Building AI Strategy Part 1: The Week Your Executive Team Time-Travels.

You don't need another deck.

You need a clean room for thinking.

Imagine five to seven days.

Off-grid, in a remote lodge in the jungle.

No laptops during daylight.

Phones in a Faraday pouch.

Full management board plus domain experts.

Whiteboards, index cards, and one clear objective: reimagine your business with AI—then come back with a shared future, not a vague intention.

Welcome to the Imagine phase – the first act in a pragmatic AI strategy framework built for leaders like you. Over the coming weeks, we'll explore three phases – Imagine, Design, and Run. Today, we begin with the most challenging part: facing an uncertain future with courage. If that sounds like a tall order, it is. However, if you bring your entire executive team off-grid for a few days and follow a disciplined process, you'll emerge with clarity, courage, and, yes, a renewed sense of calm.

Before we dive into the four steps of the Imagine phase, let me give you the high‑level picture. The Imagine phase is about scanning the external environment and your organisation's internal landscape, then generating vivid pictures of possible futures. The Design phase (my next article) translates those pictures into a portfolio of AI use cases aligned with business goals, supported by clear governance. The Run phase takes those ideas to market with lean pilots and robust data foundations. In other words, Imagine creates the raw strategic material, Design turns it into plans, and Run delivers.

Now, let's roll up our sleeves. Here's how to run a 5–7‑day Imagine workshop – ideally in a place where phones don't work and the only distraction is the occasional monkey swinging past your conference room.

Day 1 — Art of the Possible: Technology Trends

Objective: Separate the real frontier from shiny distractions. Build an AI technology storyline: what becomes instant, what becomes infinite, and where autonomy shows up first—and what that unlocks for your economics.

You don't need a taxonomy lecture. You need a shortlist of shifts that matter: agentic workflows that actually complete tasks, generative design cycles that compress weeks into minutes, and adaptive UX where software tunes itself to the person, not the other way around. A practical approach is to divide AI tech advancement into three waves (the first wave improves efficiency, the second quality, and the third really transforms).

How we work: We start with slowing down and inspiration phase, led by top experts. After that, we pair "what AI can now do" with How-Might-We (HMW) prompts, deliberately colliding capabilities with your hardest questions. The Tech & Trend Matrix forces concreteness: one capability × one HMW per cell. No fluff, just potential use cases you can sketch and debate.

Artifacts as input for day 2:

• A crisp capabilities map annotated with near-term vs. speculative bets, each tied to a business tension.

• A first pass at wave-1, wave-2, and wave-3 opportunities relevant to your context, not the internet's.

Executives who can't articulate what changes when software becomes instant and self-adapting will overspend on tools that optimize yesterday's bottlenecks.

Day 2 — Market Trends: Competitor & Cross-Industry

Objective: Translate tech into market motion. Who's moving in your space? What can you steal with pride from adjacent industries? Where will switching costs collapse first?

This is where we set aside vendor haze and examine patterns of advantage. In the short term, competitors will harvest efficiency. In the medium term, leaders will sell higher quality outcomes. In the long term, someone will ship a new system that changes the basis of competition. That curve determines where your margin goes if you don't act.

How we work:

• We start with an on-site or remote session with experts in your industry, and key authorities in adjacent businesses.

• We use an Innovation Blueprint to structure the scan around technologies, markets, operating model, team, and assets you can leverage or must acquire. It keeps the group from wandering into punditry and forces choices about vehicles and partners.

• We map competitor moves to the three waves to see who's camping in wave 1 and who's already placing wave-3 chips. Then, we borrow cross-industry plays that compress time to value.

Artifacts you leave with:

• Trends & Drivers Report: One view of what's changing and what it means to your moat. Short, visual, and ranked by business relevance.

If your trends report can't tell me where demand, willingness to pay, and defensibility shift—it's not a trends report; it's homework avoidance.

Day 3 — Company Strengths Context: Constants & Change

Objective: Decide what must remain true about your company. And what should change when AI is native to your workflows and products.

This is future-back thinking: describe your wave-3 end-state first, then work backward to the present to determine the deltas in capability, data, talent, and model. The discipline is simple: name the few constants that define your identity, then get aggressive about everything else.

How we work:

• We run Opposite Thinking to smash sacred cows: write the assumption, invert it, and design from the inversion. "We sell software licenses" becomes “We sell outcomes." “We market to segments" becomes “We market to one." It's an inspiration for non-obvious moves.

• We capture your competitive strengths map: assets, capabilities, distribution, data no one else has, and the cultural edges you can compound—because tools don't differentiate you. Integration of tech with operating model, talent, and governance does.

Artifacts you leave with:

• Competitive Strengths Map that draws a line between your unique assets and the categories of AI advantage you can sustain, not just rent.

A truth bomb for the room: adopting AI is not an advantage. Or do you really think the vendor your rivals also use is your moat?

Days 4 and 5 — Future Scenarios & Ideation

Objective: Develop three to five plausible scenarios for your industry and your role in it—explicitly mapped to wave-1 automation, wave-2 quality, and wave-3 transformation. Then ideate bold, testable plays under each scenario.

How we work (format matters):

• Scenario writing in teams: each scenario names the customer promise, the value-chain logic, and the human-in-the-loop model. Use the Human Agency Scale (from human-led to AI-led with human oversight) to pressure-test risks and trust.

• Fast ideation: warm up with Crazy 8s to dump obvious ideas onto paper in minutes. Then Brain Writing to build on each other's sketches, not on volume in the room. This keeps politics out and creativity in.

• Collaborative Sketching: we rotate drawings, each pass adding one improvement or risk mitigation. By the time a sketch returns to its originator, it's a team concept, not a pet project.

• Wave-mapping: for every concept, tag whether it's a wave-1, 2, or 3 play. You want a portfolio across waves: capture immediate value while building toward the transformed system you intend to own.

Artifacts you leave with:

• Future Vision Scenarios & Opportunity Map: a visual grid—scenarios across the top, waves on the left, concepts in boxes with one-sentence value logic.

• For each concept, a rough Concept Card—customer, problem, solution sketch, early revenue logic, and a disruptiveness profile—so we can stress-test instead of falling in love.

Ideation isn't sticky notes. It's structured imagination that ends with choices.

Days 6 and 7 — Synthesize & Re-imagine: Vision and Principles

Objective: Compress the work into a memorable AI vision statement with guiding principles that leaders will actually use in meetings where money and careers are on the line.

How we work:

• We slide from concepts to story. The Vision Card helps the team articulate the promise, the four essential features, the risk that could kill it, and the reason it wins anyway. This forces courage with eyes open.

• We write five guiding principles—short, plain, and trade-off aware. Example: "Design humans as editors, not just creators," aligning with the reality that AI becomes connective tissue; humans shift from making to curating and orchestrating. That is the operating truth you'll manage to.

• We assemble the package: Trends & Drivers Report, Competitive Strengths Map, Future Scenarios & Opportunity Map, Draft Vision & Principles, and visuals that leadership can present without you in the room.

Artifacts you leave with:

• AI Vision & Guiding Principles—the north star.

• All Combined: a tight narrative and visuals ready for the broader org and board.

One-liners don't move organizations. Principled stories repeated by busy executives do.

Logistics

You want intensity with discipline, not a boondoggle with flip-charts. Here's the operating system:

1. A real offsite. No commute, no drop-ins. You're unreachable from 8:00–18:00, but we work max. 6 hours per day. The objective is calm down, slow down to improve thinking quality. Trekking in the jungle, or meditation are part of the recipe.

2. No slides during daylight. We sketch. We write. We debate. Slides are produced after the conclusions. And you have support for that.

3. Cross-functional by design. CEO, CFO, COO, CHRO, CIO/CDO—plus two rotating experts per day. AI fluency is a leadership capability, not a delegated topic.

4. Two decision windows per day. Morning exploration, afternoon decision. No parking lots that last beyond sunset.

5. A visible backlog. Ideas we won't tackle now go into an Idea Shopping Cart—sorted into now, <5 years, and long shots—so we don't derail the core.

Because clarity beats volume, every evening ends with a 1-page daily brief: what we learned, what we decided, what we dropped.

Why This Works (And Why "Pilot Purgatory" Doesn't)

Most organizations stall not because the tech is hard, but because leadership alignment is missing. When executives don't set direction and frame trade-offs, teams collect tools, not outcomes. The fix is not more demos; it's a coherent blueprint that connects market drivers to ambition, roadmap, and enablers—technology & data, talent & capabilities, operating model, governance, and ethics—so pilots roll up to strategy instead of dying in isolation.

During Imagine phase, you explicitly tie outside-in market drivers to future-back intent, then to principles that will guide Design and Run. The three-wave lens keeps you honest: if you only place bets in wave 1, your quality and system plays will be late; if you only dream about wave 3, you'll bleed cash while others bank efficiency and quality advantages now. Balance isn't a buzzword. It's survival.

You're an executive, not a tourist. You don't need more hype; you need clarity. The Imagine retreat is where you earn it—by stepping away from the noise, facing hard trade-offs, and choosing what future you intend to own. The rest is execution, and yes, we'll get there.

In my next article, we'll tackle the Design phase, turning your vision and concepts into a portfolio of AI initiatives, prioritised and aligned with business goals. We'll lean on evidence‑based frameworks for use‑case scoring, leadership readiness, and data foundations. We'll also discuss how to challenge corporate inertia without sparking a civil war.

For now, relish the clarity that comes from a week in the jungle.

You've earned it.