The Triangle™ – A Clear Lens for Understanding Digital Project Friction

In infrastructure organisations, digital delivery challenges seldom come from a single tool or task. They show up as shifting priorities, unexpected changes, rework, incomplete inputs, or decisions that don’t align with technical reality.

Leaders experience these issues as unpredictability, budget pressure and slow progress.
BIM managers and coordinators experience them as design interruptions, unclear requirements and constant corrective work.

Different perspectives, but often the same underlying structure.

To make sense of this, Pasi Joensuu created The Triangle™: a simple model that explains how three organisational domains shape the daily reality of digital delivery.

The Three Corners of The Triangle™

Leadership

Responsible for direction, clarity and the pace of decisions.
When priorities shift without shared reasoning or roles are unclear, both engineering and financial functions feel the impact immediately.

Engineering

Responsible for the models, data and coordination that projects rely on.
Even highly capable teams struggle when inputs conflict, workflows lack structure or the information environment doesn’t support smooth progression.

Finance & Risk

Responsible for budgets, governance and predictability.
When approval or risk decisions are made without the necessary technical context, friction spreads through the entire delivery chain.

None of these corners operate in isolation. When one becomes misaligned, the effects ripple across the whole project.

Why These Three Corners Matter

Digital delivery is often handled as a technical problem. In practice, it’s an organisational one.
A design issue may begin with leadership uncertainty.
A budget deviation may trace back to a missing technical input.
A risk decision may disrupt workflows across multiple teams.

The Triangle™ makes these systemic connections visible. By understanding how these domains interact, organisations gain a clearer picture of why friction appears, how it spreads, and what helps projects become more predictable and stable.

A Shared Language for Leaders and Technical Teams

One of the biggest challenges in digitalisation is that different roles describe the same problem in different ways. Leaders talk about predictability and risk; technical teams talk about missing inputs and rework.

The Triangle™ bridges this divide.
It provides a neutral, shared language that helps teams look at the same issue with the same structure – without blame, and without adding complexity.

What Alignment Looks Like

When leadership, engineering and finance/risk share a common understanding of digital delivery, something important happens:

Decision-making stabilises.
Expectations are clearer.
Workflows become smoother.
Data becomes more usable.
Rework decreases.
Projects feel calmer.

Digitalisation begins to support the work instead of slowing it down.

Created by Pasi Joensuu

The Triangle™ is a model created and owned by Pasi Joensuu, developed through years of observing how digital teams, project leadership and finance functions struggle with different pieces of the same problem.
The purpose of the model is simple: to help organisations see the system clearly, so they can improve it without adding extra layers of complexity.

If You Want to Understand Your Own Triangle

Many organisations discover that a single conversation is enough to reveal where their real friction comes from.

A short clarity session with Pasi helps you see:

• which corner of the Triangle is creating the most pressure,
• where expectations are out of sync,
• and what small, practical adjustments would make your work — and your projects — flow better.

This is not a sales call.
It’s a fast, honest way to understand your organisation more clearly and identify the first step toward smoother digital delivery.

If you want clearer projects, better flow and fewer surprises, book a clarity session with Pasi.
It’s one small step that can change how your whole organisation works.