What goes unnoticed

How to make AI your best team player

A conversation in my strategy workshop yesterday shifted my whole perspective on AI implementation.

One of the board directors – an experienced executive – cut through with a brilliantly practical insight.

"Stop thinking about AI as a technology rollout," he said. "Start thinking about it as getting a new team member – in every team." He explained how each group in his business was asked to imagine AI as their newest colleague, one with some unique abilities but also clear limitations.

His marketing team, for example, 'assigned' their AI member to draft initial content and analyse market trends. His finance team had their AI 'colleague' take on initial budget drafts and modelling of projections. Even the product team found their AI teammate invaluable for brainstorming features and documenting specifications.

It's such a powerful reframe. Instead of vague directives about "leveraging AI," his teams are asking practical questions: “What tasks would we give this new team member? How can they best support each of us? What are they good at, and what should we keep doing ourselves?”

Question: If you had a new team member who could process vast amounts of data, work 24/7, and draft initial versions of almost anything – what would you have them do first?

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Your strategy is bigger than you are

Last week, I found myself flipping through an old strategic plan from the 1990s (yes, an actual printed document!). Something struck me immediately: every page was intensely self-focused, as if the organisation existed in splendid isolation.

Today's reality?

The most impactful organisations I work with understand they're part of a much bigger story. Take one of my healthcare clients. Their new strategy doesn't just talk about hospital operations – it maps how they connect with community care, mental health providers, social services, and even local housing organisations. Because getting people healthier isn't limited to what happens inside the hospital wards.

I also saw this brilliantly illustrated by a family violence prevention organisation recently. Their strategy director prepared a map of where they fit in a complex web – from police and courts, to GPs and health services, to workplaces and community groups. They know that they are only 10% of the solution to shifting deep-rooted social norms about men’s coercion and control of women.

All of my clients talk about ‘integration’, ‘collaboration’ and ‘synergies’, but I insist that their strategies illustrate WHO they’re integrating, collaborating and synergising with.

Question: Does your strategy show your ‘fit’ within larger systems, and your specific value-add?

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When good metrics go bad

I'm writing this from an airport terminal, watching bags appear on the carousel in the most frustrating way possible: two bags arrive quickly, then... nothing... for... ages.

Why? Because I’ve just learned that my airline measures "time to first bag" as their key metric.

It reminds me of a client who discovered their "80% same-day customer response" metric was actually making customer service worse. It turned out staff were cherry-picking easy cases while no complex customers got a same day response.

My job often involves unearthing these 'perverse metrics'.

A hospital wanted to show ‘responsive urgent care’ but wasn’t counting people waiting in ambulances outside their emergency department. An international aid agency that wanted to ‘reach 10 million people’ ended up biasing its programs towards larger families living in towns, not small families in isolated villages. An employment agency for long-term unemployed people said it wanted to ‘change lives’ but was only measuring placements, not job fulfillment or economic uplift.

The way I see great KPIs is that they act as lighthouses, not as targets. They should illuminate the whole landscape. When a doctor measures my waist circumference, she’s actually gathering intelligence about my overall health risk. When one of the many tech platforms I use (Loom, Menti, monday.com) tracks my engagement time, they're really measuring product value.

Question: Close your eyes and name your top four success indicators. Do these metrics drive the behaviors you really want, or are they just easy to measure?

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One of my KPIs for this newsletter is how many people react or interact with me. So, clicking the heart does matter (50 is good, 100 is great). Equally the number of people who reach out with comments matters (publicly or privately - 20 is good, 40 is great).

Before we meet again, I’ll be deeply thinking about what results matter the most to two organisations that are solving family violence, one that’s making a city more liveable for quarter of a million residents, another who’s making sure that every Australian has access to physiotherapy when they need it, and a hospital that’s wanting to meet growing demand (without growing its resources) for a catchment of 1.5 million people.

I’ll certainly enjoy my week, and I hope you will too.

See you next Friday,

Andrew