and then butt heads again at the execution level, and again, and again. The friction pops back up, making the executives who made the call frustrated with each other.
The third: bifurcated tech stacks. Even if you get everyone aligned on cross-departmental goals, the CTO might look at you and say: our ad tech stack and our audience tech stack are two separate worlds, and they don’t talk to each other. Which is really not how it should be. But it is how most publishers are wired, because the stacks were built at different times, by different teams, for different revenue models. So you’re back to square one — not because of a people problem, but because of a plumbing problem.
This is where the Change Tax lives. The energy spent negotiating who owns what, who gets to prioritize, whose roadmap wins, whose tech stack gets the investment — that’s not work. That’s the tax on work.
A mission dissolves this by redefining the unit. The mission isn’t “build a better app” (product’s framing) or “produce better journalism” (editorial’s framing). The mission is “extend subscriber lifetime by 15% this year” or “launch a newsletter that reaches 50,000 subscribers in 12 months.” Everyone on the team — the journalist, the product manager, the engineer, the data analyst, the creative marketer, possibly the sales person — reports to the mission, not to their department, for the time being.
The department still exists. It handles professional standards, career development, your salary band, your community. But the mission is where you do your work.
2. Know your role — and escalate where appropriate.
I have to be honest about one thing: building a Mission Operating Model is the C-suite’s responsibility. It requires redesigning how authority flows, how resources get allocated, and how success gets measured. No amount of bottom-up initiative can substitute for an executive team that cares about org design.
If you are the CEO or someone running an organization: throw yourself into the messy, emotionally draining work of org design. It’s not glamorous. It won’t get you invited to panels about AI or the future of journalism. But it’s the single highest-leverage thing you can do, because every other initiative — your AI strategy, your subscription growth, your product roadmap — will either fly or stall depending on whether the underlying structure can support it.
If you’re in the middle rungs, the C-suite doesn’t care, and you feel the Change Tax crushing you daily — leave. It won’t get better. This isn’t cynicism. It’s structural reality. You cannot align your way out of a wiring problem.
If they do care (and most do, often deeply), but don’t see the tax, surface it for them. Give it a name. Quantify the meetings, the rework, the talent you’re losing. They’re likely to agree with you.
At the conference, I quoted George Box: all models are wrong, but some are useful. The same is true for organizations. According to German sociologist Niklas Luhmann — and I’d love to see systems thinking make a comeback in management — organizations exist to simplify an infinitely complex world. They’re all just models. So they’re all wrong. But some work.
3. Be patient.
According to Mark Thompson, now CEO of CNN and long-time chief executive of the New York Times, it took the Times five (!) failed reorganizations before they landed on the cross-functional model that now supports 12.8 million digital subscribers. Bonnier News, the shining example from Sweden, spent years transforming from what their CEO called a “decentralized, silo-based structure” into an integrated organization. Neither happened overnight. Neither was clean, and arguably, neither is ever fully done.
The mission model isn’t a reorg you announce on a Monday and implement by Friday. It’s a practice — something you get incrementally better at, one mission at a time. Start with one stuck initiative. Staff it properly. Protect it from departmental interference. Learn what works. Then do it again.
Does it actually work?
I’ve been spending the last few weeks trying to answer that empirically — looking at whether organizations that get this integration right actually perform better financially, and whether you can see it in how employees describe their workplaces. The results are interesting enough that I’m going to dedicate next week’s essay to them. For now I’ll just say: the pattern is more consistent than I expected.
Another signal, from the Audiencers Festival last week: it was a gathering of practitioners sharing what had actually worked for them in growing subscriptions. There was a barely audible throughline in nearly every presentation. Nobody said “our department did this.” They said: all departments pulled together to achieve this.
That’s what integration sounds like when it’s working. Not a strategy deck. Not a reorg memo. Just people describing their work, and the silos being absent from the story.
The line I never said.
Back to that opening I’d prepared and never delivered:
The word segmentation comes from biology. It originally describes the process by which a fertilized egg divides and differentiates — branching into increasingly specialized cells until it forms a full organism.
I could just as easily have said that about organizations. (As a political scientist by training, I know the risk of biology metaphors — unfortunately, this one works.) Organizations start unified, then they specialize. Functions form. Departments crystallize. Expertise deepens. And somewhere along the way, the specialized cells stop talking to each other. And then you’d better have the right diagnosis before you start medicating at random.
The mission model is a re-integration. Not de-specialization — nobody wants generalists pretending to be engineers or journalists pretending to be data scientists. But deliberate, temporary recombination around a shared outcome. Specialists who remain specialists, organized around what they’re trying to achieve together rather than what they each do separately.
During my internship at BCG in 2007, a partner told me something I’ve never forgotten. She said that organizations are a bit like human beings — they’re all similar, but each one is different. That was what fascinated her about this work.
It’s what fascinates me, too. The structural problems are universal. The solutions never are. But the diagnostic — figuring out where the cells stopped communicating — that’s where you start.