Category: strategy
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Why systems beat goals
When I wrote my first book about agility and business transformation I wrote about the idea that in leading change, systems beat goals. It’s a principle that I keep coming back to, both in my transformation work with businesses and in a personal context with things that I’d like to achieve or change in my life. There’s…
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AI Transformation and ROI: Bottom-up trap, top-down fantasy
Last week I was asked to take part in a Cambridge Judge Business School panel on AI transformation. It was a pretty wide ranging discussion but there was a useful lens on this given by the latest McKinsey State of AI 2025 report which had just come out. There were some interesting findings about enterprise adoption of…
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The Future of Agencies in the Age of AI
Last week I spoke at the Google Partner Summit in Dublin about managing agency change in the era of AI, and then moderated a panel of exceptional agency leaders including Pats McDonald, Christina Lemieux, and Liam Wade. In my talk I spoke about the need to combine optimisation and efficiency focused efforts with transformational thinking to reinvent processes, workflows and…
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Systems and Empathy
Way back in 2017 (crikey) I wrote a report for the IPA on the Future of Agencies. One of the key frameworks that I used described how agencies could succeed in the future by focusing on combining systems (which I defined as data, technology, efficiency, delivery at scale) and empathy (human insight, creativity, relational connection). Given…
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The Future of Strategists and Planners
The latest WARC Future of Strategy report is just out and makes for interesting reading. 80% of strategists think the discipline is at a crossroads. Agency jobs in decline, and yet client demand for strategy skills needed more than ever in a volatile world. There also seems to be a split on whether AI will erode the…
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The Future of Strategy in the Age of AI
A couple of weeks ago I ran a session with a large agency strategy team focusing on integrating AI throughout the planning workflow. It reminded me of how much I love working with strategists – naturally curious and open people. Towards the end of the session we had an interesting discussion around where this is…
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Think-prompt-think
In 1995, McArthur Wheeler walked into two Pittsburgh banks in broad daylight and robbed them with his face uncovered. When police arrested him hours later using surveillance footage, Wheeler was genuinely shocked. He’d rubbed lemon juice on his face (the same substance used in invisible ink) believing that it would make him invisible to cameras.…
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How AI supercharges strategy and planning
I ran a session with a leadership team last week in which we were working through how AI could be a true partner throughout the strategy development and deployment process. One of the issues in discussing this subject is the sheer breadth of application. Similarly to the innovation process, there’s just so many ways in…
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Using AI for simulation and scenario planning in strategy
One of the most eye-opening ways in which AI engines have opened up new possibilities in my work has been through the ability to use them in simulation and scenario planning. It’s enabled me to do things that were previously not an option for me without using expensive systems or tools. As I’ve said before,…
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Transforming systems and thinking differently
I once did a fascinating project with the operations team of a big pharma business helping them to understand how they could combine agile ways of working with Lean manufacturing techniques. As part of the research for it I did a dive into the origins and principles of the Toyota Production System (TPS) from which…