Leveraging AI in Strategy Development and Execution

I'm Randall Rawlinson, President of LBO Strategies and one of the co sponsors of the Practice. I and our other co sponsors, Transformative, you'll see. Mark Bills is with us today and the Army Strategist association welcome you to today's session. We're very pleased that you've all taken the time to attend. This is our fifth monthly AI strategy webinar and as you know, we didn't charge anything. They're always free. Our goal is to establish a monthly forum where we learn together about the technical revolution unfolding before us. Our specific interest here for our team is to gain a shared understanding of the impacts, the benefits, the barriers, and today the uses of AI in order to navigate this new reality. Now, I'd like to introduce you to my colleague, Robin Champ, our Vice president of Strategic Foresights here and our moderator for today. All yours, Robin.

Thanks, Randy. All right, the presentation will run for around 45 minutes, followed by a 15 minute Q& A session. Although TED said he likes being interrupted, so please feel free to raise your hand or interrupt TED and ask questions along the way or, or put things in the chat. The session is being recorded, but we will stop the recording at the end of ted's presentation. So if you feel more comfortable asking your questions when it's not being recorded, you'll have an opportunity to do that as well at the end and we'll make an announcement when that happens. So again, along the way, feel free to ask questions directly to ted, interrupt or put them in the chat, and we will engage TED a lot during his talk today. So I am very excited to introduce Ted Jackson who will talk to us about leveraging AI and strategy development and execution. Ted is the co founder of clearpoint Strategy and is a seasoned strategic management expert with an MBA from Harvard Business School and an undergraduate degree from Duke University. Prior to founding Clearpoint, Ted spent a decade collaborating with Drs. Norton and Kaplan, pioneers of the Bounce School scorecard concept. Ted plays a crucial role in developing clearpoint Strategies innovative software streamlining strategic processes for organizations. His deep industry knowledge and practical insights make him a sought after speaker and thought leader in strategic management with a commitment to excellence. Ted's impact on the field and dedication to helping organizations achieve their goals has established him as a valuable asset to the strategic management community. So with that, please welcome Ted Jackson.

Thanks, Robin, and thanks for inviting me here. I'm happy to to be presenting to y'. All. I'm going to be sharing my screen a fair amount, which might mean that I missed some things in the chat. So Robin's going to be helping me watch that and I going to give you a little bit more of an introduction to who we are here at clearpoint. But don't worry, it's not a sales pitch, but I think it's probably more for context on where AI fits into my world, my professional world. In the Q and A later we can talk about how I use AI on a regular basis in my personal life. But let me kind of quickly tell you a little bit about our organization, clearpoint. As Robin said, I started my, my business career working with doctors Norton and Kaplan, worked there for 10 years, then for the last 16 years started and have run Clearpoint. And at Clearpoint we've seen, you know, thousands of people use strategy management overall and we've come up with a success framework that guides the way clients end up using our software. It's around making sure you have a good framework for organizing strategy. You get alignment across your organization, you can manage projects, you do a good job communicating the strategy inside and where appropriate, your public sector organization may be outside of your organization. And then you're taking the right steps to simplify your approach. So you're spending more time actually managing your strategy and less time or more time talking about your strategy and less time managing your strategy overall. AI helps a lot with that.

Right.

So our tool again as you'll see it, because we built a lot of AI inside of it, but just to, and I won't be kind of, this won't be a training session for the tool, but it's known for its flexibility, its ability to scale and its user centricity. But, but where we've really been a leader and where we connected with LBL strategies, especially in thinking about things like this webinar, are in the automation that we've built into the tool. So you spend a lot less time putting in data or building calculations or trying to pull together that quarterly business review and you spend more time analyzing your results and talking about strategy. And that's where AI has come in as well. And so, and so we view AI in a ton of different places, which is the point of this discussion today. We work with a ton of different organizations. I've tried to list a lot of our non profit or public sector organizations, whether they're state level, city level nonprofits, big departments like a Department of Health or New York Power Authority, things like that. And then we're known for our, our customer success and some of the usability stuff. Hopefully I didn't take too much Time giving you an idea of who we are as an organization. In short, we make software to help you manage your strategy. You're tracking your goals, your KPIs, your projects, linking them all together. When we think about AI, we started embedding it into our tool last year and have thought about it in these two different areas like AI for strategy development or AI for strategy execution. And I know this is a working group focused on this. So you're. I thought I would kind of quickly start at basics and then move us more to advanced pretty quickly. So I'm going to start inside of ChatGPT just with like in the strategy world where we use it for brainstorming and where we use it for, for communications or how people use it for communications. So this will be to make sure you don't get the after lunch nap time a good place for you to put into the chat where you've used a tool like ChatGPT for your own strategy. And I'm using the free version here. But one of the things when we help a city or a county, you know, one of the things they say would be like, you know, how can we brainstorm better?

Right?

Like, like list five good strategies for making our downtown more walkable.

Right.

And so it's just a great place to start when you, oh great, this chat GPT down today. Let's hope not. So it's a great place to, to, to get started instead of a blank piece of paper.

Right.

And, and you probably saw in my prompt that I told it to only do five because ChatGPT can be very verbose and, and might list 20 and 20 might be a bit much.

Right.

And so this is a great way to think about getting started. And then you may want to then say, well how could we leverage this in communication?

Right?

Like can you write 300 word email to city leadership summarizing these ideas at the seventh grade level. So this is basically a way to use AI for copy editing in essence. And it went from slightly technical to just like, hey, can you make the sidewalks wider? Can you mix things up? It'd be awesome to have a place to live. Let's slow down traffic. So here's some very, very simple ways to think about, you know, getting ready and using this for, for your strategy. And, and since I wasn't in some of the earlier sessions, what I'll say are some of the benefits of doing this and, and some of the things you might have seen was I didn't need to put in anything about my organization at this Point, right. So at this point all I said was I'd like to start not on a blank sheet of paper, right. I'd like to just start with some information and then I'd like the information structured in a way that would help me communicate it better. Of course you can chat with a chatgpt so you could change, you know, one of these. But we'll get into that later, right? So that's just a simple way and for, for this discussion I'll talk like chat. GBT is, is, you know, the primary large language model. But of course there's Bard and Claude and, and X or Turk, whatever it was called. And several more are coming out on a regular basis. So rather than endorse one, I'm just going to use one as example for, for all AI. So let's go back to the, the PowerPoint and get into, to kind of some more advanced ways to think about AI for strategy development. And for this I'm going to jump into our application and again trying to take you through these concepts using our application clearpoint as a tool to show you. But again it will be less like a clear point sales pitch or clearpoint training exercise, more just trying to focus in on strategy assistance, on building OKRs and on doing initiative development overall. So, so let's jump back over here. I have a, currently inside of our application. It's a web based tool so you would just log in. I'm looking at a fake airline that has three divisions associated with it. This airline, you know, can have a typical strategy management system like a bunch of objectives, a bunch of measures and a bunch of initiatives maybe sorted by categories like financial, customer, internal and learning and growth. But you know, in the beginning you may not have a strategy overall, right? You may not have one that's very well defined. So we've created a bunch of assistants to help you through that process of thinking through your strategy. I'll come back to the okrs because that's what I'm going to talk about next. But we've thought, well, can you build some generic strategic plans around an organization scorecard? If I already have my organization scorecard, maybe a department scorecard, local government scorecard, a university, if I'm a utility, maybe an energy scorecard, state agency, nonprofits, healthcare systems. So what we're doing with these tools are, are plumbing the back end of a language model with guidance on how it should help you based on what you want. But we also have built a bunch of frameworks, right? Like everyone's familiar with the balanced Scorecard. That's where I cut my teeth on strategy frameworks. But there are also, you know, strategic horizons. What am I going to do in the short, medium and long term? The value disciplines from Tracy and Wiersma. Are we more customer centric? Are we more innovative? Are we more operational excellence? And so on and so forth.

Right.

So let's say we wanted to build our strategy using the entrepreneurial operating system.

Right.

And I wanted to build it for, you know, Coke Mexico, for example.

Right.

So, so what this is going to do is first it's going to say, okay, is the name of the scorecard the same as the organization? Because you may be doing something at, at different levels. Let's just for simplicity, say yes.

It.

Guesses based on its knowledge. Searching the Internet as well. It's a subsidiary of Coca Cola. Great. We know that it's significant. Is this the right Coke? And that's helpful in case you didn't choose something as well known as Coke Mexico. You know, you could. Is correct. No problem. Now it's going to teach you a little bit about the entrepreneurial Operating system framework. Not sure how many of you are familiar with that, so I'll just kind of read aloud.

Right.

It's a business model aimed at aligning and synchronizing all the pieces of your business to produce the results that you want. It's got six key components, Vision, people, data issues, processes and traction combined. Complete picture of your business. Have an interactive discussion to make suggestions based on this framework. Any questions about the EOS framework you did like, who developed this framework? So Gina Wickman, thank you for doing that. Here's the book in case you want to learn more about it. So again, remember, it's. It's an AI model.

Right.

So I can do that. Okay, no more questions. So what are my long term goals?

I don't know.

Let's say enter the alcohol and high caffeine. I do still. Caffeine looks good. Are these the right things that I want? And you make this one more specific or so you just type in whatever you want.

Right.

And. And then you kind of. Yep, looks great. And, and so what we're doing is trying to make that strategy development process easier.

Right.

You still have to be a human being can build a real model that leverages our experience on how you should be building things like strategy assistance or OKR assistance and things like that. Let me know if that answered your question overall. Okay, good. One other quick thing on the kind of getting started piece is, is sometimes what we find in organizations is that, you know, there'll be a strategy team and they'll build a strategy, and then they will hand over something like a project to someone else. So in this fake airline, a project like we should have a WI fi on all of our planes, and they hand it over to Izzy, and Izzy's like, okay, how do I get started on this? I mean, obviously you need a little bit of an expert if you were in the airline business on WI fi. But in clearpoint, we've also allowed you to have an AI assistant to build out key steps and milestones along the way. So it just reads everything about this initiative and you say, yep, because it knows the start date and the end date, which were in there already. And then what it's going to do is just build you some simple milestones. You can completely interact with this. So you can say, no change number two, change number three. You know, do whatever you want. Say, no changes, looks perfect. And. And then you can just add these milestones directly into clearpoint. Now, I would never really say have an AI tool build all the milestones for all your projects, but I think there are a lot of times where you start to wonder, did I get everything that's needed in this? How am I supposed to do something like this? You know, do I need more time? You can change the end dates here. You could change who's responsible for each of these items, but, you know, it quickly will add all the pieces for you and. And put them in a gantt chart, kind of spread out, you know, the right way. Project kickoff being really small, equipment acquisition being bigger, but installation being the biggest piece. So it does a decent job of helping you think through this. Again, not perfect. Strongly encourage people to use their brains and interact with these tools. But what we've seen is the tools help you move a lot faster. Anything else anyone would love to see or hear about or do you want to move on to the strategy execution piece? We'll move on. There are a lot of places where we think about AI helping you in strategy execution. So first, let me kind of quickly say I think of just very easily get on the same terms. Strategy development is that whole process of determining what your strategy is. The strategy execution is that monthly or quarterly reporting process along the way. Okay, so if we went back to our. Our full scorecard here, right. Remember, our airline has financial goals and customer goals. If we looked at a measure like revenue, for example, I might have a bunch of data for this and some analysis and some recommendations. Sometimes the analysis you get stinks Right, like revenue dropped. Okay, thanks. And you need just to do a little bit more analysis, right, so you can have AI analyze the data.

Right.

And what it does is it's analyzing last period in this year, in this period, in case you want to see some additional say, yes, long term would be great. It says, hey, look at the long term data. Come on, look at the year of data. So we're consistently meeting expectations until June. Then performance has been fluctuating. Okay, let's, let's copy that last message down here shows a significant drop. That's. That's okay. So let's come up with my recommendations. You can have the tool make recommendations for you, right? Investigate the factors that contributed to fluctuation. Develop strategies to stabilize and increase revenue, such as promotional campaigns, improving service quality. Conduct a thorough review of current revenue targets, ensuring they're real, realistic and achievable. You could say, like, how would I do a promotional campaign? Okay, so now I'm starting to get somewhere. So maybe what I want to do is copy this entire conversation into clearpoint and even take some of these pieces and move them back under here, say, all right, now I think I'm going to capture what I want for some good recommendations for how I can move forward. That makes sense. Like another thing that we can do inside of the tool. I'm just going to make some. Just do the recommendation engine again really quick. I'm not going to follow through with this. But what we could do is turn these recommendations into action items for individuals. So now imagine, right, we're in a world where the AI is looking at my data, it's seeing some issues, it's making some recommendations. I can tweak them, and then I can add action items to the tool, which means I then assign them to people. So I can assign Randy and Robin and Mark all different action items and then they would have them show up and they need to execute them before the next meeting. And they can ask the tool to build out the action items in more detail or ask questions on how they would do that. There are a lot of ways that they could, they could mess with it. We just wanted to give you some ideas or things to, to think about in that area. The. I'm not going to save this one, so. So good question. If you wanted to, you could take this data. Let's see if I can just copy it here. I think in the paid version of ChatGPT, the 4.0, the $20 a month version, you can. It's not going to let me cut and paste in the data in a meaningful way, but you could put the data in with a spreadsheet. I was working with a local government conference in North Carolina and we took someone's spreadsheet and put it in there and analyze the data and built a chart with it. So, so it's certainly possible to be able to do that in the, the $20 version of Chat GPT, but again, you're still stuck moving stuff in and out of the tool on a regular basis. So you're thinking, okay, is this getting me where I want to get? One last thing I wanted to show you. Let's see if I can just copy it here. I think in the paid version of ChatGPT, the 4.0, the $20 a month version, you can, yeah, it's not going to let me cut and paste in the data in a meaningful way, but you could put the data in with a spreadsheet. I was doing, I was working with a local, by the way, you can at the objective or at the goal level inside of clearpool Government conference in North Carolina. And we about talked, took someone's spreadsheet and put it in there and analyze the data and even built a chart with it. So, so it's certainly possible to be able to do that in the, the $20 version of Chat GPT, but again, you're still stuck moving stuff in and out of the tool point. You can summarize all of the linked elements, so all the measures and projects that link up to it, you can see how they're doing, but also at the scorecard. So at upward areas corporate, or if you were just looking in the western division, you could use the AI assistant to either summarize everything in the account or just look at the things that are off track. And so by doing this on a regular basis, so you're thinking, okay, is this getting me where I want? It's going to read your entire strategy for the reporting period, see how you've been doing, and then write up results and break it down for you. Because the, the irony and strategic planning, right, is that you do want people or in strategy execution to be reporting on all of your goals and your measures and your projects. And then your leadership team says, I don't have time, what to get. One last thing I wanted to show you, by the way, you can at the objective or at the goal level inside of clearpoint. Can we make this a little bit easier? Can you summarize it? You can summarize all of the linked elements and, and so Here's a quick summary of what's going on. We could even do some exception reporting that way. So it's kind of a, it's an interesting way to leverage this. I will tell you, inside of our organization, we've done this in a unique way. So we use some of the automation to, to, to send out emails to get people to report on their, their, their data that we can't automatically load. We pull it all in. Then about three days before our strategy review meeting, we have the AI assistant summarize what everyone wrote and we put this as the first page of the read ahead document. And then people read it and then they go through and read all the pieces and come back to it. So it's a really interesting way to be able to summarize all of your information. Okay, that was all I was going to talk about at this level, except I thought it would be worthwhile to go through a few guardrails and I think I have about five minutes and then we can open this up for, for Q and A, we can stop the recording, so to speak. Let me just read the chat just for a second. Yeah, so, so, so you're exactly right. You know, Robin, when you put in there, like if you, if you, you know, aren't buying a strategy reporting solution, you can still think about your strategy reporting steps and leverage what you can with AI as either brainstorming or copy editing. It's great at that. I've taken three different voices, three different people sending me analysis, and asked ChatGPT to write it in a common voice so that we can have a common, common review. There are a lot of things you can do in that sense as well as you can analyze data and you can do it in the free version, but you just need to cut and paste it in the right way. I was probably moving a little bit too quick there, so.