Lead AI Strategically
In other words, what are your major aims with AI and what’s your plan of action to make it happen?
Looking towards the year ahead, when strategic planning with your team, remember that all-important word.
What word?
Not AI.
Team.
Whether you’re exploring the potential of AI as an element of your strategy, or strategising about something else, keep in mind that a successful plan of action ultimately depends on your people. Even if an aim of the plan is to automate some workflows, successful automation depends on people adapting their ways of working.
So make sure your strategy not only makes logical sense but also emotively inspires forward. By co-creating your strategy with your people.
For example, the first draft of our AI strategy statement reflected many other organisations’ AI strategies:
Leverage AI to gain efficiencies across business processes to reduce costs and increase return on investment.
It made perfect sense – but lacked the emotional connection needed to inspire a successful transformation. In other words, even though in this instance it was hand-crafted, it may as well have been written by a robot.
So we personally rewrote it:
Redistribute our time to higher-value work by upgrading workflows with AI advances.
Purposefully not clearly defining what ‘higher-value work’ means. Thereby creating space to engage and vision together what higher-value work might look like.
Whether it means more profitable.
More meaningful.
Or unexpectedly discovering that sometimes it might mean a chance to do repetitive seemingly boring work. Giving teams a revitalising break from the pressures and mental demands of creative problem-solving work.
Creating higher-value outputs.
Through lower-value inputs.
Strategically.