AI is changing how organizations approach strategy. Today, with just a few prompts, you can generate a 50-page strategic plan in under three minutes with AI.
It looks like strategy. But strategy has never been the document. The document is an artifact.
The high-value outcomes are the shared ownership and collective trust required to move forward together. It’s planning with your team not doing it to your team.
The hardest part of strategic planning is not writing the plan (the big ideas and even the goal-writing are never the hard parts). It’s helping the people who do the work change their hearts, minds, behaviors, and habits. This happens through inclusive discovery activities and uncomfortable conversations that surface competing priorities. Aha! moments – like when team members realize they’ve been solving different problems and talking past each other – build collaborative connective tissue. The trust that’s built as people wrestle with essential decisions together is the ultimate team-building activity. The shared understanding and buy-in that develop because staff, leaders, board members, and community voices took the time to listen with openness and curiosity to other perspectives wins out over a slide deck any day. At its best, the strategic planning process builds the will and operational readiness to move an organization forward together once the plan itself is on paper.
As with any wayfinding app, AI can help us chart a path, but humans still have to choose the destination, articulate the choices essential to the journey, get in the vehicle together, and navigate twists and turns along the way, staying connected, prepared, and focused, even when the unexpected happens.
That’s the work AI doesn’t do. It is the work Bloom does.
