September 8, 2025
Behind every big policy push is the same hard question: how do we make it real?
Public and social impact leaders are great at defining the vision and pushing for urgency. But in a landscape shaped by crisis, complexity, and cross-cutting mandates, even the best ideas can lose steam before they reach the frontlines.
In our experience, momentum often stalls not from lack of effort, but because delivery hasn’t been built into the system from the start.
At Opus Group, we've worked alongside public institutions, non-profit organizations, unions, and industry partners navigating this tension.
This article shares five principles we've seen help leaders turn ambitious ideas into reality.
Here’s what we see again and again:
– The mandate is clear, but ownership isn’t – and sometimes the problem itself is poorly defined.
– The strategy is ambitious, but some big real-world constraints aren’t accounted for.
– Feedback loops are missing.
– And there’s no built-in way to adapt when conditions change.
These challenges show up both when a crisis occurs and immediate solutions are needed (COVID-19 pandemic) and when issues are systemic and complex (healthcare workforce shortages; dynamics within economic hubs like airports).
But delivery isn't a mystery. It's a focused practice. One that can be learned, designed for, and built into the DNA of every change effort.
Here's how.
Five principles. Field-tested. Each brought to life through real-world case studies.
See what’s really going on. Mapping the current state means listening beyond the meeting room – and starting with a clearly defined problem.
Build it live, with the people it’s for. Prototyping under pressure leads to solutions that stick.
Design with the system, not around it. If it can’t be absorbed, it won’t be sustained.
Keep learning while the work is live. The best delivery plans adapt in motion.
Change sticks when everyone sees their role in it. Shared ownership makes complex work possible.
After years of working inside complex systems-alongside community-based organizations, unions, industry groups, funders, and public institutions-Opus Group has seen what makes delivery succeed, and what quietly stalls it. These five principles aren’t a framework; they’re field-tested habits for successful delivery.
It sounds obvious, but in the rush to deliver, it often gets overlooked: before anything can change, you have to understand the problem you’re solving and see what’s really going on – not just on paper, but on the ground.
Too many strategies launch without a full picture of how things work today-who’s involved, where authority sits, what’s in the way, and what conditions need to be in place to achieve success. The risk isn’t just inefficiency, it’s building something that the system can’t absorb.
Some social impact leaders are doing things differently.
When SEIU Healthcare set out to build a sector-wide workforce strategy, they didn’t start with a top-down plan. They began by bringing together frontline workers, employers, and sector partners to name what wasn’t working and what might. That surfaced a tangle of operational gaps, policy roadblocks, and missed opportunities-insights that would have been missed in a traditional planning process.
Opus Group helped design and facilitate the process end-to-end, moving from shared problem-definition to mapping assets, constraints, and opportunities. This reshaped the strategy entirely.
Three years later, that early phase laid the foundation for a long-term workforce strategy, a formal labour-management partnership, and a new path for internationally educated nurses. This wasn’t just a rewriting of the process, rather, it was a new logic.
Effective delivery starts there: with a clear picture – of the problem, the assets you can build from, and the opportunities worth pursuing. Big plans can’t override reality.
You don’t build a working model by sketching on a whiteboard. You build it by trying-fast, collaboratively, and in real conditions.
That’s what UNITE HERE Local 75-a union representing hospitality workers-had to do when the hospitality sector collapsed in 2020. With thousands laid off and no roadmap, they had to act in weeks, not months. Together with Opus Group, they launched HTA 75: a sector-led centre built with direct worker input and real-time iteration.
The model wasn’t perfect at the start - and that was intentional. Programs were shaped around what workers actually needed, then adapted again as the crisis evolved. Before the industry reopened, the centre retrained laid‑off workers for in‑demand roles like PSW and IT. Today, it continues to evolve - now focused on preparing workers for high‑demand careers within hospitality as the sector adapts to new realities.
This wasn't just about moving quickly but about building trust through collaboration and responsiveness. When the people affected by change help build the solution, they stick with it, even when the ground keeps shifting.
Some of the most promising strategies fall short when they collide with system realities. That’s why, at Opus Group, we often say: if the solution can’t be absorbed, it won’t be sustained.
We saw this clearly in our work with Toronto Pearson and the Toronto Region Board of Trade during the height of pandemic recovery. With over 50,000 workers employed across airlines, agencies, vendors, and contractors, there was no shared workforce plan-and no single actor who could solve the problem alone.
Rather than design in isolation, we worked with Toronto Pearson and its partners to engage deeply across the system: surfacing hidden bottlenecks like inconsistent hiring requirements, limited transportation between terminals, and the impact of federal security clearance processes on workforce flow.
That process led to a shared workforce playbook - a system-aware roadmap built from the inside out. It aligned dozens of players around interdependent commitments and elevated priorities no one group could have defined on their own.
The lesson? If you want your strategy to hold, build it in dialogue with the system it has to live inside.
Many delivery plans assume things will go mostly as expected-but they rarely do.
Conditions change. Needs shift. What worked in week one may not hold by month three. That’s why feedback loops matter-not as reporting requirements, but as tools for live learning and adjustment.
Some of the most effective delivery efforts we’ve seen didn’t wait for perfect data. Instead, organizations made space to reflect, adjust, and evolve as they moved. SEIU Healthcare built this into its training strategy-continually refining program design based on frontline input and sector dynamics. HTA 75 did the same: what began as a pandemic response shifted repeatedly in response to worker needs and system signals, eventually becoming a durable workforce hub.
In dynamic systems, the ability to learn as you go is often what determines whether change sticks.
In the chaos of the real world, no one owns the entire process. Yet strategies are often designed as if someone does.
That’s the loose thread that can quietly unravel even the most promising reforms. Complex delivery environments-like regional economic hubs-are made up of dozens of players, each with their own mandates, constraints, and incentives. Without early trust and shared ownership, even the best-designed strategy can’t get traction.
That was the challenge facing the Greater Toronto Airports Authority during the pandemic. With more than 50,000 workers employed across airlines, agencies, contractors, and vendors, no single actor could solve the workforce crisis alone. Opus Group supported GTAA and its partners to create a shared workforce playbook.
At its core, this playbook was a common language and a set of interdependent commitments which provided the structure and mutual trust needed for everyone to act in unison.
In our experience, delivery moves only when enough people see themselves as parts of the solution.
If you’ve been in the weeds of delivery, you’ve probably lived some version of these principles already. Maybe you’re mapping something complex right now. Maybe you're building under pressure. Maybe you're still looking for the missing conditions that make good work take hold.
These principles aren’t a checklist. They’re a way of working-one we’ve honed across sectors, partners, and public priorities. And they’re strongest when applied in context.
If you want to talk through what this might look like in your world, we’re here. We offer complimentary working sessions for public sector and mission-driven teams to explore these principles in your own context. No pitch, no slide deck-just a smart conversation grounded in real work.
Book your session here.
