In boardrooms across the world, digital transformation is on every CEO’s agenda. Yet many leaders unwittingly fall into a strategic pitfall that sabotages impact before it even begins. I call it “spray and pray”—an incremental, seemingly safe but ultimately disastrous approach.
The logic behind it feels sound. Faced with digital disruption, leaders crowdsource potential “AI” use cases from within their organisations or adopt “best practices” pitched by consultants and vendors. A committee then ranks and selects these use cases based on feasibility, budget constraints, and risk.
The result? A portfolio of seemingly safe, disconnected initiatives that are structurally siloed and often in conflict, but most importantly,y are completely divorced from any notion of value created for customers.
Spray and pray is what technologists call an antipattern: a common response to a recurring problem that seems smart on the surface but leads to horrible outcomes. For CEOs seeking real data-driven impact, understanding—and avoiding—this pattern is essential.
Even Good Intentions Lead to Poor Results
Several structural forces make spray and pray seem attractive despite being highly ineffective and wasteful:
Industrial-Era Thinking in a Digital World
Many executives still subconsciously apply industrial logic to digital transformation: focus on supply-side processes, break problems into smaller parts, and optimise incrementally. But data-driven value creation isn’t about supply-side improvement, it is about the demand side and delighting customers.
Group Consensus Over Strategic Impact
When committees select initiatives, they often converge on what you could call “sevens” on a scale of 1-10: safe, politically acceptable options that seem rather sensible but do not deliver breakout wins. As Sarah Travel observed in talent management and Matt Lerner echoed in growth strategy, seven kill success. They give the illusion of avoiding risk—but most importantly they have basically no impact.
Misapplied ‘Wisdom of Crowds’
The idea of crowdsourcing decisions assumes each participant is both independent and more often than not correct. But in most corporate settings, committee members aren’t making independent decisions and are influenced by hierarchy, politics, or groupthink. Nor are they all equally informed. The result? Poor choices that appear democratic but lack strategic coherence or alignment.
Disconnected Initiatives That Don’t Scale
Narrow use cases might deliver local wins—a chatbot here, a dashboard there—but they rarely build toward a scalable, competitive advantage. Worse, they absorb valuable talent and budget, starving higher-impact initiatives.
A Better Path: SLASOG—A Framework for Compounding Impact
For global leaders, the alternative to spray and pray isn’t simply “doing more.” It’s doing smarter. To escape the trap of spray and pray, CEOs must replace scattered effort with structured, high-leverage action. The SLASOG framework offers a clear path for this: focus on your unique unfair advantage to win.
Leverage your unique advantage and unfair non-digital advantage—customer demand, physical assets, etc—in the data-driven paradigm, and productise their impact. Use power laws in your data and demand direct effort where investments can compound with an asymmetric returns profile.
Align your everything and everyone to a clear North Star metric, centralise strategic decisions, and decentralise execution. Empower execution with clear commander’s intent and align incentives to reward outcomes, not activity.
Simplify products and re-engineer processes. Ditch outdated consensus-based decision-making hierarchies. Remove, automate, or modularise complexity to stay adaptive and scalable.
Optimise decisions based on your environment by knowing where uncertainty must be embraced, not eliminated. Our ability to build a layer of abstraction–an empirically valid, well-defined mathematical problem–is now the key to unlocking optimal solutions by leveraging the vast data and computing at our disposal.
Grow by shifting from a scarcity to an abundance mindset. Build funnels to convert and flywheels to accelerate. Obsess about latent demand, build compounding value loops, and focus on delivering 10× outcomes—not incremental wins.
SLASOG equips leaders to act with conviction, not just consensus, and delivers data-driven impact that compounds for decades.
For Global Leaders: Avoiding the Comfort of Mediocrity
In global markets, the stakes are even higher. Competitors aren’t waiting for your committee to reach consensus. Markets shift, technologies leapfrog, and customer expectations evolve in real time. Leadership in this context demands being intelligently contrarian and decisive with an ability to allocate resources with both clarity and courage.
Spray and pray is a comfort trap. It reassures stakeholders, spreads budget risk, and creates the illusion of progress. But it will never produce the kind of integrated, enterprise-level capabilities that result in category-defining data-driven digital leadership.
As a CEO, your job is not to hedge every bet—it’s to place the right ones, with intent. That means steering your organisation away from scattered effort and toward cohesive, outcome-driven strategy. You can still pray, but without spraying.
About the Author:
Ritavan is an entrepreneurial technology leader and over the past decade he has built and scaled data-driven solutions that have impacted billions of euros. He has authored peer-reviewed papers, given invited talks at global conferences, and holds an international patent. Known for his first principles approach to building and scaling data-driven solutions across industries, Ritavan combines deep technical expertise with strategic vision and an execution-focused mindset. Having launched on the 29th April, Ritavan’s new best-selling book, Data Impact, emphasises the true power of first-principle thinking, and applying mathematical rigor to solve real-world problems.
