Major initiatives often cut across strategy, finance, operations, commercial priorities, organizational capability and external stakeholders. Decisions in one area can create consequences in another, while different parts of the organization may be working toward outcomes that are not fully aligned. The larger and more consequential the initiative, the harder it becomes to understand any one dimension in isolation.

The difficulty is not necessarily a lack of expertise. Organizations may already have capable people and established functions addressing each part of the problem. The challenge is that those perspectives can come with different constraints, incentives and definitions of success. What looks attractive from one perspective may create a constraint somewhere else, and what appears to be an implementation issue may actually reflect a deeper strategic or economic trade-off.

Special situations add another layer of uncertainty. The circumstances may be unusual, the available information incomplete and the consequences of different choices difficult to determine in advance. In these situations, the sequence in which decisions are made can matter as much as the decisions themselves.