Arkaro Insights

AI and the Future of Consulting - Embedding Strategy in Organisations (Just Great People podcast)

• Mark Blackwell • Episode 21

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What if the greatest threat to AI-powered strategy isn’t technological limitation, but human implementation failure?

Following the publication of our article “AI, Strategy Implementation, and Human Collaboration”, I had the opportunity to explore these themes in depth with Barry Eustance on the Just Great People podcast. The conversation revealed fascinating insights about why human-centred approaches become more crucial as AI capabilities advance, not less.

Link here to the orignal podcast and show notes: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2316310/episodes/17521116

Current Reality:

  • Only 14% of employees can describe their company strategy
  • 71% can't recognize their own strategy when shown options
  • 85% of leadership teams spend <1 hour monthly on strategy

The Acceleration Paradox

AI generates strategies faster, but intensifies human implementation challenges rather than solving them.

Key Insights

The Airline Question: "Would you board a plane with no human pilot?"

  • High-stakes situations require human judgment and "shared jeopardy"
  • Same applies to AI strategy implementation

The Neuroscience Factor:

  • People's brains respond to AI change like "a lion on the savannah"
  • Triggers fight-or-flight, shutting down rational thinking
  • Risk: "Computer Says No" syndrome—disengaged employees

Solutions

  1. Team Design Principle: Those delivering strategy should help design it
  2. Reframe AI: From "Artificial Intelligence" to "Agility and Implementation"
  3. Human-AI Symbiosis: AI generates options, humans provide context and implementation

Bottom Line

"If you don't invest in human-centered AI integration, your organization will die."

Organizations must develop human capabilities to thrive alongside AI, not be replaced by it.

Send your thoughts to Arkaro

Mark:

There will still be an element of people who will say, well, I haven't got the time to do that or it's too expensive. I think the argument is the opposite If you don't do it, your organization is going to die, especially if you believe that you're in an organization where the environment is more complex. There's a sense of feeling that from the 70s to the end of the millennium, life was pretty predictable and planned. We weren't living in the Soviet-style five-year planning situation, but life was reasonably predictable. In general, people don't accept the world is like that anymore. The world is changing. The world is not obeying the 12-year budget cycles anymore. The world is requiring adaptive solutions. Ai can help us manage that and be more responsive and more agile, but at the same time we've really got to invest in our people to make sure that they can work in this and thrive in this way of working, and that AI is used to unburden some things, but allow more time and investments for the things it does to enable this rapid change. Welcome to the Success Consultancy's.

Barry:

Just Great People podcast, the podcast that introduces you to ordinary people who've done extraordinary things. My name is Barry Eustance and I'd like to introduce you to today's guest. My name is Barry Eustance and I'd like to introduce you to today's guest. Hi everybody, it's Barry Eustance here from the Just Great People podcast with Mark Blackwell, the founder of Ocaro Consulting in Geneva. Mark and I have been talking at length about the importance and relevance and integration of AI with change and transformation programs, the big questions that people will be asking does it replace consultants? Is it an adjunct to? How does it all work? How does it all fit together? And we've had some views and some thoughts, and I'm very pleased that we managed to track down Mark to a hiking lodge in Switzerland and you'll see behind there. Rather than have a virtual background. You'll see the relevance of that later on. Rather than have a virtual background, we've got a real one, which is a blanket. So, mark, thank you. Welcome to Just Great People podcast. Delighted to have you on at last.

Mark:

Barry, and thank you for having me. It's a great pleasure, looking forward to some fun conversation some fun conversation.

Barry:

Yes, indeed, absolutely. And no, no, ai, um, no ai voices here, mark, um, the serious point, and there's some statistics that I think are worth leading with just to sort of focus our dear listener and viewers attention regarding change and transformation and strategy. And I should also point out that mark has got a very strong background, not only in consulting but in corporate operations, having spent a very long time with DuPont and, obviously, his own consultancy. So Mark's got a very rounded perspective on all of this. And so, mark, over to you. I will, as usual, sit in the corner, ask the difficult questions that our listeners and viewers would like to have answered.

Mark:

Yeah, Thank you, Barry. Well, I mean, I think a lot of us are seeing in our LinkedIn feeds and other information sources that AI is going to take over and this is going to be the death of consulting and maybe the death of young consultants spending all hours writing slides, and I maybe just want to explore this hypothesis and maybe say the future of consulting may not be as bad as some of these doomsters are predicting, but I think we're going to maybe change and the last thing I am is a Luddite. But I've got some ideas which we can explore this afternoon which shows that really there actually might be much more need for supporting organizations with the advent of AI and bringing about strategy, programs and change, not less. But you made the point about statistics. So let's just think where we are pre-AI in the reality of the world and that we think we can do strategy and it's only going to get without it, and so forth.

Mark:

I won't offer a number of them. One study suggested a few years ago only 14% of employees and that includes the executives could actually describe their corporate strategy. Another one is when presented with their own business strategy as part of a multiple choice answer, 71% of employees couldn't recognize their own company strategy. Now, when we move up to the executive level, only 28% of executives can name three or more strategic initiatives in their organization. So 85% of leadership teams spend less than one hour a month on strategy.

Mark:

So the issue is where is the bottleneck in the process? The key bottleneck in the process isn't the amount of slides and charts and beautiful strategies that we've been producing for the last 10 to 20 years. The bottleneck in the process is getting it embedded and implemented across the organization. That's where it is, because if you think strategy is about producing 200 slides that get presented to the board and investors, great, yes, the situation at the moment is pretty good. If you believe that the point of strategy is to bring about change and innovation in your organisation, then self-evidently we're not doing very well, and execution is really a key element of all of that, isn't it?

Barry:

Buy-in and execution? The trail does lead, as you saw, mark, in the conversation I had with Hilary Scarlett and Julie Hodges leads right to the center of the issue, and that is the people in the organization. The AI can do a whole load of things, but actually, in terms of implementation, execution and buy-in which does obviously foster the concept of sustainable change and embedding it in the organization requires people. Would that be fair completely?

Mark:

correct and I really want to get to that. But even before we get there, right, let's say that we will be having more ai in strategy development. Again, I'm not a luddite. Let's embrace it, let's see what happens, right. But if we believe the world is vuca and we believe ai strategy is there to give us more rapid responses and updates to our strategy, we are only going to have more strategy updates, right? So that's only going to make the problem of people to understanding their strategy, believing in it and implementing it and working as a team harder, not easier. That's my hypothesis the.

Barry:

The hypothesis I think is actually, as we've seen, in fact funny enough with with the accounting function in organizations, whereas we used to have people focusing on the year end and then for three months thereafter nothing really happened other than other getting the year out and the annual the year end out in the annual reporting. Now it's running on a 24 7 basis pretty well. Um, it's. There's a lot of automation in the annual reporting. Now it's running on a 24-7 basis pretty well. There's a lot of automation in the system. People are having to still input stuff, consider it and actually make sure that what's coming out is viable and it's always on.

Barry:

And I guess what you're saying and what certainly I think is that strategy is kind of an everyday thing. It's not a once a year. Put it on the shelf, let it gather dust, Don't worry about it. We did strategy last year. We'll dust it down in September and have another strategy thing conference and a retreat and then put it back on the shelf again. It's every day, isn't it? It's really every day because it's also the execution, implementation and the measuring of the discernible introduction and implementation of the strategy.

Mark:

Correct, and that's that's the one positive. If we do have more iterative, fast moving updates and then moving away from the annual budget prison, that would be great, Completely with you. But I think we've got work to do in helping ourselves as human beings. And remember and I love the way hillary scarlet described it because I'm completely with it we are two million year old people who lived on savannah. That is what we are dealing with and let's not move away and that's how all of our neuroscience developed and I absolutely fully support her approach.

Barry:

Understand that and you can begin to understand how to manage and engage a team to get them on and we were talking to, julie and Hilary, really say was was very much about people, centric leadership and the neuroscience for organizational change. Neuroscience happens in, in humans, any being, any sentient being. That was a big thrust of the, the, the podcast we did, and there will be a link to that podcast as well. From this one, everybody and that's what we're saying, isn't it that ai is there and can do magical things that we previously couldn't. And I go back, actually, to some previous magical iterations, for example the cotton jenny, the steam train, the personal, the personal computer. I remember running in our organization on a Commodore 8032 with two floppy disks and that was magic, as was the telephone, where people bought a telephone and then put it in the middle of the room and waited for it to ring and look.

Barry:

I'm not trivializing AI, but actually this is and I have no doubt this is a revolution, probably to rival the Industrial Revolution, but actually human beings continued throughout the Industrial Revolution to be an integral part of the system, because basically the system has to be about the people who it serves rather than the other way around. How do we retain this balance and what's the purpose, what's the role of, of the consultant then in in that sort of system where you've got ai that's accelerating its, its intelligence, and it's not intelligence but it's iq, the, the iq equivalent, at a rate that is, is exponential 160 IQ of 160 last year, 1,600 this year, who knows where next year. How do we as humans, and how do consultants assisting other humans fit into that system? What's your thinking on that?

Mark:

So there are a number of ways that we can answer this. I mean it's building on the SCARF model and the SPACES model. Think about change to us in the modern day workforce Tilly was arguing it's like a lion running at you at the savannah it creates threats. Now it doesn't matter whether the threats are rational or irrational. Basic responsive Bain just goes into a sympathetic overdrive. The David Brock model is very similar to the spaces model, but we think about it.

Mark:

What does your amygdala respond to? To create a panic in response to threat, and it's scuff loss of status. C. Loss of certainty, A loss of autonomy. R a loss of relatedness within in how we connect to other people. And F. Quite interestingly, we respond very badly if we see a lack of fairness in the organisation and if we think about anyone who's been through any moment of change in their lives on a personal or team basis. When you put it as those are threats, it's no surprising that people shut down their rational brains as the amygdala takes over and sees some of these.

Mark:

I think it's very important to consultants to be aware of this is a perfectly natural response, and so some of the responses you see are rational panic, the other thing. You know, with AI in particular, it can do a lot of things. What it's not very good at always is understanding context and culture. So, as well as irrational seeing things that you're seeing in terms of the organization as you're trying to implement a strategy, there can also be a lot of very rational things happening in the cold face that haven't really been accounted for. Yeah, so I think you know consequence of that and they, you know I have a concept of understand, co-create, enable and sustain. It's arguing for a much deeper and longer understand phase of a two-way communication.

Barry:

So that the change agents and those that are having change with them, rather than done toize, re-evaluate and reassess strategies and strategic planning more rapidly. The gross error checking, the contextualization, the judgmental elements that are intrinsically human are going to be more in demand. Because, if I can and a viewer, if I can relate to a previous iteration of my existence where I was an airline captain Realistically, airplanes have had the ability to be controlled remotely for some time. We've seen it in the military environment frequently. The question here is, and I ask you, would you be prepared, dear listener and viewer, to sit in an aircraft flying from, say, London to Hong Kong, knowing that the element that was controlling your destiny had no jeopardy, no skin in the game, did not share your mutual outcome with you, because it was AI?

Barry:

What I'm actually suggesting is if would you willingly jump in an airplane and fly six or seven miles above the Earth's surface with just AI controlling you? And the reason I say that is because it's really relevant. It's down to what we are back to the two million year old savannah creature with an evolving brain that evolved for the savannah. Is that something that you would feel comfortable with? And if so, fine. And if not, why not? And I think the question here is that, ultimately, if you're looking at AI Mark, is it not the case that it is that contextualization, the understanding of the politics of the situation, understanding the sensitivities, the intrinsically human elements that certainly are likely to be lacking from AI for this foreseeable future?

Mark:

Absolutely For me. Absolutely. I mean, let's think about going back to the scarf model. I mean, one of the things that we're saying is fairness. Well, my team, in other words, should have a role in life. Well, that's one of the things that we feel threatened by and respond negatively to if we see an unfair evolution of the role. I think definitely that AI struggles with a lot of context issues and it also by consuming our roles, we will inhibitively lose our sense of motivation.

Mark:

What is the Daniel Pink story of motivation is you need autonomy, mastery and purpose. The misuse of AI could easily take out all of those. This morning I was thinking about this quite hugely. It may be for our British listeners might resonate more closely with this, but there used to be a sketch on Little Britain where it was the computer says no, which was just a sketch about how a completely demoralized employee just gave the simple yes, no answer all the time because had lost sense of autonomy, motivation and purpose. Quite clearly on the sketch. And this is why you know we've got to be careful what computers can do and we're humans but probably are much better than doing that.

Barry:

So and this the scarf model. David rock scarf model very closely models and aligns with hillary scarlett's uh neuroscience for organizational change, spaces model, and spaces stands for self-esteem purpose. So s for self-esteem, p for for purpose, a for autonomy, c for certainty, e for equity very important and S for social connection. It's interesting that the neural pathways for lack of social connection are the same as the normal physical pain pathways, and so we're wired up thus. That is what the science is suggesting we need, and it gives us a very unique set of skills. I think that would be extremely difficult to replace and one of the things both Mark and I use AI a lot, so we're not Luddites, we're actually users in context of AI. But it's actually putting that in context, isn't it, mark? The two sit working side by side. One is not there to replace the other. Ai is not there to replace the human being, but may change how they interact with human beings. I mean just to be absolutely clear.

Mark:

right now you're describing the status quo, but if within two years time we may be in a different situation, but at least I would hope that someone had listened to this discussion who was able to think that some design of the advance accounts for neuroscience. So we'll we'll rewind to this and see what we get.

Barry:

And how do you, how do you see it developing, and where can we leverage the advantage of that symbiotics existence between AI and humans to really be of benefit to humanity and the organizations that we, as consultants, serve?

Mark:

benefit to humanity and to the organizations that we, as consultants, serve. Yeah, so I for me. Um, I think there is still there's a lot of work to be understood. What is a strategy framework? Why are you talking about definitions on that? Because there's already so much confusion, even amongst the parent experts about what strategy means how we bring about this right that it is likely that people who influence the development of AI are not going to be terribly detailed in that, and that I understand the implications of not considering how we bring about change in the organization.

Mark:

So top of my list would really to get change management experts, psychologists and business people with a bit of time to think really carefully about implementation of these tools in organizations, because we're already seeing signs of rushed AI implementations into businesses with lots of mistakes. That should be a big warning to us, right? Maybe the cost hasn't been so high so far, but I'm hinting that, you know, a few more misapplications or a few poorly designed implementations of the tool could have much more far-reaching negative consequences than we have so far really thought through. So, purely in my narrow world of strategy, change and implementation, let's start getting some common language about what these ideas are all about and make sure people do not see strategy as 200 slides delivered on powerpoint and forgotten about within a couple of months yeah, exactly, and of course, verily, wherever you shall find five strategists, you'll find at least 200 definitions of strategy as well.

Barry:

So, so that we need to, we need to have a common language. Much as we do in the air, I have to say um, so you're, you're, you're going to start a business or you're running a business. Your livelihood depends on the success of that business. To whom do you entrust the?

Mark:

the planning, the strategizing and the implementation of that strategy mark an individual with experience, or a team with experience, who's you know, rather than yes, being using a, a tool as catalyst, the facilitator, to cut down on all the drudgery. And you know, research is great with AI, absolutely sure. Context is not all so great. You know, I think it made me miss time to make reference to Chris Fox in the Strapmap app. As Chris himself will say, it gives you every prompt. The AI can give you a lot of ideas, right, but the wrong thing to do is to say yes to all the ideas. Themselves will say it gives you every prompt there. I can give you a lot of ideas, right, but the wrong thing to do is to say yes to all the ideas.

Mark:

Yeah, exactly the right thing to do is to review them for context built on experience and wisdom, to say okay, thank you, ai. Which of your ideas are we going to accept or reject?

Barry:

yeah, yeah, yeah, and build on them for those who aren't aware of stratnav app it's it's actually my go-to daily strategic planning app. I use it for everything from meetings through strategy build and assisting clients with their corporate planning, and it's it is ai powered, not enabled powered, I mean it's. It's got that capability to to do a huge amount of the heavy lifting so that we can make informed judgments about the elements that AI suggests that are added to the plan, but also gives us the opportunity to reject them and say it does that heavy, tedious lifting that would otherwise have taken weeks, perhaps sometimes months, to build a strategy. And you can build a very powerful strategy very rapidly by using contextual interventions with what AI comes up with. And I think that's the point, mark, isn't it that you're making here?

Mark:

So the first thing, you asked me who should be doing this? So, yes, all of the AI support. Yes, you use experience and wisdom to help with the context. But, even more important than that, who should be designing the strategy is the team that has to deliver it. This is the bit that is really one of the key reasons why so many training programs creates 200 slides, does it for the organization, imposes it on the organization and then expected people to deliver Again, that's known. All the psychology tools that we've learned about and bring in something like ADKAR. You know, be aware of something, desire it, have knowledge, be able and to reinforce it, desire comes by having some skin in the game. If you have built your own solution, you're more likely to have ownership, not a sense of rejection, and you'll be engaged in the implementation.

Barry:

And you'll understand it critically, you'll understand it. It's not a thing in a black box that you have no knowledge of and don't understand the implications of it. It goes back to that question I posed, probably about five minutes ago, and that is so. If your listener, viewer, that's you out there are running your organization, are you going to trust it to AI to do the whole planning or are you going to do something else where there's a hybrid solution that AI helps the people who actually have got skin in the game ie you and your advisors helps and assists to arrive at more timely solutions and probably more well-researched solutions within that time boundary, so things that would have taken weeks or months can now be acquired in minutes or less.

Barry:

What is your thoughts on that? Dear viewer and listener, and Mark, I'll throw the same question over to you again, because it is kind of at the nub of this how do you get buy-in in an organisation, the critical buy-in for change and transformation, unless you have specific and direct human interaction? I don't think you can.

Mark:

You can't. So then there is a difficulty. The obvious statement yes, okay. So does that mean that 20,000 people in a large organization should be designing the corporate strategy? No, I don't mean that. What I do mean is that you should have some sort of hierarchies and nested flow down of strategy so that those in their work teams for which they are bound by the strategy above them and the constraints that gives them have a sense of ownership and design of what they should be doing yeah, and can be involved in the, the working up of the strategy and the development of the strategy in a controlled environment where everybody's part of a greater picture.

Barry:

it's not a free-for-all, but that buy-in is probably, if you take the Hilary Scarlett's work Neuroscience for Organizational Change and Julie Hodges' People-Centric Organizational Change and her new book how to Manage and Lead People-Centric Organizational Change, the common theme for all of those people and common theme is buy in, isn't it? And getting over the, the Savannah fight or flight response to change and take the threat away by putting the models we discussed, scarful spaces and it's going tick, tick, tick. All of those apply. We've, we've, we've covered all of the relevant neuroscience that is required to ensure that our people are on board and they're justifiably on board.

Mark:

Absolutely. I'd add on to it just to be clear. You know, on the one hand I have Scarf and the threats and on the other side of my head I have Pink and his drive. Autonomy, mastery, purpose right, autonomy let people design their own futures and implement their own futures. That means they've got to be part of the strategy, design and implementation. Purpose yes, mastery they have to think about what they're doing, so you can't devolve it all to a computer to give the answer, otherwise you'll get the computer says no response. That's what. It's completely obvious why you'll do that purpose. People need to believe that they're doing something and that's unlikely to be happen if they've given the laws given down above, with no involvement in creating what they're doing and why. It seems, when we think about it from a neuropsychology basis, it's all become so obvious. This is what. There is no other way of doing it, in my view.

Barry:

There is no other way of doing it. In my view Well and in mine, I have to say, I mean our own people change leadership management framework, which is the P stands for people-centric leadership. E is for empowerment, which is what we just discussed. O is to optimise the organisation so it's actually ready for the change. If you've got a cultural issue that is inhibiting change or you've got a structure that will inhibit change and get in the way of it, you've got a structure that will inhibit change and get in the way of it, you've got to change that. And then P is for purpose-driven vision. We've just covered purpose.

Barry:

People have got to see beyond the bottom line. They've got to align and have the emotional connection to it. Learning If you don't learn, you're going to get nowhere. So you've got to learn, because you've got to measure your change and adjust as appropriate. And then you've got to embed it. That the embedding, culturally, organizationally, requires guess what People. So that all spells people, our people change leadership framework. And that's why it's written that way, because it's about the critical element of change, successful change and transformation, and that is people Sits right at the center of it, as julie and and hillary both indicated and, of course, mark has reinforced. So where do we go with this mark? What happens next in terms of the adoption of ai and the role of the advisor in that context? What? What do we think is going to happen? What are we encouraging people to consider?

Mark:

well. I mean, there will still be an element of people who will say, well, I haven't got the time to do that or it's too expensive. The argument is the opposite If you don't do it, your organization is going to die, especially if you believe that you're in an organization where the environment is more complex. You know, we we can divide the rights and wrongs of it. We can divide the rights and wrongs of it. I've got my own view.

Mark:

But there's a sense of feeling that, you know, from the 70s to the end of the millennium, life was pretty predictable and planned. We weren't living in the Soviet-style five-year planning situation, but you know, life was reasonably predictable. In general, people don't accept the world is like that anymore. The world is changing. The world is not obeying the 12-year budget cycles anymore. The world is record, requiring adaptive solutions. Ai can help us manage that and be more responsive and more agile. But at the same time we've really got to invest in our people to make sure that they can work in this and thrive in this way of working and that ai is used to. You know, unburden some things, but allow more time and investments for the things that does to enable this rapid change Excellent.

Barry:

And you heard it first here, folks from Mark Blackwell A stands for agility, not artificial, but agility, agility and intelligence. So my A would be implementation and implementation. There you go Agility and implementation. And that is the ai we want you to, to consider, to invest in, to work with and remember for all of that, central to all of that are people. If you want effective change mark, please finish the sentence if you want effective change, you need people. There we go, it's easy, it's easy. So there we are Agility and implementation and people. And that from us, I think, will cover most of this podcast. I suspect you'll be hearing more from Mark and from me very soon as this whole thing rolls out. In the meantime, just keep it simple Agility, implementation, people, implementation people Sounds great.

Mark:

Thank you very much, barry, really enjoyed this afternoon, thank you.

Barry:

Mark, it's been great talking, and you too, and now to do a fresh air again. Yeah, thank you. Thank you, mark. Just to remember that Mark is currently sitting in a hiking chalet in Switzerland and has dragged himself in to do this podcast just for you, mark, thanks very much indeed. Great Enjoy. Thank you very much, barry. Bye, bye, cheers, cheers. If you'd like to know more about the Success Consultancy's People Change Leadership and Management Framework, please simply click on the QR code or in the link in the show notes below, and please do remember to like and subscribe the Just Great People podcast. Thank you. So that's it for today's Just Great People podcast from the Success Consultancy. We hope and trust you've enjoyed it. Please join us next time and please do remember to subscribe. Thanks for joining us.

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