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Distillations in this newsletter: Strategy Distilled – The Updated Archive (2021-2025)
STRATEGY DISTILLED:
A monthly concoction of insight, learning and things you might have missed for anyone who works on strategy, works with strategy or just loves strategy.
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This month …
MY NEW BOOK: AI-Augmented Decisions: A Practical Guide
I’m thrilled to announce that my latest book, AI-Augmented Decisions: A Practical Guide, is released in paperback on 3rd September and is available to pre-order as an eBook now.
For years, this newsletter has explored the nuances of strategy. We’ve delved into frameworks, debated leadership and distilled the essence of strategic thinking. But what about the decisions that underpin strategy itself? The high-impact, high-complexity choices that define an organisation’s future? How can we make these decisions smarter, faster and better?
AI-Augmented Decisions: A Practical Guide tackles this very challenge.
While strategy is a core focus, the book is designed for a broader landscape of critical business initiatives. Think of the complex, multi-faceted decisions involved in:
- Digital and cultural transformations;
- Launching a new service;
- Entering a new market.
These are the kinds of decisions where the stakes are high, the variables are numerous, and traditional analysis often falls short.
What the Book is About
At its heart, AI-Augmented Decisions introduces a five-phase process designed for anyone to make their most critical decisions faster, smarter, and better. For the strategist, this framework will feel both familiar and refreshingly new. It integrates principles from design thinking and decision science, providing a structured path through the ambiguity that often surrounds major strategic moves. The five phases are:
- Decision Scoping: Moving beyond a vague problem statement to a clear, actionable Decision Brief. For strategists, this is about ensuring you’re solving the right problem from the outset.
- Decision Preparation: Building a robust knowledge base, leveraging AI to efficiently analyse market data, competitor strategies and internal capabilities.
- Decision-Making Workshop: A structured, collaborative process to translate prepared options into a clear choice, harnessing collective intelligence to create a concrete Decision Proposal.
- Decision Validation: Rigorously testing the proposed decision before committing significant resources. Think of this as pressure-testing your strategic hypothesis.
- Decision Adoption: Turning the final decision into organisational reality. This is where strategy so often fails, and the book provides a human-centric approach to ensure your decisions don’t just get made, but get adopted.
How it Works: AI as Your Expert Facilitator
A key theme is the role of Artificial Intelligence in this process. This isn’t about letting an algorithm make your decisions. It’s about using AI as a powerful partner to augment your own expertise.
The book provides practical, step-by-step guidance and five downloadable “super-prompts” – one for each phase of the process. A super-prompt is a detailed set of instructions and expert context that you provide to your chosen AI platform. In essence, it temporarily transforms a generalist AI into a specialist facilitator, equipped with a robust methodology to guide you through the decision-making journey.
This approach allows you to:
- Surface counter-intuitive insights from vast datasets;
- Challenge your assumptions and mitigate cognitive biases;
- Run scenario analyses to understand the potential outcomes of a strategic choice.
Because the super-prompts are transparent, you see exactly how the AI is being instructed, making the process repeatable, reliable and entirely under your control. You also need no prior experience of using AI – I explain how to get started using AI platforms and give a detailed case study throughout.
A Transformative Edge for Strategists
Making decisions faster, smarter, and better isn’t just an efficiency gain; it’s a strategic advantage that can be used by both individuals and teams.
- Faster decisions mean accelerating the entire strategy cycle. It’s about cutting down the time from data gathering to insight generation, allowing you to be more agile and responsive in a turbulent market.
- Smarter decisions provide a powerful way to break out of the decision-making echo chamber. By using AI to systematically test assumptions and identify blind spots, you can craft strategies that are more resilient and robust.
- Better decisions move us beyond simple, linear plans. For strategists, this means creating more adaptive strategies. The process helps in evaluating complex trade-offs and designing options that can evolve with changing conditions, rather than breaking under pressure.
I believe this approach can bring a new level of rigour and agility to the work we all do as strategists. It’s about embracing the complexity of modern business and using new tools to navigate it with greater confidence.
AI-Augmented Decisions: A Practical Guide is available on Amazon for pre-order as an eBook and as a paperback from 3rd September 2025.
If you enjoy the book, I would really appreciate it if you would ‘star-rate’ it on Amazon, and ideally leave a written review. Customer ratings and reviews make a huge difference to a book’s visibility on Amazon. Thank you!
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Goal Atlas works with leaders and teams to facilitate the development, adoption and measurement of strategy. Our process. Your people.
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