The relatively recent marketisation of Large Language Model Artificial Intelligence (LLM AI) has significantly increased the pace of market change, and more specifically, technology change. During a recent EABITS collaboration event including the topic of LLM AI, a start-up organisation approached EABITS with a query relating to leveraging LLM AI to produce a strategic vision.
Organisational usage of LLM AI for the purposes of constructing, or advising decisions relating to strategy and strategic vision has certainly increased in recent times. While LLM AIs are capable of identifying potential strategic aspirations, LLMs lack the human capability required, and most importantly, current LLMs lack capability to identify and describe the precise actions organisations need to take. This article describes the difference between strategic aspirations and true strategic vision identifying why LLMs are incapable of constructing true strategic visions and the EABITS approach to construction of strategic visions.
A strategic vision can be defined as "establishing the desired 3 to 10 year future state of an organisation through conveying a compelling and aspirational future state". A strategy however, is "a long-term plan or course of action designed to achieve one or more specific organisational goals". Strategic visions identify where the organisation wants to be, whereas strategy identifies how the organisation reaches the required destination. An inherent obstacle (or pitfall) with constructing a LLM generated aspirational strategic vision based on the aforementioned definition is that the resulting strategic vision will lack content and rationale underpinned by actual strategic initiatives and produce a strategic vision lacking crucial strategic activities.
Organisations leveraging LLMs to construct aspirational strategic visions will therefore inherently attract ambiguity. This ambiguity surfaces as construction of inconsequential vision statements with multiple meanings and subjective target future states with no meaning or purpose (or result) for the organisation. Furthermore, aspirational visions are often constrained to providing broad and often useless guiding principles which exclude consideration for the practicalities of the transformation process required to achieve the vision. As a result, aspirational strategic visions can often become a company brochure having no consequence to the organisation in context of achieving some form of success or transformation.
It can be argued that aspirational future state visions are necessarily ambiguous. However, organisations adopting a more risk adverse approach therefore must accept an unnecessarily increased risk exposure as a result of the ambiguities of the vision. As an attempt to avoid or mitigate the increased risk exposure inherent within ambiguous visions, organisations will typically choose to adopt a more objective, outcomes based approach to strategic vision. However, this presents another conundrum as outcomes are typically constructed to target a specific and narrow objective which undermines the purpose of adopting a broad vision.
The purpose of this article is to describe EABITS proven methodology for establishing accurate and precise objective based strategic visions achieving transformational future state outcomes with precision while maintaining the broadness of scope required by a strategic vision. The adoption of this methodology significantly improves organisational capability to respond and capitalise across rapidly changing markets.
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