Strategy, people and technology · Reading note
Mission, minds
and machines.
Your strategy, your people and your technology shape each other. Changing one without revisiting the others can leave the work much as it was.
Start with the customer outcome.
Mission is the direction of the business: who you serve, what they need and the value you intend to create. AI may change what a customer can do for themselves, what they will pay for and what they expect from you. Those are strategic questions before they are technology choices.
Choose one outcome that matters to a customer. Ask what has changed around it and which assumption in your current plan needs testing.
Bring minds and machines into the same work.
Minds includes capability, judgement and the conditions in which people work. Can they question a familiar process? Do the incentives reward the whole customer outcome? Is it safe to challenge a senior colleague or an AI answer?
Machines includes the tools, data, integrations and controls that make the work possible. The technology can open up a different way to serve the customer. That possibility may change the strategy, the roles and the skills needed. The relationship runs in both directions.
Absorb the capability into how the organisation works.
Using AI to draft a document is adoption. Changing how a decision is prepared, challenged, approved and acted on is a change in the operating model. TIP uses absorption to describe that deeper shift.
Consider onboarding a new colleague. A faster policy summary helps. A better first month may also require a different handoff between recruitment, HR, IT and the hiring manager, with someone accountable for the experience. Technology, people and purpose meet in that work.
Method makes the connection repeatable.
Name the problem, outcome and context. Examine the current work before choosing a solution. Test an assumption, validate and verify the output, and review what happened with the people involved.
As functions create capacity and change workflows, bring the evidence back to the leadership team. Decide what to reinvest, which incentives need to change and who owns the next cross-functional outcome.
About this reading note
Adapted from TIP's paper From AI Adoption to AI Absorption and its Mission, Minds and Machines framework. This is a short reading edition, not a research finding or a maturity score.