A small business consultant was telling me the other day that he had the clients’ strategic plan drafted using AI before he got to the airport to fly home from the strategic planning session he had just run. Case in point: it’s getting easier and faster to form strategies.

But is it the right strategy? Did the team come together and put all the right practices in place to ensure they made good decisions. Did they check that they were answering the right questions? And did they do what is needed to ensure that the mental model of the future in each person’s head was aligned?

Given they engaged an experienced business consultant with a strong reputation, let’s assume all that happened. Now the real challenge begins: Implementation.

2026 has been unique in so many ways, from a war that caused an oil crisis and ramped up market volatility to a plethora of AI agents going rogue as the boom in adoption of AI accelerates. Chances are, the strategy you had on January 1 is already outdated as the world has shifted, uncertainties have changed, and your people are distracted as they learn to adopt AI.

There is that word again – ‘people’. Yes, your people are distracted, and they are taking risks and being told they’re the human in the loop, they’re accountable, they need to be more productive, and that AI adoption is costing too much and, and, and ….

Which is why I ask: What are you doing to help your people navigate these times in pursuit of your strategic goals? What are you doing to align team after team, to create a cross flow of much-needed communication and knowledge sharing across silos and ensure they all have a clear decision envelope to operate within?

Plenty to do. Take that last one, decision envelopes. Teams need to know their risks and the organisation’s appetite for risk. And if you put into play integrated performance and risk reporting, you break down silos and give the Executive Team the best possible chance of ensuring team alignment to what matters most.

As always, I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts on strategy implementation during this unique year.