The Map Your Organization Is Missing
By Jamie Jacobs and Dave Foley
What assumptions are you making as you define what you are solving for? Imagine you could see quickly, in granular detail, exactly how work moves through your organization. Where it flows cleanly. Where it stalls. Where people have quietly built workarounds that aren’t even recognized as workarounds anymore. Where your systems are under utilized. Where automation could step in tomorrow, and where human judgment is irreplaceable.
Most leaders don’t have that picture. They have dashboards, utilization reports, survey scores. They have a general sense of where things feel slow. But they don’t have the map.
Dave Foley built Vendi to create it. Dave has spent his career at the intersection of talent and technology, building passive recruiting processes before LinkedIn existed, seven years at LinkedIn itself, and the last decade in HR tech. When he started seeing organizations hire rapidly and then lay off just months later, he started asking a different question: not what went wrong with the talent strategy, but the gap of what was never understood about the work design in the first place.
“We were seeing organizations hiring only within two to three months, then letting people go. That’s classic evidence of poor planning. But the poor planning was grounded in technology and a misunderstanding of how disruptive that tech was going to be.”
– Dave Foley
That clarity of knowing how work actually moves before you try to change it, is what separates organizations that get real ROI from their investments from those that keep wondering why nothing seems to stick. And it’s more attainable than most leaders think.
When The Mandate Doesn’t Match The Result
Here’s what I see constantly. A leader has an AI mandate. The board wants it. The CEO wants it. So the team moves fast. They buy the platform, launch the pilot, announce the initiative. Six months later, adoption is low and the ROI isn’t there. The question everyone asks is: what went wrong with the technology or the talent?
Usually, it’s neither, it’s the assumptions made about what was being solved. The process the technology was meant to automate was never well understood in the first place. McKinsey recently found that high-performing organizations with effective AI investments are three times more likely to have completely re-architected their processes — not layered AI on top of existing ones. That’s not a technology finding. That’s an organizational design finding.
Dave puts it plainly: if you’re investing in AI and you don’t know how the work actually gets done, you’re scaling the wrong thing. You’re solving the wrong problem. And no amount of sophisticated tooling will fix a process that was broken before the technology arrived.
“Almost every vendor is on this journey to do all things to all customers. So you need to first ask: within your existing tech investments, are we fully utilizing what we have? And then — are we actually seeing the outcomes the business needs most?”
– Dave Foley
When the Workaround Becomes the Workflow
One of the patterns Dave keeps finding: employees working outside the process because the system creates more friction than leverage often due to decisions made at implementation or resources changes since. They’re in one-off emails, parallel Slack threads, ad-hoc meetings — all doing work the system likely has the capability to handle, but wasn’t configured to.
The cost of that isn’t just inefficiency. It’s a profound lack of visibility. If you don’t know how the work actually moves, you can’t see where it stalls. You can’t identify where human judgment is genuinely required versus where a tool is forcing a workaround. You can’t answer the most important question: is this technology enabling the right capability at the right time, or is it just adding a step?
For every dollar spent on technology, organizations are reportedly spending seven to eight dollars on wraparound services and shadow work that the system was meant to replace. Identifying that gap — and closing it — is where significant value lives. It’s already paid for. It just isn’t flowing yet.
The CHRO as Transformation Architect
Here’s what I find most energizing about this conversation. Dave is building Vendi specifically to put data in the hands of HR leaders that design how the work drives the desired outcomes, how we organize it, how we reward it, and how we optimize, develop, and motivate the people components within our organizations, not to hand the transformation agenda to a consulting firm or a technology vendor, but to enable the CHRO to own and drive it.
That matters because CHROs bring something most technologists and traditional consulting firms don’t: organizational design fluency, change management experience, an understanding of the human dynamics underneath the process. That lens is what’s missing from most AI transformation efforts. The tools get evaluated in isolation from the people who will use them. Processes get re-architected without anyone asking who owns the judgment call at each step and without really understanding where we’re starting from and the full capabilities of the existing tech stack with their evolving roadmap of functionality.
When HR leaders step into this role armed with real data about how work moves, not just engagement scores and headcount reports, the transformation conversation changes entirely. They become the architects of a system, the people and tech, that actually optimizes outcomes, not just the stewards of programs designed to manage around its gaps.
“The CHRO and HR should have a really important role in helping organizations drive this transformation. They have a unique set of skills in organizational design, human development, and change management that most technologists don’t have.”
– Jamie Jacobs
Don't Over-architect. Start.
One of the biggest traps in AI transformation is the temptation to design everything before moving. Organizations try to map every process, document every edge case, build the perfect governance model. Months pass. The technology evolves. And you’re still in the planning phase.
Dave’s approach at Vendi is a 30-day sprint. Pick a process that is a known opportunity to drive a better outcome. Bring your existing documentation, your org charts, your SOPs, whatever you have. Map how the work actually moves. Interview the subject matter experts who live closest to it. Find the immediate opportunities. Start there.
That’s the same instinct I see in the organizations that are actually making progress. They pick the clearest starting point, move, measure, and adjust. The question isn’t whether your process mapping will be perfect. The question is whether you’re willing to look honestly at what’s happening now.
Because once you have that picture, the path forward gets clearer fast. You can see which technology investments are paying off and which are generating drag. You can make the case for re-investment or re-architecture with data, not intuition. You can show the board not just what you’re spending on transformation, but the outcomes it’s actually producing.
That’s what becomes possible when you know how the work actually moves. And that possibility is already inside your organization, waiting for someone to go looking.
If you’re navigating transformation, building organizational capability or need fractional or interim leadership we can help.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Jamie Jacobs is CEO of Gig Talent, built to deliver principal-evel expertise deployed with precision to accelerate performance, culture, and growth. Her work is grounded in a simple belief: fear is the greatest barrier to transformation and courage expressed through bolder decisions, faster iteration, and more honest leadership is a multiplier that unlocks capability, innovation, and momentum inside organizations.
Dave Foley is Head of Strategic Growth at Gig Talent and CEO and Founder of Vendi, the operating system that connects HR strategy to technology execution.