Related question
Why do top-down AI mandates struggle?
Short answer
Because leadership sets direction without the operating detail. The people doing the work know where information actually comes from, which exceptions matter, and which undocumented workarounds keep the process running. Leave them out of discovery and those details never reach the requirements, so the system solves a process that does not exist.
Executive sponsorship is necessary. It is just not sufficient, and the gap between those two things is where a lot of money disappears.
We learned this on an engagement of our own. The scope was to turn a client's daily job schedule into optimized driver routes, which was a clean problem with a clean solution and completely wrong. That operation does not schedule day by day at all. Drivers receive a batch of work and route themselves through the week. The detail had surfaced in discovery, but not as a hard rule, and we only understood what it meant once we were building against it.
Delivering the original design would have produced a process the client did not need and would not have used. Technically complete, solving a problem that did not exist.
The strongest pattern combines both directions. Leadership defines why the problem matters and what outcome justifies the investment. The people doing the work explain how it actually happens, including the parts nobody documented. Then the builders translate. Skip the middle step and you get a system delivered to employees rather than built around their reality, which damages the design and the adoption at the same time.