A business architecture discipline for leaders

Most courses teach you what to do. This one teaches you how to see.
Your organization has a gap between what it intends and what it delivers. You can feel it. The strategy sounds right but nothing changes. The dashboards are green but stakeholders are disengaged. Everyone is busy, and nobody can explain what all that busyness is for.
That gap is not caused by people who don't work hard enough. It is caused by broken connections. Between why the organization exists and what it actually does. Between strategy and the capabilities behind it. Between what you build and what people experience. The connections are the architecture. And most organizations have never deliberately designed them.
The gap between intent and execution is not one gap. It is four. Purpose disconnects from strategy. Strategy outpaces capability. Capability never reaches operations. Operations drift from purpose. Each gap has a specific cause, a specific diagnostic question, and a specific design response. You will learn all four.
You will follow one institution through a real crisis. A story with human stakes, hard trade-offs, and no tidy ending. You will watch a leadership team go from forty-seven disconnected ideas to a strategic definition that changed how they made every decision. And you will see what happened when the environment shifted six months later: not panic, but purposeful adaptation.
This is not a technical modeling course. You will not learn notation or build enterprise diagrams. What you will gain is a way of seeing your organization as a connected system and a set of questions that tell you, with evidence, whether that system is actually working.
You will not leave with a plan. You will leave with something more durable: a discipline that makes better plans possible. The ability to ask the right questions before building the wrong things.
See how purpose, strategy, capabilities, and operations connect, and where those connections break
Identify which alignment gap is causing the most damage and where to focus first
Use the Four Ares as a shared governance vocabulary for assessing alignment
Understand key artifacts, from Stakeholder Value Maps to Capability Heat Maps to Service Blueprints
Run your first Design4 cycle and build momentum
Built around the Design4 Framework, this course walks you through four interconnected phases of organizational design:
Anchor in authentic purpose and understand your stakeholder ecosystem before solving problems.
Translate purpose into strategic choices you can actually test.
Design the capabilities your strategy actually requires and name the gaps between ambition and reality.
Deliver value people actually experience, measuring outcomes rather than activity.
Key Questions
Senior executives and transformation leaders who need a framework for aligning disparate functions around a shared direction
Strategy professionals who want to ensure their plans are grounded in organizational capability, not just aspiration
Operations and program leaders who need to understand the strategic context of their work
Professionals moving into Business Architecture
Five years ago, the strategy-execution gap was expensive. Today it is existential.
An organization that spends eighteen months executing a strategy that was wrong on day one doesn't just waste money. It loses the trust of the people it exists to serve. And trust, once lost, does not come back on a quarterly cycle.
Three forces are compounding. The speed of environmental change has outpaced the planning cycle. Stakeholder ecosystems have become genuinely complex. Your organization operates in a web of regulators, partners, communities, and constituencies with conflicting needs. And purpose has become a performance variable: employees, customers, and regulators are all asking what your organization actually exists to do.
Organizations have responded by adding more tools, more dashboards, more frameworks. They have layered complexity on top of confusion and called it transformation. But the organizations pulling ahead are not the ones with the best tools. They are the ones that have built the capacity to sense what is shifting, make choices quickly, and execute those choices without losing sight of why they exist. That capacity is not a talent. It is a discipline. And disciplines can be learned.
This course is part of the COR-BA curriculum and serves as an entry point to Business Architecture alongside COR-EA-100 (Introduction to Enterprise Architecture). It prepares learners for deeper application in follow-on Design4 courses and the PUB-BA-101 technical modeling pathway.