Welcome to the 50th edition of The Pulse, your bi-weekly newsletter of Insights for Strategy Leaders. Elate is a strategy execution platform that helps strategy, operations, and chief of staff leaders align teams, execute plans, and see real results without the chaos of disconnected tools.
In this edition:
- Navigating Risk with AI to Unlock Growth
- Friday: Sneak Peek at Strategy Advisor for Pulse subscribers
Before we dive in, a quick heads up: This Friday, I’m hosting an exclusive 30-minute demo of our upcoming AI release. Reserve your spot here, and learn more below.
Navigating Risk with AI to Unlock Growth
A great Strategy isn’t measured on the merits of how the plan looks on paper. It is measured in the results it delivers.
In the last Pulse, I shared about the importance of building a great Strategy, and how AI can serve as a thought partner in setting a strong foundation. But ultimately the Strategic Planning process is just the start.
As Strategy Leaders, we must recognize that the original plan will change. From macroeconomic shifts, advancements in technology, or internal changes… it’s only a matter of time until our strategy must evolve.
But making the required pivots while executing the plan is easier said than done. It feels like building the plane ✈️ while flying it.
One of the biggest challenges Strategy Leaders face is processing the vast amount of information required to identify early warning signs and make timely, confident decisions.
This is where I believe AI can support Strategy Leaders.
From Time Savings to Real Impact
While time savings is always non-negotiable when it comes to the introduction of new technology, the real value is when efficiency turns to impact.
I recently met with a COO who shared that his focus in evaluating AI is the difference between realized vs unrealized gains.
Yes, AI should save time. But the real impact is when that time is converted into growth.
But that impact only becomes real when there’s a foundation for intervention.
At Elate, we see organizations jump straight into trying to streamline how they track projects or report on KPIs without understanding or communicating the ‘why’ behind them.
As an example, an organization struggling with prioritization might turn to project management to help track what’s happening across the organization and share updates with leadership. While there might be an immediate bump in visibility, nine times out of ten all that does is create a culture of “transactional tasks”.
Now they start to see the countless projects tracked and updated (often inconsistently), but nothing anchoring them to the strategy.
And thus, they drift. 🌊
They have a lot of work being done, but because it isn’t connected to the strategy or operating plan, the projects aren’t prioritized correctly or measured for the results they deliver.
KPIs fall into a similar category. No one comes to us asking for more dashboards. Everyone has plenty of those.
But those dashboards just become more noise. 🔊
And even when they find the right dashboards, KPIs don’t always equal context.
So how do we shift from unrealized gains to realized growth?
Proactive Risk Navigation Starts with Understanding
Well, imagine if you had a foundation for your strategy in which you could see the operating outcomes driving your organization’s priorities, and in turn, empowering employees to set the right objectives to deliver on them.
This foundation allows for true Risk Navigation.
Once the foundation is set, AI’s real power is in its ability to monitor this strategy to identify warning signs, summarize the perceived risk, and provide immediate intervention actions.
While the first step comes from a foundation being set, the true power is in how AI can constantly monitor this strategy to identify warning signs, summarize perceived risk, and provide direct methods of intervention.
Given enough time and resources, great Strategy Leaders can do this all on their own.
But this is not our reality. Time and resources are finite, and the need to process information is becoming increasingly critical to an organization’s success.
The ability of AI to layer over strategy and monitor what’s working - and what’s not - is game-changing. And, when tailored with past context and performance of your organization and trained on what to identify, we now have an additional resource on our team, monitoring our plan 24/7.
And it goes beyond monitoring. It's providing summaries of what’s happening, assessing the potential of the risk, and even providing recommendations.
It’s multiple resources all built to serve you and how you identify risk, and more importantly take action based on what’s being seen and recommended.
The only way to truly understand risk is to go below the surface-level status updates that today’s performance management, project management, and OKR tools are limited to.
The Risk You Don't See Until It's Too Late
A common question we hear is: “How do you identify when an employee’s status update is at odds with what the data represents?”
We call these Watermelon Objectives: green on the outside, red on the inside. And they’re more dangerous than they appear.
While the status update might tell us one thing, there are signs underneath the surface indicating that we have cause for concern. That folks, is one of the most important things to identify early, because it can introduce risk in our entire strategy.
If we had endless hours, we could uncover these by meeting with Objective owners and doing a full interview on the status of an Objective. But we don’t.
Which is why AI can help solve the challenges so many Leaders face when it comes to identifying, and more importantly, understanding the risk that lies beneath the surface.
There are three things we want AI to help us identify at scale:
- Discrepancies between status updates and measurable outcomes
- Sentiment in comments that suggests misalignment or flags connected risks
- Trends and pacing that that warn of at-risk objectives
There are more ways that we can help better understand what’s truly happening when we see part of our strategy move into the red, but these serve as a strong foundation for shifting from reactive to proactive.
That shift is ultimately what enables us to make decisions faster and with a higher degree of conviction than ever before.
Move Faster with Confidence
Every organization today is feeling pressure to move faster, while doing more with less. But far too often the idea of moving faster is met by employees asking, "At what?"
Creating a unified view of strategic direction that brings together long-term vision with tactical execution sets the required foundation to empower employees with clarity and visibility into organizational priorities.
This clarity empowers teams to say ‘yes’ to the things that matter and ‘no’ to the noise. This is the foundation that ultimately allows us to create the alignment needed to move faster.
Once we can establish an agreed upon direction, now we can start to accelerate with AI. Technology amplifies processes, but it can also expose gaps.
It’s our responsibility to implement tools that ultimately unlock our teams to maximize their impact. This creates the ability to turn unrealized gains into realized growth, which stems from our ability to move faster with more confidence.
If you’re interested in learning more about how Elate is introducing AI in a practical way to help facilitate the way organizations identify risk and take action more quickly, I’d love to share a sneak peek of what we’ve been working on over the past few months.
I’ll be hosting an exclusive demo webinar next Friday just for Pulse subscribers. It’ll be a 30-minute look at what we’ve been working on that makes these ideas real, and you’ll be one of the first to see it.
Details:
- 💻 Inside Strategy Advisor: The AI Engine Powering Strategy Execution
- 📆 This Friday, September 26th
- 🕙 12:00 PM EST
And if you can't make it, register anyway, and we'll send over the recording afterwards.
That's all for today, have a great rest of your week.
-Brooks
