Mal Wanstall

We examined 43 strategic initiatives across four enterprises and found that 39% had no measurable connection to the strategic bets they claimed to serve, consuming $47M annually in orphaned activity. The failure wasn't in strategy or execution. It was in the space between them.

A detailed case analysis of how initiatives labelled 'strategic' become untethered from the outcomes they claim to serve, and why every standard reporting mechanism missed it.

The dominant mental model treats strategy as a plan to be executed faithfully. We propose an alternative that changes what you measure, what you track, and what you do when things aren't working.

Organisations announce restructures with fanfare. But the most consequential reorganisations happen silently, when strategic shifts create new dependencies, new boundaries, and new power dynamics that the formal structure doesn't reflect.

Organisations have immune systems, deeply embedded structural and cultural mechanisms that detect and neutralise foreign bodies. AI deployments trigger this immune response more reliably than almost any other change initiative. Understanding the mechanism is the first step to surviving it.

Every AI business case models the direct effects: cost reduction, speed improvement, accuracy gains. Almost none model the second-order effects: how AI changes team dynamics, shifts power structures, alters information flow, and reshapes organisational boundaries.

Technical debt has a well-understood cost structure. Strategic debt, the accumulated weight of deferred organisational decisions, is more expensive and far less visible. We found $23M in annual cost attributable to decisions that were never made.

The rush to appoint Chief AI Officers assumes that AI adoption is a leadership problem. In practice, it's a boundary problem, and adding a new node to the org chart often makes it worse.

Organisations that invest most heavily in data capabilities often make decisions no better, and sometimes worse, than those that don't. We traced this paradox across six enterprises and found a structural explanation nobody was looking for.