It’s 2026. Stop Designing for Last Year’s Problems.
Looking back at 2025, many initiatives born of pressure will have quietly become permanent structures in your organisation. They’re locally rational: they unblock dependencies, address specific problems, and sometimes help teams ride the AI wave. But when they persist, they don’t just solve a problem. They become how the business operates.
It’s an initiative. But is it strategy?* Which initiatives are we letting harden into our operating model?
When these initiatives stick, it’s often because we’re treating symptoms to keep delivery moving, not fixing the underlying constraints. Left unchecked, these initiatives accumulate into an operating model that optimises for yesterwork*, not today’s strategy.
Digital transformations are pressure cookers: hard deadlines, tightening budgets, and vendor slideware promises made before the foundations are in place. On top of that, AI-automation lowers the cost of launching new initiatives and accelerates whatever direction you take. In my experience, the programmes that come closest to their intended outcomes are the ones where leaders can clearly trace each initiative to a strategic outcome and the business capabilities it must change. Business Architecture is the lens that makes that trace explicit and usable.
This isn’t only adoptable for large enterprises. In smaller organisations, you don’t need a Business Architecture function to get value. A thin slice is enough: one value stream, a capability map, and a simple heat map. That turns investment from a negotiation driven by urgency and personalities into a clearer choice: fund the capability gaps that most constrain the strategy in that value stream first.
In practice, the thin slice is simple:
- Pick one value stream. Not “the enterprise”. One slice you can actually change.
- Talk to the people understanding the work. Stage by stage: what they do, what they call it, where it breaks, and what they rely on.
- Consolidate into one view. One value stream, one set of capabilities, not five versions of the truth.
- Validate the language with the group. The goal is shared meaning.
- Score the capabilities. Combine strategic impact, current effectiveness, and breadth of coverage into a single opportunity score. Not to be scientific, but to make trade-offs explicit.
- Sequence investment. Start with the highest opportunity-score capability gaps, before you fund anything that just looks good on a roadmap.
My two cents: initiatives become strategy in practice the moment we keep funding them and give them a home. So use a Business Architecture lens to choose deliberately which capability gaps are worth institutionalising, and which fixes stay time-boxed workarounds. If you can’t name the capability gap and the strategic outcome it shifts, don’t bake it into your operating model. That’s yesterwork in disguise. Challenge yourself in 2026: which initiative would you fund next if it had to prove the capability gap it closes and the strategic outcome it shifts?
* Endnote (Strategy-as-Practice framing): I’m drawing on Jarzabkowski, Kavas & Krull’s framing in It’s Practice. But is it Strategy? Reinvigorating Strategy-as-Practice by Rethinking Consequentiality (2021).
* Endnote (Yesterwork): Peter Hinssen uses “yesterwork” to describe obsolete processes and practices that organisations keep dragging along, harming progress and productivity.
