“We need to leverage a more robust and agile infrastructure that enables more deep thinking about the future,” said my client’s VP of strategy.
It was a standard planning session. We were discussing a common problem about a strategic objective and related initiatives that could have appeared on just about any business meeting agenda in the world.
I bit my lip as I wondered to myself: “Are you sure you’re not a robot?”
Like most working professionals, I’ve spent over a year wrestling with the implications of all the new generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools. I have cycled through stages: first amusement, then fear for my job, then excitement about the practical possibilities for day-to-day work, and then finally depression. I’m not depressed because I think that one day HAL or M3GAN will kill us all or take our jobs (though the jury is out on those questions), but because of the realization of how transparently derivative and, dare I say, artificial, human expression can be.
My first experimentation with AI tools was for writing. The results were astounding and often saved hours of brainstorming and research, helping me quickly get to something focused and polished. Sure, there were factual errors that needed to be corrected and none of the output could be used without rewriting, but I compare the experience to working with an efficient intern: they could provide valuable research, but I still had to write anything with my name on it.
Another weakness became more obvious over time: while it was very helpful for organizing your thoughts, the AI output was always a cold mishmash of corporate speak. As I learned more about how the tools work, it became easy to see how this happens. If you ask the machine to draft a white paper on, say, Lean Six Sigma, it will quickly scan writings on that topic and then intelligently piece together a coherent summary for you (without sourcing the original authors, but I digress). The tool literally pieces together phrases it finds elsewhere and combines them in a grammatically concise manner. If a human wrote the white paper, we might call it intelligent and creative, but in fact, this is just the ultimate example of intellectual regurgitation.
My depression didn’t arrive while using AI, but instead hit me much later. As I happened to be scanning through management literature and articles online, it suddenly dawned on me how much of the carefully considered content read just like the AI output. I found much of the same academic bloat, including smart-sounding platitudes such as we need more innovative leadership; we need to expand our reflection time; we need to apply agile principles to strategic leadership; we need to foster a culture of accountability; we need to minimize our downtime; we need more engaging collaboration; we need to leverage continuous improvement principles to software development; and so on.
I noticed the same thing in my client’s strategic planning discussions – often involving long dialogs restating one platitude after another. These statements, made in earnest, usually have a nugget of meaning within a certain context but often lack any concrete application. Is it possible that all management science is just a mishmash of semi-plagiarized corporate speak?
How to Make Strategy Tangible
So how does a strategy practitioner cut through the clichés and steer the conversation towards something more tangible? There are communication principles we teach in our measurement classes that are critical to overcoming this issue in a practical sense. We teach practitioners to translate abstract strategic intent into concrete, sensory-specific intended results that are more measurable (for more about this technique, see this blog: https://balancedscorecard.org/blog/why-world-class-performance-isnt-measurable/ or Stacey Barr’s blog below). If you want your organization to get out of the intangible mishmash of nothingness, this “measurement” skill of articulating abstract intentions in concrete terms is needed in all our communication practices.
For more about learning about this approach, I’d recommend learning more about our KPI Professional Certification.
References:
David Wilsey is the Chief Executive Officer with the Balanced Scorecard Institute and co-author of The Institute Way: Simplify Strategic Planning and Management with the Balanced Scorecard.