Strategy – What’s Changed & What Hasn’t?

It’s best of times & the worst of times – and it was ever thus.  So, when it comes to Strategy deployment & execution, what has changed & what has not?

What Has Changed

AI has made it easier than ever to answer generic questions of Strategy:

·       Given our business situation, what is our aspiration & winning logic?

·       What OKRs should we use and how should we deploy them?

·       What should our dashboards look like?

·       How do we set up our Obeya (aka Control Tower, Big Room, Cockpit)?

AI also makes it much easier to answer Growth questions like:

·       What’s the size of this market, how fast is it growing and what are historical profit margins?

·       Who are the main competitors & what are their strengths & weaknesses?

·       Who are the key customers in this market, and what do they value?

·       What are current customer satisfaction levels & what opportunities might new entrants exploit?

And so, AI can help you begin to understand the nature of the challenge, and generic approaches you might use to handle it. To use chess analogy, AI can help you understand the basic shape of the board, how many pieces there typically are, and sometimes, how these pieces move.

That’s not nothing, and if we understand AI’s limitations, it’s a helpful start. But if we stop there, we’ll just release more AI-slop & create waste & hassle for our organization.

What Has Not Changed

Strategy deployment & execution remains a messy, ragged human thing, an affair of the heart and of intuition & gut feel gained by decades of work & thoughtful reflection. It’s not enough to articulate an AI-formulated-sort-of-maybe-just-okay winning logic. People can sense & seem to have an innate revulsion to AI slop.

Moreover, developing & deployment a sound strategy is akin the achieving physical fitness through a commitment to a sound workout regime. You have to do the work. If the workout regime calls for daily jogging but you decide to drive, you’ll remain flabby.  Similarly, if rather than walking the value stream and customer journey, doing the messy work of Catchball and all the rest, you default to AI, your strategy will blah-blah-blah.

Leaders at all levels have to validate the aspiration & winning logic with their teams through messy open forums I learned as ‘Catchball’ wherein the leader invites pushback & translation.  ‘Am I on the right track; is there anything I’m missing; can you please share this your teams & come back with what you can do to support this plan.’

Catchball is of course based on data, and ideally YODA – your own data & not stale, incomplete, irrelevant data provided by some out of touch corporate system. Without YODA strategy execution can quickly degenerate into HIPPO (highest paid person’s opinion) & ZEBRA (zero expertise but really adamant) management.

The Value of our strategy (or of any initiative) is a function of the Quality of the intervention and the level of Acceptance: V = Q x A. People dislike AI slop & they don’t respect phony strategies or phony people. And brings us to something else that has not changed: the mysterious catalyst/accelerant called Leadership.

In the Age of AI, Leadership is the Killer App

Leadership is the killer app. Good leaders articulate high quality strategies because they have a deep, intuitive grasp of the industry, value stream, technology, customers and their journeys. Good leaders foster acceptance of the agreed upon aspiration and winning logic because they walk the value stream and the customer journey. They ask, ‘What do you think?’ in a spirit of humble inquiry

In summary, when it comes to Strategy deployment & execution, what’s changed is AI, and what has no changed is the messy, human work of alignment, and the centrality of Leadership. AI can be a fine servant but is a poor master.

Best wishes,

Pascal Dennis         E: pascal.dennis@leansystems.org