Understand the opportunities, declare your posture as an organization, and prepare yourself for the road ahead – Develop your integrated game plan.
My humbling realization in 2016 was that all the training and experience of a 20-year career in strategy was not sufficient to address with and for my clients the increased complexity of how technology is shaping strategy going forward. So, I started to develop a better tool. The biggest obstacle to shaping strategy that is informed by technological opportunities and choices is the lack of understanding what these opportunities are. Organizations who are not aware have to close this gap first. Much of the work of Advancing AI Wisconsin is aimed at doing just that. But there is more to it. Disruptive technologies can be an important element, but it may not be THE answer in all cases. Once organizations understand the possibilities across their value chain, I help them articulate a posture using tools like The Strategic Chessboard and Dimensional Visioning (see above). Through an iterative process of examining specific opportunities aligned with this posture as well as preparation needs for various organizational stakeholders (including partners outside of the organization), we formulate the integrated game plan. If you want to ready your organization for the future, but you don’t know where to start, allow me to share this approach with you.
