Cultivating strategic thinking and agile tenacity in the AI era

When I look at today’s business landscape, I see unprecedented levels of technological, environmental, social, and political turbulence.

Rapid technological innovations are reshaping industries, while the dire threat of climate change is pressuring businesses to prioritize environmental sustainability – a challenge starkly illustrated by the record-breaking heatwave currently scorching India. At the same time, geopolitical tensions and major ongoing conflicts like the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine are compounding the turbulence facing business, prompting a fundamental rethinking of markets, organizational structures, and supply chains.

Against this backdrop, how can leaders effectively deal with these challenges? I believe organizations need to focus on three key areas: strategic thinking, organizational agility, and agile tenacity.

Strategic thinking is essential for leaders to anticipate future trends, pinpoint opportunities and threats, and develop long-term plans that enable organizations to adapt and thrive in a changing environment.

Organizational agility is required for business to respond quickly to changes, innovate, and maintain flexibility in their processes, structures, and culture.

Finally, we need leaders with agile tenacity who can navigate the complexities of the current business landscape, inspire and motivate their teams, and drive successful outcomes

I had the pleasure of exploring two of these areas at the Global Female Leaders - Changemaker Forum in Frankfurt – a gathering of some 200 forward-thinking leaders from business and politics.

Here I outline my key points and takeaways from the sessions:

Strategic thinking and artificial intelligence – a symbiotic relationship

The essence of strategic thinking is: Recognizing emerging threats; Prioritizing the right things and Mobilizing your organization to envision and enact promising paths forward. Moving rapidly through RPM cycles is valuable because you move faster than competitors and respond rapidly to external events.

Through my research and work with diverse leaders and organizations across several decades, I have identified six disciplines required to drive different stages of the RPM process: pattern recognition, systems analysis, mental agility, structured problem-solving, visioning, and political savvy.

The advent of AI-enabled tools can help “augment” executives’ strategic thinking by providing them with new insights and perspectives.

Take pattern recognition. AI can carry out simple data procession, amplifying our ability to recognize patterns, even in noisy environments. For systems analysis, it can make decisions based on predefined rules or algorithms. It can assist with goal setting and planning and even help improve our political savviness by providing deeper insights into stakeholder systems and dynamics.

For now, AI is a powerful complementary tool, but not a replacement for human understanding and judgment. Leaders should strike a balanced approach, leveraging AI's analytical insights while combining them with the intuition, ethics, and cultural understanding humans bring. However, they must also remain agile, continuously embracing AI's evolving capabilities as the technology rapidly progresses toward potentially eclipsing human cognition one day.

Developing agile tenacity in yourself and your leaders

Just as AI has the potential to augment our strategic thinking, I also believe it will challenge us to reimagine the way we lead. At a CHRO breakfast, we discussed how, in testing times, many people fall back on default mental models. Yet many of these models aren’t necessarily the ones that are going to help us navigate the turbulence we face now and in the future. And in some cases, they might even exacerbate it.

Earlier this year, I wrote about the adoption of General Purpose Technologies.  Think steam power in the UK, electricity in the US, and the internet in the developed world. These inventions all standout because of the magnitude of their effects across society and economies. Yet, while the adoption of steam power unfolded over a century, AI could alter industries with astounding speed.

What’s more, many leaders are living disconnected from their emotions, which is hindering their ability to mobilize teams. At the other end of the spectrum, there are leaders – especially in politics – who are stoking fear to gain power. So how do we develop leaders that can handle real-time fluctuations and build high-performing organizations that thrive in the face of adversity?

I believe in this case even the most brilliant strategic thinkers are futile without agile tenancy. This powerful combination of adaptability, resilience, and grit enables leaders to nimbly navigate complexities, overcome adversities, inspire teams, and drive outcomes amidst turbulence.

Adaptability refers to the ability to adjust and respond effectively to changing circumstances, new information, or unexpected challenges.

Resilience is the capacity to cope with adversity, recover from setbacks, and maintain motivation in the face of difficulties.

Grit, as introduced by Angela Duckworth, encompasses adaptability and resilience but also includes passion for pursuing long-term goals and perseverance in achieving them.

By understanding the distinctions between adaptability, resilience, and grit, we can implement strategies to enhance these qualities in ourselves and our teams. Importantly, agile tenacity is not just something we should cultivate in our professional lives. I believe we have a responsibility to ensure that the next generation can thrive in technological, environmental, social, and political turbulence.

Research shows that the most resilient children do not come from families with ascending or descending narratives, but from those who have a so-called “oscillating narrative” – that is those whose families faced bad times and overcame them. As Bruce Feiler noted in a New York Times article called “The Stories That Bind Us” one of the most important things you can do to develop resilience in your children is to excavate your family history for stories of intergenerational resilience.

In a complex, uncertain, volatile, and ambiguous world, it becomes more important than ever to mobilize, focus, and sustain our energy. By striking the right balance of AI-augmented strategic thinking and cultivating deep personal and organizational reserves of agile tenacity, leaders can build future-proofed organizations adept at navigating turbulence.