Visionaries gave us products that disrupted markets, but they always had a strategy to back up the vision. Steve Jobs gave us a cellular phone that had a touchscreen keyboard because he hated mechanical ones. It also played music like Apple’s popular iPod and offered a world of apps you could download from Apple itself.
When Herb Kelleher took Southwest Airlines nationwide, he had a vision for making air travel affordable for all: he would model it after Greyhound bus lines. For better or worse, that led Southwest to implement its less expensive point-to-point flight patterns, distinct from the other airlines’ hub-and-spoke patterns.
The vision drove the strategy, and, no doubt, many project managers and communications professionals made it work.
In recent months, I have heard a subtle but important shift in how professionals talk about strategy. Increasingly, teams are not just using AI to support execution; they are asking it to suggest direction. Prompts such as “What should our strategy be?” or “What is the best approach?” crop up more and more in both project environments and content strategy discussions.
This shift raises an important question: Are we improving strategic thinking, or are we outsourcing it?
This post explores the following:
- What Strategy Really Is
- Features of Experience-Based Strategy
- Features of AI-Influenced Strategy
- Comparison of the Two Approaches
- The Blended Approach—And Its Risks
- Caveat: HITL Is Not a Panacea
- Conditions for Effective Blending
- Structuring Strategy in an AI Environment: A Model
- Practical Applications
- Strategy Still Requires Human Ownership
DK Consulting of Colorado 