Can't We Just Have the Robots Do It? A Cautionary Tale in Strategic Planning
As generative AI was exploding across the news cycle, I was walking into a two-day-long strategic planning session. The organization, with a 100-year history and a talented board, was excited to be together and think about the future. But, unfortunately, no amount of planning can prevent the inevitability of a group getting tired during a two-day planning session.
The grumble emerged as a team member reached for his 6,000th post-it note: “Can’t we just have AI do this?”
Well, can’t we?
I had briefly panicked about AI's implications for our grant writing department, but I hadn’t considered whether AI could write strategic plans. Once home, I opened Chat GPT, one of the better generative AI tools.
“Write a three-year strategic plan about a nonprofit that creates food access!” I shout-typed into its clean interface, with a Downton Abby-type accent only I heard.
What emerged was somewhat shocking. It touched on marketing. It touched on food variety. It touched on sustainability. The breadth of what it was able to do was shocking. But after the 500-character, a perfectly formatted document emerged, one thing was clear: This robot had read lots of strategic plans, but it didn’t know how to do strategic planning.
Before entering the room on this day, I’d surveyed hundreds of people touched by this organization, reviewed five years of financial data, and gotten to know each executive and board member. I had data and assumptions, but I could only begin to understand that data in real dialogue with the stakeholders.
It’s not meaningful to say, “Do More Marketing!” without a sense of what marketing currently exists or what barriers prevent marketing from expanding. A good planner enters the room, having built several years of understanding.
Perhaps the best analogy I can offer is a picture I asked AI to generate. We consider ourselves the local wizards of the strategic plan. So I asked Gen Craft to make a picture of a wizard writing a strategic plan. This first pass had a wizard writing something. Perhaps the long paper indicates that this is a Gantt Chart? Either way, while there are ten fingers, the seven fingers on one hand and three on the other model is a bit disconcerting. What was really missing, though, was the Post-its. Any strategic planner knows post-its are our number one tool of the trade.
So, hey, we’re not there. This technology may get better. It learns as we teach it. But it will never know your organization the way that a planner in the room - steeped in your organizational knowledge, ready to guide the conversation - will do.
We aren’t there yet.
