It’s a fair question, and I’ve been asked it enough times now — by practitioners, by academics, by people inside organizations trying to place the work — that it’s worth answering plainly and on the record.
Most of the established approaches fall into two families, and both do real, valuable work.
The first is the reference-model family — SCOR, the Theory of Constraints, Lean, Six Sigma. These describe and benchmark how a system should operate, and they reason rigorously about it. SCOR in particular has evolved impressively; its Digital Standard reframes the enterprise as a synchronous network and adds a governing orchestration layer. These frameworks take a system as given and make it better.
The second is the relational family — the discipline of aligning the parties in an inter-organizational relationship, designing the operating model they’ll actually run on, and managing the interactions between them. This is serious work, and when it’s done well it addresses something the reference models don’t: that outcomes emerge from relationships, not just from well-specified components.
Here’s the distinction, and it isn’t a criticism of either — it’s a matter of sequence.
Both families work on the system as it is declared to operate. The reference models optimize the declared process. The relational models align the declared relationships. Both assume the map they’re handed reflects the territory.
The Hansen work sits one step upstream of that assumption. Before you optimize a system or align its parties, there’s a prior question: does the declared version of how this organization works actually match how it works? The gap between the two — the undeclared incentives, the timing, the workarounds, the shadow processes nobody put in the model — is where transformation efforts quietly fail, no matter how good the framework applied on top of them.
That’s what Phase 0™ does. It validates the operating reality before a method optimizes it or a relational model aligns it. It doesn’t compete with SCOR or TOC or relational design — it makes them land on a system that’s real rather than one that exists on paper.
This isn’t a lesson I picked up on the job — it’s the principle the work was built on. The approach that became Strand Commonality™ existed first as theory; the defence engagement of the late 1990s is where it was proven. Delivery performance moved from 51% to 97.3% in three months — not by selecting a platform, and not by redesigning the relationships, but by first correcting the model of how the work actually happened. The technology and the process design came afterward, onto a foundation that was finally accurate.
That the theory held up in the field was not only my assessment: Canada’s Scientific Research and Experimental Development program (SR&ED) found the Strand Commonality™ work and those early results compelling enough to fund its continued testing over the following couple of years — independent validation, before the idea had any track record to stand on.
So the short answer: it’s not a replacement for the frameworks you already use. It’s the validation layer that comes before them — the discipline of making sure the system you’re about to improve is the one you actually have.
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A question I keep getting: “How is the Hansen Model different from what’s already out there?”
Posted on July 28, 2026
0
It’s a fair question, and I’ve been asked it enough times now — by practitioners, by academics, by people inside organizations trying to place the work — that it’s worth answering plainly and on the record.
Most of the established approaches fall into two families, and both do real, valuable work.
The first is the reference-model family — SCOR, the Theory of Constraints, Lean, Six Sigma. These describe and benchmark how a system should operate, and they reason rigorously about it. SCOR in particular has evolved impressively; its Digital Standard reframes the enterprise as a synchronous network and adds a governing orchestration layer. These frameworks take a system as given and make it better.
The second is the relational family — the discipline of aligning the parties in an inter-organizational relationship, designing the operating model they’ll actually run on, and managing the interactions between them. This is serious work, and when it’s done well it addresses something the reference models don’t: that outcomes emerge from relationships, not just from well-specified components.
Here’s the distinction, and it isn’t a criticism of either — it’s a matter of sequence.
Both families work on the system as it is declared to operate. The reference models optimize the declared process. The relational models align the declared relationships. Both assume the map they’re handed reflects the territory.
The Hansen work sits one step upstream of that assumption. Before you optimize a system or align its parties, there’s a prior question: does the declared version of how this organization works actually match how it works? The gap between the two — the undeclared incentives, the timing, the workarounds, the shadow processes nobody put in the model — is where transformation efforts quietly fail, no matter how good the framework applied on top of them.
That’s what Phase 0™ does. It validates the operating reality before a method optimizes it or a relational model aligns it. It doesn’t compete with SCOR or TOC or relational design — it makes them land on a system that’s real rather than one that exists on paper.
This isn’t a lesson I picked up on the job — it’s the principle the work was built on. The approach that became Strand Commonality™ existed first as theory; the defence engagement of the late 1990s is where it was proven. Delivery performance moved from 51% to 97.3% in three months — not by selecting a platform, and not by redesigning the relationships, but by first correcting the model of how the work actually happened. The technology and the process design came afterward, onto a foundation that was finally accurate.
That the theory held up in the field was not only my assessment: Canada’s Scientific Research and Experimental Development program (SR&ED) found the Strand Commonality™ work and those early results compelling enough to fund its continued testing over the following couple of years — independent validation, before the idea had any track record to stand on.
So the short answer: it’s not a replacement for the frameworks you already use. It’s the validation layer that comes before them — the discipline of making sure the system you’re about to improve is the one you actually have.
-30-
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