#429 – August 24, 2026

Storm-Proofing Starts Below the Waterline

 

Hello, fellow strategists!

Most leadership assumptions — that a team agrees, that today’s AI pricing will hold, that a succession plan is ready— go without review until it’s too late. This issue looks at four ways to close that gap: forging real agreement instead of assuming consensus; identifying the risk of future dependencies on AI at its true cost; building succession plans that are more than a checklist; and using scenario planning as a diagnostic rather than a crystal ball. Enjoy!

 

Quick Takes

 

When a Nod Isn’t Really a Yes

Most senior teams and boards leave a strategy discussion believing they’ve agreed on the plan. Unfortunately, it’s a commonplace that few could write down, independently, the same three sentences about what’s actually going to change.

Writing in the July–August Harvard Business Review, Julia Dhar, Kristy R. Ellmer and Philip Jameson (Boston Consulting Group) call this gap the false alignment trap: leaders behaving as though they agree on why, what, and how to change, when actually they don’t. Tensions then emerge later as implementation problems.

Alignment, they argue, only means nobody is in anyone else’s way. True agreement means the specifics have actually been debated and decided — and could be written down the same way by everyone in the room.

The trap tends to arise from three tendencies:

• A broad goal stands in for a well-specified decision. “We need to be more community-led” or “we need to diversify revenue” sounds like agreement. But nobody has said what that means in practice yet, so each person quietly fills in their own version — and differing interpretations stay invisible until the change gets underway.
• Agreeing out loud is easier than disagreeing. Around a board table, “I’m supportive” can mean four different things depending on who’s speaking. And since we expect disagreement to feel worse than it actually does, people nod along rather than work through tensions that will emerge below the surface.
• The details get pushed to later. “We’ll sort out the specifics once we’re underway” is a promise rarely kept. Sometimes the urgency is justified, but once a change is in motion, nobody circles back to settle what was left as little more than a vague understanding.

Their fix, drawn from their new book How Change Really Works: Seven Science-Based Principles for Transforming Your Organization, isn’t more discussion — it’s more specificity, earlier. Before your next change plan gets sign-off, ask each person around the table to write down, on their own, what they clearly support, what they don’t, and what they’re still unsure about.

A nodding head isn’t always agreement. It may hide that the team hasn’t been asked to get into specifics yet.

 

Is Your AI Business Case Really Just a Coupon?

Identity architect Phil Hunt has been running the numbers on his own AI usage, and his conclusion belongs on a risk list rather than in a budget line.

Today’s AI subscription prices are defrayed by investor capital, not earned in the market. Someone is currently paying the difference between what your tokens cost and what you pay for them — and that party expects, eventually, to stop subsidizing your usage.

A typical comparison people reach for is search, and Hunt shows it runs backwards. Search was free because advertisers paid for it. And if it didn’t work out, switching to another model cost you nothing. With AI services, you are both the paying customer and the subsidized party, and no advertiser-equivalent has appeared to cover the difference in cost.

The bigger risk isn’t rising prices. It’s the dependency.

The more you depend on cheap AI, the more you may stumble if you can’t afford AI costs at more realistic long-term pricing. You might regret the system you retired. The role you didn’t backfill. The capability you no longer have in-house. If the price triples or quadruples, or the vendor doesn’t survive its own economics, will your business model fail? Will you be stuck with operational services and products you can no longer deliver?

Hunt’s remedy is ordinary and available now. Price a real month of usage at metered rates and use that figure — not your current subscription fee — in any business design, staffing or systems decision. Stress-test your plan at two to five times your current AI costs, and identify which choices you couldn’t reverse in the future. If your business case survives only at the promotional price, Hunt’s verdict is bracing: you don’t have a business case; you have a coupon.

Source: Phil Hunt, Your AI Subscription Is Subsidized. Plan Accordingly, LinkedIn, July 30, 2026

 

Preparing for an Exit

This summer we’ve noticed increasing numbers of boards and senior teams navigating the critical transitions of leadership succession. It brings to mind a data point from author Navid Nazemian, who says 40% of executive transitions fail during the first 18 months. 

When leadership stakes are so high, it’s risky not to have intentional succession processes in place. There is a persistent lack of preparation for succession across sectors of all kinds, and a majority of organizations have no succession plans at all. Of those that do, many have only token plans that check the boxes and sit on a shelf.

Instead, organizations need robust succession processes that nurture talent pipelines to fill major positions at all levels, whether for board, ED/CEO or senior management positions. We also must deal with cultural issues, internal politics, strategic direction and risk management, not just the technical steps of filling a position. (For more on that, see Issue #395 — The Complex Matter of Succession.)

Starting Points for Succession Planning:

In strategy+business, consultants David Reimer and Adam Bryant recommend we start with the what, not the who. As one telecom CHRO told the authors, “we seem stuck with the best practices of the 1990s”.  Often a board or hiring team is presented with little more than a short list assembled by others. Instead, structure your plan using these three key elements:

• Start with strategy and execution, not with the individual’s characteristics for the role.
• Build a shared framework (objectives, desired values, questions) for assessing candidates.
• Structure your process to mitigate bias and minimize personal preferences.

For succession planning at the board level, a recent Company Director piece featuring Steven Bowman and other governance consultants suggests it should be about more than just replacing the skills of a departing director. Your planning should ask what capabilities, perspectives and behaviours the organisation will need around its board table in the years ahead and firmly connect your recruitment focus to meet your future circumstances, strategic needs and emerging risks.

 

8020Info Drill-Down:

Scenario Planning as a Diagnostic Tool

Scenario planning has a reputation problem: it sounds like something done with a war room and a decade of oil-price data. Strip away the props, though, and it’s a thinking tool — a way to pressure-test your plans against future storms you can’t predict.

• Test your readiness, not just your plan. Run a few plausible futures — a funding cut, a sudden spike in demand, a key departure — and ask where your organization would actually struggle: resources, expertise, culture, or structure. The scenario is a diagnostic, not a prediction.
• Take small steps into the fog. Rather than waiting for the full picture, test a small move, see what it reveals, and adjust your scenarios.
• Decide in advance what you’re watching for. Pick two or three early signals that would tell you which future is unfolding, whether that’s a change in funding, a shift in client demand or a pivot in government policy. Commit now to what you’ll do if and when you see them. Don’t wait to decide in the moment.
• Use scenarios to look for moves that work no matter what happens. Some strategies pay off across almost every version of the future. Stronger communications, partnerships, culture, and efficiency tend to help whether next year is smooth or chaotic. (As the saying goes, a diet built for a diabetic is a healthy diet for almost anyone.)
• Don’t assume someone else’s best practice fits your scenario. As design strategist Jen Briselli puts it, best practices are a form of “crystallized learning” — reliable in a stable, familiar situation, but brittle when the ground has genuinely shifted. A borrowed solution may not transfer to a different scenario.
• When every option looks bad, employ scenarios to reframe the problem. Reframing expert Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg suggests asking whether there’s a better problem to solve than the one in front of you. A given scenario might reveal you’re looking at a symptom rather than the real problem. Or is there a path to it you haven’t considered?
• Run each scenario through “Own the UGLY”, a technique from leadership consultants Karin Hurt and David Dye: as you picture a given future, ask what you’d be Underestimating, what’s Gotta go, where you’d be Losing ground, and where you’re missing the Yes — the opportunity already sitting in plain sight.
• Does the scenario prompt you to look outside your own walls? If you’re anticipating a problem you can’t solve alone, or one that leaves you with no good option, collaboration may be an overlooked way through it.

Finally, to paraphrase FBI hostage negotiator Chris Voss, go into your scenarios prepared for an outcome better than the one you started with. And use these tips to survive contact with a future you didn’t expect! 

 

For Your Reading List:  Beliefs Bend Reality

In The Power of Beliefs, based on two decades of his research, author Shawn Achor identifies seven core predictive beliefs shaping human potential and performance.  They range from believing in agency — that “my behaviour matters”— to gratitude, connection, higher purpose, personal contribution and meaning.  The “I matter” mindset correlates with longevity, health and happiness.

As our colleague Harvey Schachter noted in his review: “The beliefs aren’t new. They won’t startle you. They are at the core of most social, philosophical and religious institutions. And they are important.” Achor includes practical tools for shifting beliefs and coping with what he calls “the great drift” arising from today’s workplace pressures. 

 

Closing Thought:  Spell-checking Woes

“Marketing writers no longer have to worry about spelling. Now we have autocorrect. And I am defiantly grapefruit.“
—  Community Joke quoted on MarketingProfs.com, Sept. 9th, 2025

 

AI Disclosure: This newsletter was hand-crafted and personally curated. In addition to using Gemini Pro and other online tools for research and fact-checking, the author made some use of Claude for polishing the prose and headings.