Hard to Engage Staff on Vision/Strategy? In Your Sleep w/AI
Strategy dies in the gap between communication and activation. Two strategy consultants reveal why traditional approaches—town halls, PowerPoint decks, cascading KPIs—leave employees with metrics but no context for daily decisions. The problem isn't that CEOs don't communicate enough; it's that strategy never becomes alive in the minds of frontline workers making real trade-offs. Amy unveils ContextUM, an AI tool that walks CEOs through interactive strategy mapping, extracts principles through dialogue, then enables employees to query strategic dilemmas in real-time. Sales rep facing a contract decision at midnight? The AI applies strategy principles to help navigate the choice. Francis demonstrates NotebookLM integration—transforming strategy documents, transcripts, and interviews into interrogable knowledge bases where employees ask "what does this mean for my job?" Both approaches surface critical insight: AI is terrible at independent research but brilliant at extracting principles from human-provided truth. The breakthrough isn't AI replacing strategists—it's AI activating strategy through people, creating feedback loops that surface outdated assumptions before they kill execution. 00:02:24 Core problem redefined: not communication failure but activation gap where strategy becomes memory instead of living context 00:08:28 Why talking doesn't activate: one-way information delivery versus strategy as context for moment-by-moment employee decisions 00:16:30 ContextUM prototype: interactive CEO onboarding extracts principles, employees query real dilemmas, dashboard surfaces recurring strategic tensions 00:22:06 NotebookLM approach: strategy sources become interrogable environment, employees ask unlimited questions, surface outdated assumptions upward 00:33:03 Critical AI limitation: terrible at independent competitor research, expert at extracting principles from human-provided strategic truth
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