People think that artificial intelligence (AI) is capable of doing everything. Whether that’s true or not, I’m confident of one thing: AI can make strategic planning more fun—in multiple ways. Here’s where AI helps remove the drudgery from strategic planning.
1) AI Removes Time from Strategic Planning Activities
One major time killer in strategy planning? Documenting group input, plus identifying the new insights and emerging strategic themes. Thanks to AI, Brainzooming can now process input on the spot using various AI tools:
- Recording conversations to instantly capture what everyone is sharing
- Transcribing photos of meeting notes to accelerate documentation
- Asking AI to identify preliminary themes from both online and in-person collaborative content
Coupled with a well-planned agenda, these AI use cases support moving ahead with strategy planning while everyone is present and engaged.
2) You Can Lower the Stakes for In-person Strategy Meetings
When executives convene for a big strategy meeting, the stakes and the costs are high. Whether there is a specific financial outlay for the meeting, the cost of participant time and the opportunity costs associated with what else they could be doing are significant. Pairing online collaboration and AI before in-person meetings, Brainzooming is reducing the risks and increasing the likelihood of tremendously productive meeting time. We accomplish this by using AI to:
- Test questions in advance (at scale), ensuring that they work as effectively as possible
- Tweak planned exercises so that they’ll generate the types and expected volumes of input
- Generate plentiful ideas that you can seed within small groups if anyone experiences a slow start collaborating
- Produce examples that we incorporate to help people move through exercises more quickly
- Hypothesize an exercise’s end results to better manage group outcomes
As a facilitator, it’s always reassuring to have a good sense of the end results before we start. AI empowers us to shape more predictable outcomes.
With AI backing them up, participants can focus more on creative thinking and strategic contributions, making the experience both less stressful and more enjoyable.
3) Make It Easier for Attendees to Participate Successfully
Testing exercises upfront lets us develop “idea guides” for participants—if they want them. Brainzooming prepares these aids, as needed, to help small group participants accelerate their progress. Instead of starting with prompts and questions, a group can grab a few ideas to begin. They can use more of their time for both focused new ideation and editing attractive initial suggestions.
Introducing more options directly into the session enables us to shift the exercise mix. We can focus more on selecting and editing activities than taking extra time to generate more ideas.
Overall, freeing participants from getting stuck makes a strategic planning meeting way more enjoyable.
4) It’s Viable to Invite More Participants and Increase Diverse Thinking
One big barrier to inviting more people and producing greater input in a strategy collaboration? Something has to happen with all the ideas and comments. Using AI to identify preliminary themes in open-ended output, whether from an in-person workshop or Blast! online collaboration, is proving tremendously successful.
Having AI take the first pass at identifying themes (which is one of the most time-consuming elements after a strategy meeting) changes the analysis dynamics. We can now more efficiently handle a greater volume of input from more diverse people. This paves the way for letting Brainzooming clients dramatically expand the participant list. By including more voices, using AI enables a wider array of perspectives, enriching the strategy process. It also helps in developing more innovative solutions.
Brainzooming Makes Strategy Planning Productive and Fun
If there’s a way to make strategic planning more productive, Brainzooming is interested in incorporating it. Over decades of designing and facilitating strategic planning, we find that making the strategy exercises and activities fun is the most significant enabler to boosting productivity.
Interested in experiencing how to make your strategy planning more efficient, fun, and diverse? Book a free call with me today. Let’s explore the possibilities that we’ve identified and discuss how these strategies can apply to your organization. - Mike Brown
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