How does one approach leading a team in UX with no goals or roadmaps?

I've joined a company at the start of April. I am appointed as the Lead UX designer and I've been given a lot of information regarding the company's goals and future plans, just before I started.

When I started, I realized that the team is a little different than what I was told. We are following the KanBan approach so we have no sprints. This is still fine but the problem comes in with our development cycle. We have no deadlines, no clear goals, no clear mission as to what we are trying to achieve.

No I'm caught up having to work on improvements or redesigning parts of a system where there is no measurable outcome or shared understanding as to what we are solving or what we want to achieve. There's no real brainstorming any issue and when we meet up, we don't document any action points or action plans.

The fact that there's no common goal or expectancy, delivering the correct product seems almost impossible. I'm working with 2 analysts and mainly the head of development and everyone seems to have a different understanding of where we are headed. I followed a lot of Joe Natoli's work and I've been trying to get that shared understanding and agreement between stakeholders but when I ask these questions, the answer is usually: "it's complicated". When it comes to UCD, it seems like the managers are more vigilant in having their needs met instead of the needs/frustrations of the users.

So at this point in time, I have to lead UX with very little input/collaboration from team members and without any clear goal or roadmap.

Has anyone encountered anything similar to this? I would LOVE some thoughts regarding this.