I want to make an argument that might make some of my peers uncomfortable.
We have undersold what operations is.
Not the importance of operations — plenty of people have made that case. I mean the scope of it. The conventional definition of the COO role is too narrow, and I think that narrowness is costing organisations more than they realise.
The conventional definition goes something like this: the COO makes the business run. They build the systems, design the processes, create the org structure, and keep everything moving so the CEO can focus on strategy and growth. Internal focus. Execution orientation. Keep the trains running.
(Not familiar with the fractional COO model? Start here →)
That is a real and important part of the job. But it is only half of it.
The COO who only looks inward is flying partially blind. And in an environment where markets shift, customer behaviour changes, technology disrupts, and the organisations that survive are the ones that can sense and respond — partial blindness is a serious liability.
Marketing is organisational intelligence, not promotion
Here is what most COOs miss about marketing.
Marketing is not just a function that generates leads and builds brand. Marketing is the part of your organisation that is systematically paying attention to the external world and reporting back on what it finds.
Marketing tells the organisation what customers want. What prospects are asking. How people find you. Which messages land and which ones don’t. What competitors are doing. What demand exists and where it’s coming from. What the market believes about your category and your organisation’s place in it.
That is intelligence. Organisational intelligence. And it has a direct bearing on strategy, sales, delivery, capacity planning, finance, and client experience.
Research on market orientation — the degree to which an organisation systematically gathers and responds to market intelligence — has consistently shown that firms with higher market orientation outperform those without it. Kohli and Jaworski established this in 1990. Narver and Slater confirmed it the same year. The finding has replicated across industries and geographies for three decades.
The problem is that most of this research treats market orientation as a firm-level trait, not as an operational practice. It asks whether the organisation is market-oriented. It rarely asks how market intelligence actually moves through the operating system — or whether the COO is part of that movement.
I would argue they should be.
If marketing learns something important — about what customers are asking for, about why prospects disappear partway through the sales process, about what a competitor just changed — and that intelligence never reaches operations, delivery, finance, or strategy, the organisation has paid to acquire that intelligence and then ignored it.
Cross-functional information integration matters. Griffin and Hauser showed in 1996 that cross-functional coordination between marketing and operations improves outcomes. Ruekert and Walker found similar patterns nearly a decade earlier. The principle generalises: when intelligence stays inside one function, the rest of the organisation makes decisions without it.
The Market-Aware COO treats marketing as a signal, not a silo. That does not mean the COO does marketing. It means the COO reads what marketing is learning and asks: what does this mean for how we operate?
The scalability trap
I have little patience for the idea that a system is growth-ready simply because someone says it can handle ten times the volume.
“Scalable” has become almost meaningless. It has collapsed into a single metric — volume capacity — that tells you very little about whether your organisation is actually built for growth.
What actually changes at ten times today’s volume? What breaks? Where do the bottlenecks move? What happens to information flow, decision rights, quality, cash flow, staffing, client experience, and risk? Does the organisation itself need to become something different?
These are the questions a COO should be asking. Not “can our current systems handle more?” but “what will our systems need to become?”
This distinction matters because the research on dynamic capabilities — the work Teece, Pisano, and Shuen did in 1997 — draws a sharp line between operational capabilities (doing what you do well today) and dynamic capabilities (the ability to sense change, seize opportunity, and reconfigure how you operate as your environment changes). O’Reilly and Tushman extended this in 2008: organisations that over-optimise for efficiency and scale systematically destroy their capacity for adaptation. You build a very good machine for the world as it is, and then the world changes.
The goal is not a system that can theoretically handle ten times today’s volume. The goal is adaptive capacity: enough structure to protect what matters, and enough flexibility to respond intelligently when reality changes.
And here is where market intelligence comes back in. You cannot build adaptive capacity without knowing what is changing outside the organisation. You need to know what customers are signalling, where growth is actually coming from, and what is about to become irrelevant. That is market intelligence. And it belongs in the operating conversation.
What the Market-Aware COO actually does
Let me be clear about what I am and am not arguing.
I am not arguing that the COO needs to become a marketer, an SEO specialist, or a paid media expert. I am not arguing for scope creep.
I am arguing that the COO needs enough understanding of marketing to read the signals it generates and ask useful questions in response.
The COO does not have to be the expert. The COO has to be the person who asks the question that helps the expert see what they could not see before.
Edgar Schein called this humble inquiry — the practice of asking questions you genuinely do not know the answer to, rather than questions designed to steer toward a conclusion you have already reached. It is the opposite of arriving in a room with the answer and using questions to confirm it. The best operating leaders I have worked with used this approach instinctively. They asked from different angles until the person closest to the work could surface what was missing. The point was never to give the answer. It was to help the expert find it.
Owens, Johnson, and Mitchell found in 2013 that leaders who express genuine intellectual humility — acknowledging their own limitations, spotlighting others’ strengths, modelling openness to learning — lead higher-performing teams with better engagement. The mechanism is not complicated: if the leader is willing to not know, the team is safer to not know. And organisations where people are safe to say what they do not know learn faster than organisations where they are not.
The COO’s value is often in the seams between functions. Noticing that sales promised something delivery cannot provide. That finance is waiting for information nobody knows it needs. That marketing is generating demand the organisation cannot fulfil. That a database problem is quietly damaging client relationships. That the organisation has three clients because something in the acquisition or delivery system is creating a ceiling nobody has named yet.
Cameron Herold describes the COO in Second in Command as a chameleon: executor, integrator, moderator, enforcer, devil’s advocate, mentor, second-in-command — depending on what the CEO and organisation need. I find that accurate. The role is not fixed. It changes as the organisation changes.
A Market-Aware COO is that same chameleon, with an additional orientation: they are looking outward as well as inward. They are asking what the market is telling the organisation, and what the organisation needs to do about it.
The spiral
I want to challenge one more piece of conventional operations language: continuous improvement.
Continuous improvement implies endless optimisation of the same machine. Detect the error. Correct the error. Move on. Argyris and Schön called this single-loop learning — operating within existing rules and assumptions, fixing what breaks without questioning whether the rules themselves are right.
Single-loop learning is necessary. It is not sufficient.
The organisations that grow, adapt, and remain capable over time also practise double-loop learning: questioning the rules themselves. Not just “what went wrong?” but “what assumption did we make that allowed this to go wrong?” Not just “how do we fix this?” but “what needs to change so the next person does not encounter the same problem?”
The operating model I am working toward is not a loop. It is a spiral.
Each iteration begins from a different place than the one before, because the organisation learned something. You do not return to where you started. You come around again with more knowledge than you had before.
This requires two conditions that organisations consistently fail to hold at the same time.
The first is psychological safety: people need to feel safe surfacing real problems, admitting uncertainty, and naming failures without fear of punishment. Edmondson’s research on this is unambiguous — teams with higher psychological safety learn faster, report errors more reliably, and perform better over time.
The second is accountability: something actually has to change as a result. High psychological safety without accountability produces a comfort zone, not a learning organisation. People feel safe, but nothing improves. Edmondson’s learning zone requires both: it is safe to surface the problem, and the organisation is expected to do something about it.
The COO’s job in a learning organisation is to hold both conditions at once. That is harder than it sounds, and more important than most job descriptions acknowledge.
If you don’t want to keep learning, don’t do operations
The world underneath every function the COO is responsible for understanding keeps changing.
Marketing changes. AI changes what is possible in operations, in content, in data analysis, in client service. Privacy regulation changes. Finance systems change. Customer behaviour changes. Technology changes what your competitors can offer and what your clients expect.
A COO who simply knows how things are done becomes a constraint. An increasingly expensive one.
A COO who keeps asking whether this is still how things should be done — and stays genuinely curious about the answer — becomes an organisational advantage.
Kashdan’s research on dispositional curiosity describes it as a stable trait linked to sustained engagement and openness to new information. Curious people stay mentally active, and mental activity compounds over a career. This is not soft language. It is a documented mechanism.
Curiosity is not a personality bonus for a COO. It is a job requirement.
The Market-Aware COO is curious about operations and about the world those operations exist to serve. They look inward and outward. They ask the question the expert does not yet know they need to answer. They build for what the organisation is becoming, not just what it is today.
That is the full job.
If this framing resonates and you’re wondering what a Market-Aware COO looks like in practice, that’s what I do. Book a conversation →
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a Market-Aware COO? A Market-Aware COO is a Chief Operating Officer who understands the role requires looking both inward — at systems, processes, and organisational design — and outward, toward clients, the market, and the wider environment. They treat marketing as a source of organisational intelligence and use that intelligence to inform how the operating system is built and adapted.
How is a Market-Aware COO different from a traditional COO? The traditional COO definition centres on internal execution: making the organisation run efficiently. A Market-Aware COO holds that definition and extends it. They ask not only whether today’s organisation is running well, but whether it is positioned to sense and respond to what is changing around it. They are as interested in what clients and the market are signalling as they are in what the org chart says.
Why does a COO need to understand marketing? Because marketing is organisational intelligence. It tells the organisation what customers want, how people find them, what messages work, where demand is coming from, and how the market is changing. If that intelligence stays inside the marketing department and never reaches operations, strategy, sales, or finance, the organisation is making decisions without information it already paid for. The COO does not need to be a marketer. They need to understand what marketing is learning and ask what it means for how the organisation operates.
What does adaptive capacity mean in operations? Adaptive capacity is the ability to sense change, respond intelligently, and continue functioning as the organisation becomes different from what it is today. It is distinct from scalability — a system that can handle ten times today’s volume is not necessarily a system capable of responding to a changed market, a new technology, or a shift in customer behaviour. Adaptive capacity requires both structural stability (to protect what matters) and genuine flexibility (to change what needs to change).
What is the difference between single-loop and double-loop learning in operations? Single-loop learning detects and corrects errors within existing rules: something went wrong, we fixed it, we moved on. Double-loop learning questions the rules themselves: something went wrong, we understand why, and we are changing the assumption or system that allowed it to happen. Most organisations are competent at single-loop learning and resistant to double-loop. The organisations that build genuine adaptive capacity practise both.
How do I know if I need a Market-Aware COO? If your COO cannot tell you what your top clients said about your service last quarter, what your conversion rate is at the point where prospects typically disappear, or what your marketing is learning about the market right now — that is worth paying attention to. It does not mean your COO is failing. It may mean the role has been defined too narrowly.