Should you use ChatGPT to write your strategy?
A robotic arm and a human arm, with fingers touching, alluding to Michaelangelo's Creation of Adam.
What’s the role of AI in articulating your business strategy?
That was one of the questions put to us during our recent webinar on How to write a winning strategy.
Our answer?
AI might be able to proofread your strategy deck. It might help you find alternatives to overly corporate language in an existing document, and nudge you toward a simpler tone of voice.
But we’d strongly advise against outsourcing the writing itself to AI.
Why? Because figuring out and articulating your strategy is hard work. It’s thinky work.
And ChatGPT can’t think. Worse, recent research suggests ChatGPT may be making our own human brains less able to think.
This same research also showed that relying on Chat GPT diminishes a person’s sense of ownership over their work. In contrast, if you’ve sweated blood and tears over your strategy, that’s going to shine through when you sell it to your investors and employees.
AI is not the only tool you need to be careful with…
One of the tips we had shared in the webinar was to avoid outsourcing your thinking to another bit of software: PowerPoint.
For example, adding a fourth ‘strategic pillar’ just because it fits your template better. So the software is now driving your business decisions.
Or firing up the SmartArt feature and shoehorning your ideas into one of its pyramids or virtuous circles or some other complex graphic. A habit that creates both visual overwhelm and confusion about how the parts of your strategy fit together.
We know this from experience. For example, when a client recently sent us their 124-slide strategy deck, which was full of abstractions, jargon and complicated diagrams, all set in a tiny font size.
It hurt our brains to read and we had to ask many questions to understand how all the different threads held together.
In praise of Amazon’s writing culture
The perils of outsourcing thinking to software are acknowledged at one of the world’s most successful companies, Amazon, where PowerPoint presentations are distinctly frowned upon.
Instead, people are expected to sell ideas by writing memos of up to six pages (rather than giving presentations).
Every meeting begins with a silent 20-minute period where all the attendees read and take notes on their copy of the printed-out memo. This reading time allows for much more informed questions, comments, and discussion once the 20 minutes is up.
Here’s how Jeff Bezos justifies this approach:
“The reason writing a good 4 page memo is harder than "writing" a 20 page powerpoint is because the narrative structure of a good memo forces better thought and better understanding of what's more important than what, and how things are related.”
Like using PowerPoint, asking ChatGPT to write your strategy for you may make life easy. But, as the saying goes, easy writing makes for hard reading — and vice versa.
Writing your strategy, like writing anything, involves prioritising, synthesising, testing and organising your ideas. It’s a process of inching and iterating toward clarity, sometimes painfully.
A large language model, which can mimic text without really understanding it, will never give you the clarity your strategy demands and deserves.
Instead, you need to do the thinking before your people can do the doing. So accept — and maybe even enjoy — the process.
Want help articulating your business strategy? Get in touch with us!
