Strategy is not a workshop. Strategy is a workflow. It is a process. We also call the result of this process a strategy (which, by the way, is often the source of confusion about what a strategy actually is).
A strategy doesn’t fit on a PowerPoint slide. A strategy consists of many different artifacts: vision, mission, milestones, guidelines, roadmaps, etc.
The key: the artifacts fit together and form a complete, coherent, compelling, convincing, and common picture of a better future.
A good strategy can be summarized in just a few sentences, but the summary is NOT the strategy.
A strategy isn’t created in a silo on the executive floor, and certainly not in a PowerPoint presentation that a consultant just throws over the fence.
The stakeholders co-create their strategy.
That’s why we need a shared strategy workflow—you might call it an open strategy process.
That’s why synced workshops are needed as part of shared workflows—so that information and decisions can come together. The workshops put the human-in-the-lead.
Your AI can’t create your strategy. It’s your strategy. Your stakeholders need to understand it, desire it, execute it. And besides, your AI knows less than you think—or rather, your colleagues know more than they think.
Not every strategy artifact has to be created by humans. AI agents can automate strategy workflows: generate the briefing for a workshop; extract the summary of the workshop; check the artifacts for correctness, completeness, and consistency; identify open questions and critical assumptions; … visualize the strategy on a PowerPoint slide.
But that’s exactly why you need a workflow: a concept for how work flows—from human to human, from human to agent, from agent to agent, and from agent to human.
We’re used to this in software development: it’s called Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery (CI/CD).
Software isn’t a one-time project, but an continuous process.
Strategy is not a one-time project, but an continuous process.
We need to establish Continuous Strategy. And operations must not come to a standstill in the process: we need to ensure Continuous Operations. (CS/CD)
And we need something like DevOps—that is, software development and operations—for strategy: StratOps is the continuous measurement and monitoring of strategy development in order to continuously adopt and adapt the strategy design.
That’s what we’re working on at Datentreiber with the Catalyst. If you’d like to learn more and contribute, join our community:
