#25 - Strategy in the age of AI: a hypothesis with a heartbeat

In the relentless pace of today’s market, the seasonal process of getting to an annual strategy deck can often be stressful and messy. Trying to align around a static map for a landscape that reshapes itself daily, often already out of sync by the time it’s printed. Many companies are struggling, not for lack of vision, but because yesterday's plans simply can’t keep pace with today's reality, especially as AI accelerates the rate of change.

When I was a technical director, one of the sharpest strategy lessons I learned came not from executives, but from our Quality Assurance team. They used a framework called Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) to create clarity. It looked like a testing tool. But it functioned as a strategy ritual, creating shared understanding rapidly, framed in a simple structure:

Given a context, 
When an action is taken,
Then a specific outcome occurs. 

Most strategies don't fail because the vision is wrong. They fail because this shared understanding of behaviour is missing.

What if strategy wasn't a static document at all, but a hypothesis with a heartbeat? Using a BDD-like approach, leadership sets the direction by defining the Given (the market reality, our principles) and the desired Then (the business outcome). It gives teams the autonomy to act, and the alignment to stay in sync with the When: the actions and initiatives they believe will bridge the gap. It transforms strategy from a top-down mandate into a collaborative process of rapid discovery, with clear guardrails and a rigorous, measurable feedback loop.

This shifts the focus from “Are we executing the plan?” to “Are our actions creating the intended outcome?” In an age of constant flux, the most resilient strategy isn't a map destined to be wrong. It's a compass, calibrated by a shared language of intent and outcome.