Find out what will break before you commit the roadmap.
NORTH runs a structured executive pre-mortem that exposes the strategic, operational, and organizational constraints most likely to break your AI programme — before budget, vendors, and credibility are committed. These are the artefacts that carry the answer.
“Readiness is a comfort metric. Failure paths are decision inputs.”
Where the coalition holds — and where it breaks.
Leadership agreement is often real at the level of ambition. It becomes fragile when ownership, workflow, and budget become specific. The Coalition Map shows visible alignment, conditional support, hidden veto points, execution owners, and dependency clusters — before implementation pressure does.
THE READ Support at the level of ambition: unanimous. Support when ownership becomes specific: Operations and Finance condition theirs on decisions Risk has already signaled it will block. The map names the conversation the programme will otherwise have in month six.
Which constraint stops the programme — and when it surfaces.
A NORTH brief does not tell you that AI is important. It shows you which constraint will stop the programme, when it is likely to surface, and what decision must be made before it does. Each finding reads the same way:
- FINDING
- Data ownership is fragmented across operations and analytics.
- FAILURE PATH
- The platform team selects a vendor before ownership is resolved.
- CONSEQUENCE
- The pilot succeeds technically but stalls at operational handoff.
- DECISION REQUIRED
- Assign a single business owner before vendor selection.
- EARLIEST SIGNAL
- Competing definitions of data accountability in stakeholder interviews.
Proceed, proceed with conditions, or pause.
The most sober document NORTH produces. What must be true before commitment. Which constraints are strategic and which are organizational. And which decisions cannot be delegated to the implementation team — answered before budget, vendor, and roadmap commitments become difficult to reverse.
- RECOMMENDATION
- Proceed with conditions.
- WHAT MUST BE TRUE
- A single business owner for data, named before vendor selection. An adoption path owned by operations, not by the platform team.
- STRATEGIC CONSTRAINTS
- Vendor lock-in against a two-year roadmap. Build-versus-buy on the orchestration layer.
- ORGANIZATIONAL CONSTRAINTS
- Data ownership fragmented across operations and analytics. Handoff from pilot to workflow undefined.
- NOT DELEGABLE
- The owner decision. The pause condition. The budget gate at day 90.
Measured, not asserted.
The same instrument, run again after the work. Baseline against rescore, dimension by dimension — so movement is evidence, not narrative. Until the first rescored programme completes, we show the format and nothing more.
No numbers yet — deliberately. The first real delta publishes when the first rescored programme completes: what changed, what remained unresolved, and what the leadership team did next. Including the misses.
What you will not find here.
No logos. No testimonials. No invented ROI. When named customer stories exist, they will appear on this page — labelled as named customer stories, and nothing else. Until then, the artefacts above are the proof: structure and decision value, exactly as your team receives them.