Mission Fog

For most of 2025, I saw the same thing killing momentum in large organisations.

Mission fog.

I’ve sat in rooms where smart, committed leaders argued passionately for different priorities. All of them made sense, but none of them added up to a whole.

Teams and roadmaps are busier than ever, and AI is only accelerating it. More ideas. More tools. More decks. More initiatives.

Ask five leaders what they’re building towards and you’ll get seven answers. None of them wrong. Just not aligned.

Jensen Huang has a line I keep coming back to:
“The mission is the boss”

Most companies fail that test. Instead of a clear organising mission, they outsource it to the blunt cattle-prod of quarterly metrics.

That’s backwards. Cart before horse.

When the mission doesn’t lead, businesses get fat and fragile. Investments duplicate, initiatives multiply, priorities blur, teams compete, activity rises while outcomes stall. Time and time again, I’ve watched long-term resilience quietly traded for the sugar-rush of a metric pump.

Most large organisations keep buying strategy, transformation and AI to avoid doing this harder work of choosing. So busyness increases. Slide decks expand. Progress stalls. Politics fills the gap.

Heading into 2026, the highest-impact move is removing the mission fog.