Strategy isn’t a document. It’s a process of listening, questioning, challenging, prioritizing, and building consensus about where your organization goes next.
A prompt can’t answer all of that. It can’t help you think through all the potential hurdles and deal with challenging personalities. AI gives you what you feed into it.
And listen: AI has its place.
AI can help us analyze information faster. It can uncover patterns and explore possibilities. It can help you spend less time on tasks that can be managed by technology.
What you need are the things technology can’t do:
- Asking better questions
- Facilitating difficult conversations
- Applying experience and judgement
- Building consensus and buy-in
- Helping people make decisions
Let’s talk about why you need people involved in your strategic planning.
AI only knows what you tell it. A strategist knows what to ask.
Better yet, we often know what you’re not saying and how to delicately bring those issues to light.
An AI-generated plan is largely a response to the information put into it.
An experienced strategist knows how to uncover the information that isn’t volunteered: the uncomfortable issue everyone avoids, the disconnect between leadership and staff, the assumption nobody has challenged, the community need that isn’t showing up in the data.
Strategic planning is equal parts listening and writing.
The finished document is almost the least important part of the process. (Don’t tell our staff writer we said this: she’ll be devasted.)
Good planning involves interviews, surveys, listening sessions, environmental scanning, observation, discussion, and synthesis. A human strategist can hear hesitation, contradiction, enthusiasm, frustration, and consensus—and recognize when those signals matter. You need human ears to discern the real meaning and value of each moment in your planning process.
AI can identify patterns. Humans understand context.
AI may see that three stakeholder groups mentioned communication. A strategist can determine whether that means “we need a newsletter,” “employees don’t trust leadership,” “customers don’t understand our value,” or “departments are operating in silos.” Those require very different strategies, goals, objectives, tactics, and measurements.
If you’re not running this information through an experienced strategic planner, you’re at-risk for a very surface-level response from your AI tool. You’ll definitely accomplish something but you will likely find that it doesn’t tackle the real problems you’re facing or help propel your organization to the next level.
A good strategist will challenge you.
AI is remarkably good at producing plausible answers. Sometimes that’s exactly the problem. Strategic planning requires someone willing to say: That goal doesn’t match your resources. Those priorities contradict each other. You say this matters, but nothing in your budget supports it. You’ve been trying that for five years—why would it work now?
AI’s job is to keep you coming back with positive feedback, whether it’s effetive or correct is a different matter!
Our job is to help you cut through the noise and come up with a plan that works.
Strategy requires choices, not just ideas.
Ask AI for strategic priorities and it can give you 20 excellent-sounding ones. But strategy is about deciding which three matter most—and what you are willing to stop doing so you can accomplish them. A strategist helps organizations navigate those tradeoffs.
If you had unlimited money, time, and resources, of course you’d accomplish all 20! But we’re in the real world, with real constraints, so choices must be made.
People support what they help create.
You could feed organizational information into AI and emerge with a polished 30-page plan tomorrow. But nobody participated in creating it. Nobody wrestled with the choices. Nobody had their perspective heard. Nobody built consensus around the direction. A strategic plan isn’t transformative because the words are good. It’s transformative because people believe in where they’re going.
That’s why we bring all the stakeholders into the room. We have tactics that allow for everyone’s voice to be heard and everyone to contribute towards making the plan. We want you to leave with a document that everyone is proud to own.
Humans can manage the room.
Strategic planning involves personalities, politics, power dynamics, competing priorities, history, and occasionally hurt feelings.
An experienced facilitator recognizes who dominates the conversation, who hasn’t spoken, which disagreement needs to be explored, and which one needs to be redirected. That’s not incidental to strategic planning. That’s the work.
We maintain a respectful environment and ensure no one gets talked over or forgotten.
Experience provides judgement.
AI can tell you what organizations typically do. But is your business ever typical? And does “typical” make your organization unforgettable?
Experienced strategists have seen what actually happens when organizations try it. They can recognize unrealistic timelines, vague objectives, vanity metrics, scope creep, implementation traps, and plans that look beautiful but will be forgotten six months later. You deserve custom.
Your organization doesn’t need a generic “good enough” plan.
AI is exceptionally capable of producing something that sounds like a strategic plan: strengthen partnerships, increase awareness, improve operational efficiency, enhance stakeholder engagement.
All perfectly reasonable. All incredibly vague. All potentially meaningless.
The goal is to develop your strategy, rooted in your organization’s particular circumstances, people, resources, opportunities, challenges, and ambitions. There’s no such thing as a template or generic plan when it comes to your business.
Is AI bad?
That’s a question that’s above our paygrade! We recognize that it’s a complex issue with ethical, environmental, and practical concerns. It’s not for everyone – and it probably shouldn’t be for everyone.
AI can help analyze large amounts of data and organize information. It does have its purpose and a place in today’s tech-heavy world.
At the end of the day, though, AI is simply a tool. But a hammer doesn’t build a whole house by itself. That’s where human brains and effort are required.
You don’t hire a strategic planner for the document.
You hire them for the thinking that creates it.