Discover practical lessons and firsthand experiences from a founder who navigated the complexities of selling her company. This story sheds light on the strategic decisions, challenges, and key takeaways essential for anyone considering an exit or transition in their entrepreneurial journey.
CTOs from leading companies recognized by Inc. Best in Business offer their insights on how to foster responsible and effective use of AI in the workplace.
Leaders today face unprecedented uncertainty and need rapid, effective tools for strategic foresight. Traditional scenario planning, while valuable, is often too slow and resource-intensive to keep pace with today's fast-changing environments. To address this, some companies have pioneered an accelerated scenario planning approach that centers on the decision-makers themselves, focusing sharply on their key assumptions—called 'ghost scenarios'—that underlie current strategies. By explicitly challenging these assumptions through targeted, user-centric scenarios, organizations gain relevant insights that avoid generic or overly broad predictions.
This refined method also integrates generative AI tools to speed up research, scenario development, and the creation of engaging narrative outputs, such as AI-generated videos. Examples from Fazer, a Nordic consumer goods company, and Unum Ltd, a UK employee benefits provider, illustrate the process: Both leveraged AI to halve or significantly reduce the time needed to produce high-quality, actionable scenario narratives. AI was used collaboratively—as a brainstorming partner rather than an authoritative source—helping extend imagination beyond company boundaries while ensuring human judgment remained central to evaluating plausibility.
The approach encourages rapid strategic reflection embedded into existing planning cycles, making scenario insights timely and practical. This reimagined process supports critical questioning of entrenched strategic assumptions, fostering more resilient and forward-looking decision-making in an era defined by complexity and change.
In an era defined by intense uncertainty—political, technological, ecological, and economic—scenario planning emerges as an essential strategic tool, not to predict the future but to explore plausible alternatives. While this method often highlights uncertainties, its deeper value lies in identifying and clarifying certainties. Recognizing what is stable—whether material, knowledge-based, temporal, political, or cultural—provides a grounded framework for strategic decision-making.
The future is shaped by enduring factors such as infrastructures, institutional legacies, and social norms that resist quick change. These "certainties" act as boundary conditions that constrain and enable strategic options, focusing efforts on what is realistically achievable. A five-lens framework (material/physical, knowledge/expert-driven, temporal/path-dependent, political/economic, and normative/cultural) helps leaders identify these anchors, enriching scenario work and sharpening strategy.
By distinguishing between what is fixed and what is volatile, organizations can avoid blind spots and build strategies that acknowledge both constraints and opportunities. This balanced perspective fosters clearer foresight and more resilient planning, empowering leaders to navigate complexity with informed confidence and strategic clarity.
Summary: In times of upheaval, scenario planning is vital for exploring future possibilities, but its true strength lies in revealing certainties that shape what is possible. By examining stable forces through five lenses—material, knowledge, temporal, political, and cultural—leaders can ground strategies in reality, balancing known constraints with uncertainties. This approach enhances strategic clarity, enabling organizations to make better-informed decisions amid complexity.
In today's volatile economic and geopolitical landscape, scenario planning has gained prominence as a strategic tool for executives to anticipate and manage uncertainties. Beyond presenting a range of possible futures, scenario planning's full value is realized only when integrated with adaptive strategies, ongoing environmental monitoring, and an agile organizational culture supported by proactive leadership. Historical cases such as Shell's evolving approach underscore that without senior leadership involvement, training, and systemic integration, scenario planning risks being sidelined. Critical complementary practices include developing flexible strategies that balance committed and contingent moves, real-time tracking of external changes to refine strategies, enhancing organizational agility to respond to disruptions, fostering savvy decision-making to navigate uncertainty, and cultivating resilient leaders. Using multiple scenarios allows organizations to rehearse for diverse futures, challenge assumptions, and create shared visions that guide strategic choices under ambiguity and rapid change. Ultimately, combining these six practices creates a meta-system that empowers organizations to convert uncertainty from a threat into an opportunity, ensuring better preparedness and competitive advantage in turbulent environments.
Take charge of your organization's AI journey rather than letting it be shaped by others. This guide offers a hands-on approach for UX professionals to influence how AI is integrated into business processes.
CIOs face the challenge of integrating AI not just as a standalone strategy, but as a fundamental part of their broader business strategy. At Samsara, applying AI to specific business issues led to tangible benefits like a 59% reduction in customer support chats, 27% auto-resolution of IT tickets, and 40% acceptance of AI-generated code by engineers, which sped up development and allowed focus on complex tasks.
Adopting a venture capital mindset is essential—expect only 10% of AI pilots to deliver significant returns, and maintain a broad pipeline of AI initiatives to quickly identify high-impact opportunities. This approach helps navigate the vast number of AI solutions and prioritize investments with the biggest potential.
However, investment alone isn’t enough. Effectively scaling AI requires a strong change management program involving both top-down leadership commitment and bottom-up application by those closest to business problems. Samsara fosters AI adoption through an AI Champions Network and ongoing education to build organizational AI literacy.
Importantly, AI should be framed as a collaborative partner that enhances employee work rather than replacing them. The role of the CIO is evolving to balance external innovation with internal modernization, focusing on solving core business challenges, managing a strategic AI portfolio, and empowering employees to harness AI effectively for lasting competitive advantage.
The incoming CEO of Berkshire Hathaway and the former leader of Geico share the principles that have propelled their success in business.
In 2019, only 24% of large U.S. company boards were considered digitally savvy, with at least three directors experienced in digital tech, and these boards significantly outperformed peers. By 2024, that number rose to 72%, but being digitally savvy by prior standards no longer guaranteed superior financial results, as digital literacy became basic expectation. An updated definition including generative AI, AI agents, robotics, and sector-specific technologies now shows only 26% of boards meet the threshold for being digitally and AI savvy. These boards outperform others by 10.9 points in return on equity and have substantially higher market caps, highlighting the critical importance of advanced tech expertise. Industry adoption varies widely, with information services and professional services leading, while healthcare, mining, construction, and retail lag behind. Boards excelling in AI focus strategically on using AI opportunities, defending against cyber risks, and overseeing ethical data use. General digital knowledge no longer distinguishes boards; cutting-edge AI and tech fluency drives superior outcomes.
Effective leadership requires understanding AI as a practical tool to be applied thoughtfully, not just as a technological trend to adopt. Leaders must focus on purposeful utilization of AI to drive meaningful outcomes.
