Strategic Planning While Laying in Bed
A couple of weeks ago, I was advising the CEO of a nonprofit on whose board I serve on his intention to conduct a strategic planning process. Though the overall topic was clear—thinking about scaling the organization—the specifics of what the planning process was supposed to address were murky. I suggested to the CEO that he outline the questions most important to answer.
As he worked on the request, he sent me a strategic planning proposal he’d received from a consulting firm—one I won’t name here—that outlined four deliverables they thought were important. The firm would charge us well over $100,000 for a four-month process.
Because I had a short break in the calendar before our follow-up call a week later, I laid down to put my feet up. In that position, I opened ChatGPT on my phone and asked it to address the first two deliverables in the consulting firm’s proposal. In just a few minutes of back and forth with the tool, even using dumb prompts like “checklist for nonprofit replication readiness,” I had a decent draft of those deliverables. Still lying down, I copied them into an email for the CEO.
Of course, we can’t rely on quick answers to set the strategy, but 10 minutes on my phone probably saved us a few weeks of effort. And because we could advance our thinking, we’ll be much more likely to hire a consultant for the activities where we really need them—and likely at a lower cost. As the Finance Chair, I’m pleased with that outcome!
Most of us know the power of AI tools, but the most challenging part about leveraging their value is that it often requires revising all the work habits we’ve built over our careers. The CEO wasn’t unfamiliar with AI—he just hadn’t inserted it into his existing framework for tackling this kind of work. My friend Jeremy Utley advises businesses about the implementation of AI (he also has a good newsletter on the topic), and one of his constant refrains is that the primary barrier to implementing AI isn’t technology. It’s our existing habits and mindsets.
I know firsthand how hard it is to change our habits because even as I was writing this blog post, I made the same mistake. I started working on a strategic planning proposal for a different nonprofit by opening a blank Google Doc—how I’ve always done it. Luckily, I was reading the book The AI-Driven Leader, which nudges leaders to make the intuitive shift from “How might I do this?” to “How might AI help me do this?”
I changed course on the proposal after realizing the best starting place would be to upload Strategic FUEL for Nonprofits, the organization’s RFP, and a transcript of the Q&A session their leaders hosted into Google’s Notebook LM and ask it to generate the first draft. I compared the results against my notes, and it was a pretty good approximation of what I would have written! (Having an entire book of writing for the AI tool to leverage surely helped create something that’s in my voice, but I’m confident including even a few existing memos would have done the trick.)
The experience of writing that proposal response with AI made me reflect on the bigger picture for those of us in knowledge jobs. As one rises in leadership, subject-matter expertise and the ability to process information become less important drivers of success. The presence of AI only accelerates that dynamic. However, as long as we have humans who need to coordinate actions despite having different incentives, information, and perspectives, there will be a premium on expertise in facilitating this coordination.
For the prospective strategic planning client, even if we pursue the process with AI supporting the analysis and logical process, the organization’s leaders will still bear the responsibility of the human process of preparing everyone to act on the conclusions.