The $47 Million Orphan: Anatomy of Disconnected Strategic Spend

How $47 million became invisible

When we first presented the finding — that 39% of initiatives labelled “strategic” had no measurable connection to the strategic bets they claimed to serve — the most common response wasn’t disbelief. It was recognition. As one executive put it: “I think we all sensed something was off. We just didn’t have the vocabulary or the evidence to say what.”

This article is the detailed case analysis behind the headline number. Not the what, but the how — the specific mechanisms through which well-intentioned strategic spend becomes disconnected from strategic outcomes.

The anatomy of disconnection

We identified four recurring patterns in how initiatives become orphaned:

1. The inherited initiative

The most common pattern. An initiative was created under a previous strategy, by a previous leader, to serve a previous objective. The strategy changed. The leader moved on. The initiative didn’t. It persisted because it had budget, people, and momentum — three things that are much harder to stop than to start.

Of the 17 orphaned initiatives, 11 fell into this category. They weren’t wrong when they were created. They were wrong now. But “now” had no mechanism to revisit “then.”

2. The metric mirage

Four initiatives had strong internal metrics — green dashboards, positive trend lines, met targets. But the metrics measured activity, not connection. They could tell you whether the initiative was executing its plan. They couldn’t tell you whether the plan served the strategy.

A green dashboard on an orphaned initiative is worse than a red dashboard on a connected one. The green light tells the organisation everything is fine. The orphan tells you it isn’t. The green light wins.

3. The political anchor

Two initiatives persisted because they were personally associated with senior leaders who would view termination as a political defeat. The initiatives had become identity proxies. Questioning the initiative meant questioning the leader. So nobody questioned the initiative.

4. The definitional stretch

Three initiatives had been retroactively relabelled to align with the current strategy through increasingly creative interpretation of their original mandate. A customer data platform initiative originally built for marketing analytics was now claimed to serve the “digital transformation” bet — through a chain of reasoning that required four logical jumps and two definitional stretches.

Why standard reporting missed it

Every organisation in our study had strategy review processes. Quarterly business reviews. Initiative dashboards. Portfolio management functions. None of them caught the disconnection. Why?

Vertical reporting. Each initiative reported up through its functional hierarchy. The functional leader affirmed its strategic relevance based on their interpretation of the strategy. Nobody was positioned to see across initiatives and ask whether the collective portfolio was coherent.

Activity metrics. Reporting measured whether initiatives were on track against their own plans. Not whether those plans connected to strategic outcomes. The distinction seems obvious in retrospect, but it’s invisible inside the reporting cadence.

No counterfactual. Nobody asked “what if we stopped this?” Because nobody’s job was to ask that question. The portfolio grew through addition. The mechanism for subtraction didn’t exist.

What this costs

$47 million is the direct cost — the budget consumed by orphaned work. But the indirect costs are larger:

• Opportunity cost — those resources could be deployed against connected initiatives
• Cognitive load — leadership attention is finite, and every orphaned initiative consumes some of it
• Signal pollution — orphaned initiatives generate status reports, escalations, and decisions that crowd out signal from work that matters
• Cultural normalisation — when disconnection is tolerated, it becomes expected, and the next round of strategic planning starts from a lower baseline of execution credibility

The $47 million was the number that got attention. The real cost was the organisational capacity consumed by work that looked strategic but wasn’t.