Abstract
Large-scale transformation programs routinely fail, and the explanations typically point to governance, leadership, or technology. This article argues that a deeper cause is often overlooked: the failure to preserve shared meaning as strategy travels through the organization. Concepts like "value", "innovation", "transformation" or "business impact" anchor executive discourse but remain under-specified where execution happens. Drawing on the distinction between meaning as formal reference and meaning as contextual use (Wittgenstein, 1953), and building on sense-making and communication-as-constitutive-of-organization research, we frame strategic misalignment as a breakdown in how meaning is translated across organizational levels. We call the cumulative effect a semantic drift cascade: vocabulary stays the same while meaning shifts at every layer. Two anonymized pharmaceutical programs illustrate how this plays out differently. In one, strategic meaning narrowed through translation until only deployment milestones remained. In the other, meaning expanded until it could justify anything. We propose neuro-symbolic AI (semantic knowledge graphs combined with large-language models) as a communication infrastructure that can surface divergent interpretations and make them governable, and offer a knowledge-elicitation roadmap for practitioners.
Recommended Citation
Berger, Cedric Roland and Dehais, Joachim
(2026)
"From Strategic Ambiguity to Operational Alignment: Neuro-Symbolic AI as a Communication Infrastructure for Translating Business Value,"
Global Advances in Business Communication: Vol. 12, Article 4.
Available at:
https://commons.emich.edu/gabc/vol12/iss1/4