The day I saw the light (of strategy)

Back during the PC revolution in the 90s, I was deputy Managing Director at one of the world's largest IT distributors. Size was our advantage with vendors, so we grew as fast as we possibly could.

But that growth came with a price. 

Our systems and processes couldn't keep up, and new PC models were released every quarter, making last quarter's machines almost obsolete overnight. Everything moved fast. We were all running to catch up. The growing pains hit all of us, no matter where you sat in the organization.

We still made strategic plans, trying to align everyone as best we could. But by the time a document was finished, it was already out of date, and nobody had time to read it anyway. 

Strategy became a theoretical exercise on the sideline, disconnected from the business we were actually running.

Then I met a guy named Anders Skoe. He helped us run better meetings and introduced a process that ended in a strategy on a single page. Suddenly everyone could actually grasp it. No fine words, no elaboration. Just the core of what we needed to achieve.

I've used a one-page strategy ever since. 

When Kristine and I founded Brainwells, one of the first things she insisted that we should change was that page. After being hit with strategy plans and documents literarily spanning hundreds of pages, she loved the idea of a one-page plan. But with her eye for design, she told me the one I used was too boring, it needed to be even easier to understand. 

We named it the Strategic Gameplan.

To know exactly what to write in the plan we built a process: The Activated Strategy Process. 

Two things make it work. It's involving, so it leans on the collective intelligence already there in your team. It also means that understanding, ownership, and engagement are built in from the start. 

When the strategy in addition lives on one page, it stays a real and living tool for alignment and follow-up. It does not become a document that only a few refer back to. 

Today, with AI, everything is spinning faster than the PC revolution ever did. And today, if you want your strategy to gain impact and the results you wish for, my advise to you is this: Although AI might be able to help you make a strategy on one page, if the content of your strategy isn’t built together with your people it is still hard to activate it.