- Mon, 7 September 2026
The direction is set; the board has been locked away with consultants, analysts and technology vendors. An all-hands meeting takes everybody through an impressive presentation. The summary is:
To achieve this, a new AI steering committee will be set up. The communication is very clear: AI is the future, and this company is going there.
However, most people are left wondering: What does this mean for me? Will I still have a job in six months?
It certainly creates activity, with some software developers using AI tools for coding. Marketing is using AI to generate content for its campaigns. Operations are automating some of their processes. Generally, employees are experimenting with public AI tools, regardless of whether they are formally permitted to do so. The new AI steering committee is working with legal, security and risk management teams to get control.
Managers report that productivity is up in their departments. Yet when the board looks for evidence that all this activity is creating meaningful business or customer outcomes, the picture is much less clear. There is certainly an AI programme, but that doesn’t necessarily amount to a strategy.
Plenty is happening, but there is little connecting it together. Each area is finding ways to do more AI without a shared understanding of what customer or organisational problems are actually being solved.
The board convenes and decides the problem is communication. So they decide that they need to simplify the message and hold another all-hands meeting. They make new promises to hold AI training sessions, appoint AI champions, and set targets for tool use. This refined approach should do it.
But the problem is not that people have failed to hear the strategy. The problem is that they were not involved in making sense of it. Communication cannot compensate for the absence of participation. A purely top-down strategy assumes that the people at the top possess the necessary intelligence, while everyone else’s role is execution. Separating thinking from doing is a recurring feature of traditional management thinking that still permeates our organisations.
I don’t have a problem with leaders setting direction. I do have a problem with the idea that all thinking happens at the top, and everyone else’s job is simply to execute it.
The alternative is Continuous Participatory Change: involving people from throughout the organisation to surface tensions, contribute distributed knowledge, explore possible responses and use evidence to adapt direction and investment. In this way strategy becomes an ongoing process through which people understand the purpose and context.
Participation doesn’t mean everyone gets a vote on everything. Leaders still need to set direction, make the difficult calls and decide where to invest. The difference is that they shape the strategy with input from people across the organisation, rather than working it out at the top and then handing it down.
Direction can come from the top. Intelligence must come from everywhere.
Don’t start by asking: How could we use AI? What products could we build? What can we automate? We could generate hundreds of AI ideas. But why? What problem or opportunity are we actually trying to address? Perhaps “What is our AI strategy?” is the wrong question. AI is a capability, not an outcome. Start by asking: What is the organisation trying to achieve? Then explore where AI changes what is possible.
Rather than jumping to solutions, bring customers and employees into the conversation. What are we trying to change? Why does it matter now? What would progress actually look like?
Then instead of “We will become an AI-first company”, the intent might be closer to:
“We want to make it quicker and easier for customers to get complex problems resolved. We’ll explore where AI can help, while making sure people can still step in when judgement is needed.”
That gives people a direction to work towards without pretending we already know the answer.
A great way to connect the organisation is to open up the strategy, invite people from across the organisation to participate in diagnosing the real problems or opportunities and distil that into an essential intent.
Bringing together customers, employees, specialists, leaders and partners gives you a view of many different parts of the system. Their contributions reveal tensions that an executive workshop alone would miss.
The challenge is avoiding two unhelpful extremes:
Central control | Unbounded activity |
A few leaders decide everything | Everyone launches disconnected experiments |
Local intelligence is lost | Strategic coherence is lost |
Compliance replaces ownership | Novelty replaces purpose |
Participation works best when people share the intent, understand the constraints and have room to explore.
Perhaps the chief executive is enthusiastic about an AI customer-service agent. It is highly visible, and the competitors have one as well. An impressive sales demonstration from a supplier has convinced him. The funding has been allocated.
But conversations with customers and frontline staff reveal that the principal problem is not the absence of a chatbot. It is that employees cannot access the information required to resolve complex cases. The more valuable opportunity may be an internal tool that customers never see.
So what does leadership do? They have already committed to the original idea. Do they continue with the visible initiative, defend the original strategy, reinterpret contradictory evidence as resistance, or change direction?
Inviting people to participate is easy when they confirm what you already believe. The real test is what happens when they don’t.
The essential intent must become meaningful at different levels of the organisation. This is where fractal purpose becomes valuable. Rather than decomposing the strategy into tasks, each part of the organisation asks how it contributes to the wider intent and where AI might change what is possible.
Customer services may explore reducing the time required to resolve complex cases while product teams explore new customer experiences. They can be doing very different things and still be aligned because they understand how their work contributes to the same purpose.
People understand not only what the strategy is, but why it exists, which allows them to make better local decisions without continually waiting for direction.
AI capabilities, customer expectations and regulations will continue to change. A strategy created once a year will quickly become detached from reality.
At regular intervals, leaders and teams examine:
The intent provides enough stability to create direction, while the strategy can adapt as the evidence changes.
The Enterprise Agility patterns I’ve drawn on here are Essential Intent, Open Strategy, Fractal Purpose and Continuous Strategy. Together they help create clear direction while drawing on intelligence from across the organisation and allowing strategy to evolve as reality changes.
Top-down strategy casts leaders as authors and everyone else as implementers.
Participatory strategy changes that role. Leaders still provide purpose, set boundaries and make difficult choices, but they also create the conditions in which the organisation can think strategically. Their job is not to have all the answers, but to ensure the organisation can discover and act on better ones.
AI will not become strategic because it appears in a strategy presentation. It becomes strategic when people across the organisation can connect its possibilities to customer needs, organisational tensions and a shared purpose.
Leaders still need to provide direction, make choices and establish boundaries. But they cannot create an effective AI strategy using only the intelligence available at the top.
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