Chat GPT and your Strategic Plan (an off piste post)

How can you use ChatGPT (or similar AI tools) to help you shape your strategic plan?

?

Off the bat, I could have typed “Give me 20 (50… 1,000…) uses for ChatGPT when developing a strategic plan” into said transformer.? It would have saved me an hour or two of thinking and writing. It would have undoubtedly generated more than I could ever conceive.? And (in the mix of a fair bit of chaff), likely generated better than my limited scope could.

?

Mmm. OK. ?Well, I kinda think I’m going to stop there then.

?

If you want the answer to that question, type it into ChatGPT. Save us all hassle.

?

You can, of course, replace that first question with any form of expert knowledge / advice / guidance question, to help you plug the gaps in your thinking, spark your creativity, or be the draft for you to mould specific to your sitch. And you can customise it to the nth degree.

?

Do we then need the professed expert to bother writing the article themselves anymore?

?

Why would you bother reading a human-hand-crafted article that the AI, now, more times than not, even with its occasional hallucinations, misinterpretations and generalisations factored in, will do much faster, more comprehensively, increasingly accurately, and in a writing style of your choosing?

?

Chances are, the savvy expert creator is using the AI as a research lackey, ideas font, gap filler, provocateur or editor anyway, so why not just cut to the chase? Cut out the middle human?

?

Why might you look for examples of the raw human thought pattern and output when it’s already and waiting in a prompt box that scans further and aggregates more?

?

Is it so you can assess the cut of someone’s jib, the preview of value, in case you maybe want to bring them into the tent to help you beyond the article they gifted you?

?

Is it that you’re indexing more heavily on their lived human experience, and aren’t yet as trusting of the bits and bytes version?

?

Is it that you read their articles not just for the education, but for the entertainment, or for them as an avenue into an interaction with the human, or for sharing with others and advertising your proximity to the creator?

?

Is it just so you can press “like” and make them feel good, because you like them, and don’t really give a rats about the content?

?

This AI thing, with its LLMs and GPTs, is the real deal now in the knowledge transfer space we consultants inhabit. The more you relied on (available elsewhere) knowledge as the key to your value proposition, the more this inflection point is shaking your wagon, even if your proprioceptors haven’t picked it up yet. I’m serious when I say I was all set to write an article giving you my 20 cents worth on the?stages of the strat planning process I now use ChatGPT to help with, along with some examples of prompts I use to try and get the right intel. But it’s true – type in a couple of thoughtful questions, and version 4 of OpenAI’s remarkable assistant will do it better and faster and more comprehensively than me.

?

If my goal in posting on LinkedIn is to try and give you an advantage while being fair with my own finite time and what I elect to apportion to free content creation, then it just makes sense to point you to the quicker, better way, and get you to catch your own fish. Downside is I don’t get to look as smart or expert or maybe hook a new payer… but I can spend the time saved getting better at how I use AI as a tool to help me help my clients faster, better, more comprehensively, and so they keep and recommend me. Hmmm.

?

I’ve not used the tech to write a piece of content for me, nor edit one (more fool me I suppose, given how ham fisted a lot of my prose is). Na?ve egotistical purity-of-art perspective I’m clinging onto? Likely. I have no qualms in getting it to research, brainstorm, pressure-test, provide counter arguments, expand my narrow biased perspectives, and even generate custom graphs, infographs and photorealistic imagery for me (even if sometimes the people have extra legs). My own use and attitude towards the tech is evolving quickly. But as Ethan Mollick suggests in his excellent book “Co-intelligence”, you want to think hard about what are “Just Me” human tasks, and what you designate “Delegated” or “Automated” tasks for doing by the tech.? And I hope that my undulating writing style, for now, remains a unique signature element to the work, that helps you select or deselect from any engagement with me (plus I enjoy the word wrangling).

?

So this really isn’t where I intended to go with this piece. I suppose, like any best laid plan, whippy winds can quickly send you out of the tyre ruts into the scrub. I personally think it’s super-exciting to explore and blaze non-marked trails (albeit a bit scary if you’re alone). That’s where we all are right now. A truly different place than we’ve ever been (those up the back don’t know it yet, but they’re here with us). Feeling our way with something that has already changed, and will continue to change, how we work and how we deliver and derive value from our work, particularly those of us in expertise, experience, knowledge and transfer businesses.

?

My take (which ChatGPT can’t yet give you)? Start educating yourself, post haste. Read, watch, play, talk, experience, think, get to grips with the manual old ways now being a foundational part of tomorrow’s history. Your role will likely be valuable as a herder and applicator in some capacity, but the graft and manual labour requirements we’ve been compensated for have been bested. Reminds me of a story.

?

When I was 13 or 14, my late Grandfather, born more than 100 years ago, would sit at our dining table after dinner, and show me, on paper, how to calculate a logarithm (I know, fun times in the Forrest house).? Something that today, were you in a high school maths class (if they even teach it anymore), you would just push a button on your calculator to calculate, and that I suspect only truly advanced maths heads would know how to do manually today.? He left school at 14, Len, and could do a calculation I with my fancy science and business parchments would be flummoxed by today. Is your life poorer for not knowing how to do it “the manual way”?? Sure, foundational learning and all that. But you probably also don’t know how to build a log cabin, plough a field with yoked oxen, or use a laundry mangle either.

?

Back to the start. Should you be using ChatGPT to help you with your strategic planning? IMHO, unequivocally. Process mapping, research, scenario analysis, SWOT, PESTLE, industry trends, risk identification and weighting, question generation, arguments for counterpositions to your own, workshop agendas, group exercises, idea creation (ChatGPT is especially good at pulling disparate strands and themes together to synthesise “novel” thoughts in the middle of an unusual Venn diagram)…. there’s so much you can do with it, to complement or supplement your own thinking.? And pay for the $30/mo version, better. (And this is just one tool that I’m working on getting handy with – there’s a virtual shadowboard of them, building by the day, with lots of folk working hard to become learned guides).

?

If you see the logic of this, but aren’t quite sure how to do it well in your impending strat planning session (and still value the attuned human guide through the invariably lumpy process of a team workshop), give me a shout. I’m fumbling through to find my way with this “Centaur” approach to strat planning, as Mollick calls it (part human guided, part AI informed), but I think it adds immensely to the huge gaps that just relying on our own finite pasts and blinkered views of what's ahead tend to create in most strategic plans.

?

Charting Strategic Plans in 2024.?

Sextant, compass, GPS, or predictive algorithm?

Let’s lay them on the table and see which combos are useful to inform you and yours.

No logarithm paper required.

[email protected]