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Distillations in this newsletter: AI-Augmented Decisions; Type 2 Growth; The value of deep expertise in consultancy; NOBL’s toolkit for developing your AI strategy.
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 – due to be published in March.
- Strategy snippets you may have missed: Type 2 Growth; The value of deep expertise in consultancy; NOBL’s toolkit for developing your AI strategy.
If you enjoy reading this newsletter, don’t forget to forward it to friends or colleagues who might also find it of interest.
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My new book: AI-Augmented Decisions
Drum roll, please! My new book is drafted and I’m working through the second draft to get it out into the world by the end of March 2025 (link to free chapter at the bottom of this email). Whilst my target audience is broader than strategy professionals, here is why I, as a strategist, wrote it and why I hope you will find it interesting.
Decision-making lies at the heart of all strategy: strategy development, strategy adoption and strategic agility all hinge upon good decision-making. These types of decisions are inherently hard. They are both high-impact and high-complexity. There is no prescribed way to make them and, once made, no way to tell, definitively, that your decision was the right one. There is, therefore, much need for a structured way to approach these kinds of decisions that tips the odds strongly in favour of good decisions over bad decisions. This new book sets out that framework. That, however, is only half the story. Navigating your way through a high-impact, high-complexity decision space can be arduous and time consuming. As a result, many organisations don’t attempt it. They go with gut-feel (often the CEO’s gut-feel) for what seems like the best decision. Or they analyse just enough data to point towards a particular decision without analysing the rest of it.
This is where AI is a game-changer. Not in making decisions for you but rather in augmenting your own decisions. It helps you analyse more, crystalise your insights better and communicate them more concisely. It helps challenge your thinking, reframe how you are contextualising your decision and mitigate your biases. It helps you flesh out decision-options and can offer criteria for comparing them. It will project scenarios that might result from specific decisions. It can also facilitate stakeholder engagement in the entire decision-making process and help analyse their inputs. In essence, it enables you to make strategic decisions better, smarter and faster. For any of you that have been around long enough to know my writing, you will realise this is no vague promise for the future. This is not one of those annoying speculations on what might be possible once we have ‘proper AI’. This is about now, and it is about what can be done with the consumer versions of the most popular AI platforms you can just sign up to today. The four hypothetical (but very real-world) decisions I feature as case studies in this book, have been worked through by me in full using Claude Pro (currently £18/month in the UK – please note that I have no connection with them and receive no financial reward from either my use of their product or from writing about them).
It probably goes without saying that I am impressed with the practical business value that I have been able to gain from AI – otherwise, why would I have gone to the trouble of writing a whole book on the subject! I am not, however, in any way starry-eyed about the technology. It can be frustrating, exasperating and occasionally downright stupid. I explain these limitations and give examples throughout the book. But despite them, I am a committed convert to the prudent use of AI to augment some of the big strategic decisions that I or my clients face from now on. Used in an informed way, the benefits of AI-augmentation outweigh the occasional niggles and frustrations by a HUGE amount.
Writing any book on AI is a challenge. The products, services and platforms are changing on a monthly, if not weekly basis. The capabilities that are out of reach today may be available tomorrow. I have, therefore, decided to keep this book short and focus on two key areas:
- A framework for understanding AI-augmented decision making;
- A workflow for actually making decisions, with AI-augmentation.
Discussions of the available AI technology and all the prompts / responses from the case studies will all be available as digital downloads, so they can be updated more readily than the book itself.
You can download a pdf of the contents page and first chapter of AI-Augmented Decisions: A Practical Guide here. I would love to hear what you think of it.
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Strategy snippets you may have missed
Type 2 Growth
This could be a late New Year’s resolution for 2025 or an alternative way to think about strategy. Originating as an idea of Kevin Kelly, I like the summary of Type 2 Growth from Zoe Scaman:
‘Not another sprint, but a sustainable rhythm. A pace that allows for both progress and presence – and actually enjoying the journey along the way.’
In her article on ‘The Type 2 Manifesto’, she defines six ‘New Pillars of Success”- ways of “approaching progress that challenge the norms”. They are: Longevity as Legacy; Stability as Strength; Flexibility as Freedom; Enrichment as Evolution; Consistency as Credibility; Fallow Periods as Fertile Ground.
The value of deep expertise in consultancy
This is an interesting discussion on YouTube (hat tip to Neil Perkin) on how the business model of Big Consulting is being forced to change. Rita Gunther McGrath describes the traditional model like this:
“If you think about traditional consulting, it was based on a leverage model… you’ve got the role of the finders, those are the people that gate the business, the role of the minders, the people that actually run the engagements, and then the grinders are the ones working at the coalface who are doing all the work. And the traditional model was you marked up the work of the grinders, and that fed the others.”
Now, however, as the work of the grinders becomes increasingly commoditised by AI, the value model of Big Consultancy and the pricing model that goes with it need to be transformed to focus on access to the deep expertise that the consultancy can offer. Of course, Goal Atlas has never employed ‘grinders’ so we have always prioritised access to deep expertise. No change for us!
NOBL’s toolkit for developing your AI strategy
NOBL (who define themselves as ‘the modern alternative to Big Consulting’) have built a toolkit for leadership teams to “help different stakeholders define and align their approach to AI and its offshoot technologies”. See it on Miro or on their website.
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We, at Goal Atlas, work as strategy facilitators.
We help you develop, implement and measure the progress and impact of your strategy in ways that work for you.
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If you enjoyed reading this newsletter, don’t forget to forward it to friends or colleagues who might also find it of interest.
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