Meridian: Designing an operating model for speed, purpose and growth
One of the most rewarding parts of this work is seeing the impact after the design work is done.
For Meridian, that meant delivering ideas to customers 2 to 3 times faster, returning Retail to growth with more than 25,000 new customers, and lifting Retail eNPS from around -30 to +15, all within twelve months.
Those outcomes didn't come from redesigning the organisation for the sake of it. They came from creating the conditions to move faster, respond to customers more quickly, and keep adapting as the market evolved.
OVERVIEW
Meridian's retail strategy was built around a simple but ambitious belief: Energy will not become cleaner or cheaper on its own.
Helping New Zealanders transition to a cleaner energy future would take more than a compelling strategy. It would take new products, new technology, faster decision-making, and an organisation built to keep adapting as customer needs evolved.
Meridian had the vision. What it lacked was an operating model built for it.
The Retail business had evolved into a traditional functional structure. Sales, marketing, customer service, product, technology, and digital each performed well within their own domain, but delivering customer value meant work moving across multiple teams, governance layers, and decision points. The organisation had become too slow to match the pace its strategy demanded.
Meridian partnered with Radically to redesign its Retail operating model, not simply to reshape the organisation, but to build the organisational system that would enable its strategy to succeed.
THE CHALLENGE
Meridian recognised something many organisations eventually discover: strategy is rarely the limiting factor. Execution is.
The retail leadership team knew that delivering cleaner, cheaper energy meant becoming significantly faster at learning, innovating and responding to customers. In a market where competitors were chasing broadly similar strategies, speed of execution was becoming the real competitive advantage.
Meridian had already started testing this through an internal innovation pilot, Base Camp, which showed what was possible when cross-functional teams were empowered to solve customer problems end-to-end, free from many of the constraints of the wider organisation.
It also surfaced where the real barriers sat. They were rarely technical. More often, they sat in leadership, governance, funding, decision-making, organisational boundaries and the way work moved through the business.
That insight reframed the conversation: from how to restructure, to how to build an organisation capable of executing its strategy faster.
Working alongside Meridian's Retail Leadership Team, Radically helped translate that ambition into an operating model designed for execution.
Rather than starting with organisation charts, reporting lines or job titles, we began with what the business was trying to achieve:
- What customer outcomes mattered most?
- Where would Meridian create competitive advantage?
- What capabilities would it need over the next five to ten years?
Only once those questions were answered, we began designing the operating model, focusing on the entire system, not simply the structure alone. Together we developed an operating model that connected:
- strategy and customer value
- organisational structure
- leadership accountabilities
- governance and decision rights
- cross-functional Delivery Model
- technology ownership
- organisational capabilities
- operating model design principles to guide implementation
One principle ran through the entire model: design for speed. Not speed for its own sake, but speed in learning, decision-making, experimentation and delivering value to customers.
OUTCOMES
The redesigned operating model gave Meridian a stronger foundation for executing its strategy, and the results showed up quickly. Within twelve months, Meridian could confidently claim:
- 2–3x faster execution: ideas moved from concept to customer significantly faster
- +25,000 customers, returning the business to growth after several years of decline, while simultaneously migrating to new technology platforms
- Retail eNPS up from around -30 to +15, reflecting greater clarity, empowerment and a more connected delivery model
Just as important, Meridian came out of the engagement with an organisation built to keep evolving. The operating model isn't a static design; it's become the framework the business uses to keep adapting as strategy, technology and customer expectations shift.
MORE THAN AN OPERATING MODEL
Energy will not become cleaner or cheaper on its own, and an organisation does not become faster on its own either. Meridian’s transformation shows what it actually takes: not a new org chart, but a redesigned system of strategy, governance, accountability and delivery, built to keep pace with the ambition driving it.
This kind of work takes leadership courage. It asks leaders to look beyond structure, confront the real constraints to execution, and make deliberate choices about where decisions sit, how work moves, and what the organisation needs to become. Meridian’s leaders were willing to do that work, not as a theoretical design exercise, but as a practical step towards delivering their strategy.
That is what operating model design means to Radically. It is not simply a structural exercise. It is the work of building an organisation that can keep learning, adapting and delivering faster as strategy, technology and customer expectations change.
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