Practical guidance on business architecture — from frameworks and strategy to real-world application.
Sustaining a shared vocabulary is an organizational exercise. You need engagement, governance, political navigation, and persistent attention. That skill set is different, and most organizations underinvest in it.
Before deciding what to do, it helps to be honest about where you stand. Organizations exist at different levels of maturity when it comes to shared vocabulary, and the right next step depends on the starting point.
Most strategic decisions are slow for a reason that has nothing to do with the decision itself. They're slow because the organization has to build shared understanding before it can evaluate options.
This is the most common failure mode in organizational life, and it's the hardest one to name. You don't have a capability problem. You have an integration problem. And nobody sees it, because every part of the system looks fine when you examine it in isolation.
This is the invisible gap that eats organizational performance. Not a strategy gap. Not a resource gap. A capability gap that nobody can articulate because nobody has the language.
The next time your team sits down to define capabilities, or structure a business model, or design an operating framework, ask one question first: has someone already drawn this map?
There's a meeting that happens in every organization. It's the one where smart, committed people sit in the same room, discuss the same problem, and leave with completely different understandings of what was decided.
Ask five leaders in your organization a single question: "Why does this organization exist?" You'll get five different answers. None of them wrong. None of them specific enough to guide a single decision.
Once you understand what a capability actually is, the next question is where to invest. And the answer isn't "everywhere equally."
Frameworks are abundant. Methodologies are everywhere. What's rare is honest guidance about where to begin — not in theory, but in your specific organization, with its specific problems, its specific politics, and its specific constraints.
Your organization wrote a strategic plan. Then the environment shifted. A regulation changed. A competitor moved. A funding model collapsed. A crisis hit. And the plan — the plan that assumed a world that no longer exists — kept running, because nobody built a mechanism for updating it.
A budget shows you numbers. A business model shows you structure — the architecture of how your organization creates, delivers, and captures value. When something breaks, the numbers tell you how much you lost. The business model tells you where the design failed.
Your organization invested in new capabilities. You upgraded systems. You redesigned processes. You trained teams. You built something genuinely better. And your stakeholders can't tell the difference.
Most strategic plans are wish lists. They contain everything the organization could pursue, organized by theme, decorated with timelines, and presented with enough confidence to satisfy a board. What they don't contain is choices.
Your organization has smart people. Real commitment. Genuine urgency. And yet the strategic plan that looked brilliant in the boardroom is producing exactly nothing six months later. This isn't a mystery. It's a pattern. And the pattern has a structure.
Your organization has a strategic plan. It probably took months to produce. It involved offsites, consultants, executive workshops, and a final document with enough weight to stop a door.