RESEARCH

The Capability-to-Performance Gap

Organizations are gaining access to powerful new capabilities faster than many can reorganize work around them. Master Move studies what happens between the two: where a capability’s arrival ends and a change in organizational performance either does, or doesn’t, follow.

The Question

What separates a new capability that gets deployed from one that actually changes organizational performance?

Organizations can measure deployment, usage, and increasingly even individual productivity. What’s harder is determining whether any of it translated into a business result that wasn’t there before.

We’re not assuming the answer looks the same across organizations, technologies, or timeframes. Part of what we’re studying is where and why it differs.

The Territory

Six areas where value is gained, delayed, or lost

Technology and Access

Whether the capability itself, and the data or systems it depends on, actually work the way an organization needs them to.

Human Capability & Judgment

What people are still expected to know, decide, or catch, and whether they're equipped to.

Tasks and Workflows

How tasks, processes, and the sequence of work change when a new capability is introduced.

Management and Organizational Conditions

How incentives, governance, structure, and day-to-day management shape what happens.

Experimentation and Scale

What changes as a capability moves from initial experimentation into broader organizational use.

Measurement and Value

How, or whether, leaders can credibly say a transformation produced a result, rather than simply occurred.

How We Study It

Conversations, cases, and a search for contradiction

Our research combines long-form executive conversations, transformation case analysis, and prospective interviews with people who have firsthand experience of consequential organizational change, across industries and across different kinds of technology and organizational shifts, not only AI.

We're specifically interested in cases that complicate or contradict the patterns we're starting to see, not only ones that confirm them. A transformation that stalled, one that worked for reasons nobody expected, or one where the constraint turned out to be technical rather than organizational; these are at least as valuable to us as clean success stories.

Participate in the Research

We're looking to speak with:

These are research conversations, not sales calls. We’re interested in what actually happened, including evidence that challenges our assumptions.

Have a different reason to get in touch? Contact Master Move →