The honest answer is usually no. Not because the people failed or the strategy was wrong — but because most transformations are built on people, not infrastructure.

When expertise lives in people's heads, capability walks out the door with departing personnel. When methodology exists only in documentation, it becomes static artefacts nobody can actually apply. When success depends on heroic individuals bridging organisational silos, those bridges collapse when the heroes leave.

This isn't a people problem or a change management problem. It's a knowledge architecture problem.

Documentation Isn't Infrastructure

The standard response is: document everything. Create process manuals. Build comprehensive wikis.

The reality: documents nobody reads, wikis nobody updates, process manuals that become instantly outdated, and the same expertise bottlenecks — just with more documentation debt.

Documentation captures knowledge. It doesn't make knowledge executable. It can't understand what you're trying to achieve, know which pieces are relevant right now, or apply methodology to new situations.

What "Context Is Everything" Actually Means

We're not talking about giving people more documents to search. We're talking about making organisational context automatically available at the moment of need, without requiring anyone to know it exists.

A consultancy was spending a week manually compiling assessments for £150,000 engagements — synthesising interviews, cross-referencing personality profiles against leadership frameworks, applying proprietary methodology. All entirely dependent on specific individuals. Identifying high-ROI processes like this — where expertise creates bottlenecks — is the first step.

Once that methodology became embedded in systems that could apply it — not just document it — the work went from one week to 20–40 minutes. The owner reviewed the first automatically generated analysis and "just fell out of his chair." Not because it was magic. Because the tacit expertise had become executable infrastructure.

From Rented to Built Capability

Most organisations operate on rented capability: expertise in consultants' heads, knowledge accessed through people as intermediaries, success requiring heroic individuals.

Built capability is different. Expertise embedded in accessible systems. Knowledge accessed automatically when relevant. Capability independent of specific individuals. When people leave, capability remains and improves.

The solution is layered institutional intelligence — organisational context structured across four layers:

Junior staff immediately access senior-level insights. New hires become productive from day one. The infrastructure doesn't replace expertise — it democratises access to it.

Context as Competitive Moat

As AI capabilities proliferate, the competitive advantage isn't the technology — it's the context. Generic AI tools remain undifferentiated. Everyone has access to the same base capabilities.

Competitive advantage comes from context depth, quality, integration, and accumulation. The longer you build contextual infrastructure, the more defensible your organisational capability becomes — not because competitors can't access the same AI, but because they can't replicate your accumulated organisational context.

Your context is your competitive moat. Not the tools. The context.

Passing the Departure Test

Traditional transformations: the knowledge walks out the door. Traditional documentation: the documents exist but no one can apply them. Contextual intelligence infrastructure: it keeps working. And it continues improving.

Transformation investments depreciate not because people fail, but because most transformations are built on artefacts rather than infrastructure. The structural solution: make context permanent and automatically accessible, make expertise executable through systems, and make knowledge institutional and accumulating.

That's how transformations outlast their creators. And infrastructure, properly built, passes the departure test every time.