A talent leader’s guide to critical role planning

Across industries, leaders agree: critical roles, those with outsized impact on organizational success on business success, deserve focused attention. And yet, most organizations still struggle to define them clearly, identify the right talent, and build the readiness needed to execute when it matters most. Despite years of investment in succession planning and high-potential pipelines, most organizations still lack the clarity and consistency needed to execute critical role strategy with confidence.

What are critical roles, really?

We define critical roles as those that disproportionately impact business outcomes and are hard to fill, often cross-functional, and deeply tied to strategic execution. They aren’t always the most senior roles, but they’re the ones that, if left vacant or poorly filled, slow down growth, innovation, or transformation. These roles often require capabilities that go beyond technical expertise like influence across silos, decision-making without full control, and the ability to navigate ambiguity.

Many organizations assume they know their critical roles, but often these definitions are inherited, outdated, or driven by hierarchy, not business value. We encourage clients to pressure-test role criticality by asking: How does the law of supply and demand apply when the demand for this critical role is high, but the supply is limited due to how difficult it is to find, train, and develop ready leaders?

The maturity challenge: what the data shows

Despite prioritizing critical roles, most organizations are not where they want to be:

• Only 21% say successors for critical roles are truly ready¹
• Just 25% have clear development plans for people in these roles²‍
• 50% are starting to expand beyond executive roles, but definitions are still narrow³

This results in a rise of business risk. Transitions stall. Significant business moments like product launches, market expansions, or leadership shifts get delayed or derailed. Even when roles are named and successors are listed, too often it’s the same few people rotating through stretch assignments without real role-level clarity or successor variety.

Three distinct talent needs we see

At BTS, we see three pivotal talent needs organizations must design for:

1. The role has evolved, but the leader hasn’t. The strategy has shifted, but expectations haven’t been redefined.
2. The pipeline is unclear. It hasn’t been clearly identified who belongs on the bench or whether the right people are even in it. Without visibility and targeted development, readiness remains more of a guess than a strategy.
3. A decision needs to be made now, and it must be right. The risk of getting it wrong is high, and factual, objective evidence is needed.

Readiness isn’t a one-time conversation; instead, it’s a continuous discipline. The most advanced organizations are building systems, not just lists.

Seven enablers of a critical role strategy

In our work across industries, the most effective organizations are building discipline around critical roles, not just process. We’ve identified seven drivers that consistently separate high-performing strategies from reactive ones. These show up in different ways depending on where an organization is at on their journey:

1. Strategic alignment: Roles are clearly tied to business goals and future priorities.
2. ‍Role definition: Roles are defined by impact, not hierarchy.‍
3. Building profiles: The definition of success in role is based on the future, not the past. ‍
4. Wide-ranging talent pipelines: Bench strength reflects diversity of experience, geography, background, and perspective.‍
5. Immersive development: Successors build real readiness through stretch roles, simulations, and job previews. Coaching enhances these experiences by helping leaders process feedback, build self-awareness, and apply learning to their context.‍
6. Retention strategy: Incumbents are supported with personalized development and visible investment.‍
7. Continuity planning: Institutional knowledge is captured and transitioned before it walks out the door.

What great looks like in practice

Most organizations rely on role titles, tenure, and intuition. But that’s not enough for roles that carry real risk. Organizations that are closing the readiness gap are doing more than refreshing succession charts. They’re investing in: custom success profiles, assessment-backed talent decisions, and development experiences that reflect the real demands of the role. Great organizations don’t just offer development; they also create role-specific experiences that build the judgment, fluency, and resilience required for the real pressures of the job. It’s not just about knowledge; it’s about role conditioning.

How future-ready is your approach? A quick checklist

Use this checklist to pressure-test the strength of your critical role strategy:

• Have you defined critical roles based on future business impact, not just titles?
• Are success profiles aligned with what the business will require tomorrow?
• Do you know who’s in your bench and how ready they are?
• Are your placement decisions based on structured assessment, not gut feel?
• Are your successors learning through stretch experiences and role previews?
• Are incumbents receiving targeted support that drives their retention and growth?
• Do you have a plan for knowledge transfer if someone in a critical role left today?

What you can do now

• Clarify what roles are truly critical by future impact, not just past precedent
• Be honest about readiness and measure it before placing someone in role
• Invest intentionally and build immersive, real-world development to match role demands
• Don’t confuse visibility with readiness; make decisions based on data, not familiarity
• Prepare leaders before they transition into a critical role so they’re ready to thrive from day one

Critical roles don’t just need names next to them. They need clarity, intention, and investment. Organizations that treat critical role strategy as a leadership capability, not just a process, are the ones driving growth and resilience in today’s market. This isn’t just about building a bench. It’s about building belief, from the front line to the C-suite, that the right people are leading in the moments that matter most.

¹Gartner, 2023 report

²The Talent Strategy Group, Critical Roles Report, Apr 2025

³Korn Ferry, Revamping Succession Planning, Nov2023 report

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We have more tools, technologies, and data than ever, yet talent challenges are only growing more complex.

AI is reshaping how work gets done, shifting roles and the skills required. Remote and hybrid models continue to redefine how teams collaborate, lead, and build culture. Economic pressure is forcing organizations to do more with less, making talent efficiency a business necessity. And employee expectations are rising people want more purpose, growth, and flexibility than ever before.

These shifts aren’t just complicating the landscape; they’re rewriting the rules. For years, talent operated one step removed, supporting strategy, but not shaping it. That worked when business was linear and predictable. Strategy was set at the top, cascaded down, and talent filled the gaps. But that world is gone. Today, strategy shifts in real time. You can’t launch a new go-to-market plan, integrate an acquisition, or drive cultural change without people who are aligned, capable, and ready to deliver. And that readiness can’t be an afterthought, it has to be future-back.

That’s why a new kind of talent leadership is emerging, one that moves beyond standalone programs and focuses instead on building integrated systems. It’s a shift from reacting to problems to anticipating what the business will need next; from patching broken processes to designing for performance from the start. In this model, talent strategy is no longer fragmented. It becomes a connected ecosystem where hiring, development, performance, and culture work in sync, aligned to business priorities and built to deliver results. In this environment, integrated talent strategy isn’t just good HR, it’s how business gets done.

The AI revolution and its real-world talent application

AI is revolutionizing how organizations attract, develop, and retain talent. From automating performance reviews and job descriptions to enabling personalized career path development, the promise of AI is clear. However, many warn of a trough of disillusionment. Reality often falls short due to insufficient data, immature infrastructure, and misaligned objectives between business leaders, talent leaders and across functions. Without a clear problem definition, technology risks accelerating misalignment instead of solving meaningful challenges.

Organizations must first define the outcomes they seek whether efficiency, insight, engagement, or growth before deploying technology solutions. As AI adoption expands, success will depend on whether organizations match the right tools to the right problems. Having the discipline to make this evaluation will be game-changing when it comes to delivering impact.

Skills-based organizations: substance or semantics?

The rise of skills-based models reflects both a desire for innovation and a rebranding of long-standing HR practices. While the framing may have shifted, the underlying work—job analysis, development planning, and performance alignment remains constant. Many of today’s talent challenges aren’t new; they’re longstanding issues being reframed under new labels.

To move the conversation forward, leaders must avoid fixating on language and instead focus on what truly drives performance when it comes to talent models: clear role expectations, relevant development paths, and contextualized application of skills. Prioritizing the right core activities will deliver the talent performance you need, regardless of what it’s called.

Manager capability as the linchpin

The most innovative talent strategies still rely on a critical success factor: the people  manager. Whether it’s performance enablement, development conversations, or cultural reinforcement, execution hinges on manager capability. The success of most talent initiatives ultimately depends on whether managers are equipped to implement them effectively. Manager enablement is the operational layer that determines whether talent strategies deliver impact or stall. Managers also shape the day-to-day experiences that influence engagement, growth, and retention.

Investing in scalable, practical, and embedded manager development is essential to unlock the potential of any talent system. Currently this remains a challenge to plan and execute in many companies, while some at the leading edge have leaned into this and are making progress. Looking forward, organizations that prioritize preparing their managers for delivering what’s next will yield more rapid results for the business.

Integrated talent management: moving from silos to systems

Gone are the days when talent functions could operate in isolation. Today’s organizations require an integrated approach that connects succession planning, workforce strategy, learning, performance, and employee experience. For business leaders, the structure of HR functions is secondary to receiving actionable guidance that accelerates hiring and performance outcomes.Achieving true integration means moving beyond siloed initiatives and building a connected system where talent strategies reinforce one another across data, design, and delivery. It’s not about where each piece sits, but how well they work together to deliver consistent, business-relevant outcomes.

For example, when identifying successors for executive roles, the best organizations take a systemic approach. They leverage business leader input to nominate high-potentials based on a consistent set of standards. They add rigorous assessment of people and business capability (often using external support) to reduce bias, confirm potential for more complex roles, and identify gaps. They then employ tailored development, run in partnership among the business, talent, and learning with external support, to address identified gaps. This multi-faceted approach incorporates perspectives from the business and HR while leveraging best practices from inside and outside the company, and ties outcomes to business imperatives.

Bringing “Integrated Talent” to life in your organization

Integrated talent refers to the intentional alignment and coordination of all talent-related functions such as hiring, learning, succession, performance, rewards, and workforce planning under a unified strategy that directly supports business goals. Instead of fragmented programs running in parallel, integrated talent strategies are designed and executed as a cohesive system, with shared data, consistent language, and a focus on outcomes that matter to the organization. It’s about designing for the whole employee lifecycle, not just optimizing parts of it in isolation.

The most effective partnerships, including those with consultants and external experts, often blur internal and external boundaries, delivering seamless support to business leaders.

Key recommendations for talent leaders to move to an integrated talent approach

So what does it take to lead effectively in this environment? Several key priorities are emerging:

• Understand the evolving business context: Start with a clear understanding of the organizational environment, where the business strategy is going, and the role of culture in supporting growth, before proposing solutions.
• Customize with purpose: Balance tailored approaches with scalable standards to drive consistency.
• Build your internal base: Credibility is built by understanding internal politics, brand sensitivities, and cultural norms.
• Elevate the employee experience: Amid ongoing disruption, meaning, purpose, and psychological safety are essential stabilizers. Make this a priority, and the business will follow.
• Build meta-skills: Leadership development must focus on adaptability, resilience, empathy, and systems thinking; the capacities needed to lead through complexity.
• Develop an enterprise mindset: Today’s talent leaders must be business-centric, fluent in financial and strategic conversations, and capable of integrating disparate talent functions to construct a coherent whole. They must translate data into compelling narratives and foster strong partnerships both within HR and across the enterprise.

Most importantly, talent leaders must see themselves not just as HR professionals, but as organizational architects, designing the systems, cultures, mindsets and experiences that enable growth.

Conclusion: Talent strategy integration isn’t a trend. It’s your edge.

The world of work is not simply changing. It is being fundamentally redefined. Integrated talent strategy is no longer a future aspiration; it is a current imperative. To deliver on this mandate, talent leaders must: align their strategies tightly with business priorities; build managerial capability at scale; and use technology with precision and discipline. They must create strong, trusted partnerships across internal and external boundaries, and focus on clarity over complexity. The siloed HR model has reached its limits. The future belongs to those who embrace integrated talent strategy as a core business driver.

In a world where transformation often feels complex and distant, real progress is often sparked at the community level, through leaders who create change from within.

In Senegal, a partnership between BTS Spark and Tostan, a nonprofit dedicated to community-led development across Africa, is bringing this idea to life. It’s a reminder that sustainable leadership isn’t built by imposing new systems. It grows when people are equipped to lead themselves.

A ground-up approach to lasting change

Since 1991, Tostan—whose name means "breakthrough" in Wolof—has partnered with rural African communities to advance human rights, health, literacy, and economic development. Its Community Empowerment Program (CEP) weaves together practical knowledge and human rights education, enabling communities to define and pursue their own visions of progress.

Across eight countries and more than five million lives, Tostan’s approach has led to deep-rooted changes, including the voluntary abandonment of harmful traditional practices. Not by directive, but by choice.

It’s an approach that shows leadership capacity isn’t something to be delivered from outside. It’s something to be nurtured from within.

Meeting communities where they are

In 2024, BTS Spark deepened its collaboration with Tostan through an in-person leadership workshop, led by a BTS Spark consultant, following a year of virtual engagement.

The visit coincided with a leadership transition at the executive level—a pivotal moment requiring clarity, continuity, and resilience. Through targeted coaching and workshops, BTS Spark worked alongside Tostan’s leaders to support the transition and strengthen leadership capacity at every level of the organization.

The focus wasn’t on delivering a model. It was on listening, amplifying existing strengths, and equipping leaders to navigate complexity with confidence.

Practical tools for complex challenges

As part of the ongoing collaboration, BTS Spark also provided custom-designed micro-simulations focused on sectors vital to community sustainability: climate resilience, microfinance, and agriculture.

These micro-sims offer leaders a chance to engage with real-world decision-making challenges in a safe, practical environment—an approach that mirrors how leadership development increasingly happens: not through theory alone, but through repeated, real-world application.

It’s a reminder that growth is rarely linear. It’s built through practice, reflection, and adaptation over time.

Building leadership that endures

The work between BTS Spark and Tostan reflects a broader truth:

Leadership isn’t confined to titles, industries, or regions. It emerges where people are given the tools, trust, and space to act.

Sustainable change, whether in communities or organizations, happens when leadership capacity is strengthened closest to where challenges are lived every day.

The partnership also highlights the power of investing in local capability: focusing on what’s already working, building resilience from within, and preparing leaders not just to meet today’s challenges, but to shape tomorrow’s opportunities.

Moving forward: Scaling with purpose

The work in Senegal is continuing to evolve. BTS Spark and Tostan are exploring ways to extend leadership development to more communities, deepen their impact, and continue supporting transformation through shared expertise and partnership.

It’s a model rooted in respect, collaboration, and the belief that leadership is most powerful when it reflects the realities and aspirations of the people closest to the work.

In Part 1, I told you about the three decisions we made two years ago and the simulation flywheel that produced our first Applied AI diamond.

Here’s the field-notes version.

Over 80% of our global business have now adopted a new Applied AI approach for doing simulations in the first eight weeks, across 24 countries and every practice.

‍The flywheel didn’t stop with simulations. It moved into finance, sales enablement, legal, operations, and client delivery. Teams started building agents and bringing them onto their own org charts. We didn’t plan for any of that. We built the conditions for people to find their own breakthroughs.

What it felt like inside the flywheel.

When the simulation team went live with their first clients on the new way of working, the lead person hit a wall. Their words:

“You’re asking too much. You’re making me be a full-stack developer. Up until this point I did a small part, and I sent it to the team, and they built off the back end, and they brought it back. And now I have to end-to-end soup to nuts, basically alone.”

There was graphic UI work nobody had been trained for, the fear of delivering quality below what BTS expects of itself, and the weight of not having a playbook. This was not the joyful adoption story most consultancies tell.

Then something shifted. Six members showed up for product testing, where the usual was two or three. The work created teamwork I hadn’t seen at BTS in years. The breakthrough was not an instantaneous change from skepticism to celebration. It was a breakdown in confidence, then rally, then bonding. If we didn’t make room for the breakdown, we would have lost the rally.

The other breakthrough was global teamwork; not yet a BTS core strength. Our culture is beautiful: high-freedom and entrepreneurial. But people’s first identities are to their countries. Almost every prior attempt we’ve made at a global initiative has failed. The one exception was Covid. So, when I say what happened next surprised me, I mean it.

I asked to join the simulation team’s Slack channel rather than pulling them into status meetings. What I got to watch in the mornings was someone in South Africa waking up, posting “I tried this and got stuck,” then London adding on, then San Francisco weighing in, then a surprise breakthrough overnight from Tokyo. We didn’t engineer that. Curious and determined BTS’ers did. The problem was interesting enough that the org chart didn’t matter. It was amazing to see and a glimpse into the next evolution of the BTS culture.

The pattern: Explore, expand, institutionalize, renew.

What we’ve now seen play out, both inside BTS and with clients, follows the same four-step pattern. Each step asks a specific decision of the leader.

Explore.

Stay stubborn on the aspiration and fluid on the path. Our breakthrough wasn’t the path we originally took. We changed tools and approaches. Nobody could have foreseen that. And if the team had taken the first six months of learnings from AI as their definitive “this is the detailed path we will follow,” we never would have gotten the disruption. Five different tool combinations were tried before we found the one that worked. Companies that lock into a single path or tool too early are betting against compounding capability that doubles roughly every seven months. That is not a bet I’d take.

Expand.

Run the old way and the new way side by side. When the simulation team’s breakthroughs got real, the instinct was to retreat into more internal testing. We did the opposite. They ran old way and new way in parallel on 6 or 8 live client projects across all three geographies. Every single one ended up going live the new way. The backup was always there. They didn’t need it.

Institutionalize.

Burn the boats. The simulation team committed that no new client work would be done the old way after January 1. The other practice leads then committed to dates within Q1, even though most of them had not yet experienced the new way themselves. They had to trust their colleagues. If you can do it for the most complex thing, you could probably do it for the less complex ones. By February 15, we had approaching 90% global adoption across 24 countries, across all practices. I was shocked and proud. We had spent years failing at exactly this kind of global rollout.

Renew.

Treat your agents as contractors. People on our diamond teams are now managing 30+ agents they built themselves. Our teams give agents performance feedback. We terminate their contracts when they don’t deliver. We expand the responsibility of agents when they outperform. The frontier question we’re wrestling with now is token budgeting. Two friends of mine running engineering-heavy companies believe that within 6 - 9 months, their token cost per engineer will exceed the cost of the engineer. Whether that’s the right framing is open. The question is real, and every CEO will be asked some version of it within the year.

What had to be true for this to scale.

Once we achieved this amazing global innovation, the leadership sat down to figure out what made it work. We named five things. None of them were about the technology.

Real pain points as the starting point. We had so many people frustrated from those ways of working, all the back and forth and all the wasted time, that this was gold for them. The old way was already painful. The new way wasn’t a forced disruption; it was relief. Find the workflow where the pain is loudest and start there.

The diamond unlocked creativity, it didn’t constrain it. This was the most differentiated insight, and the one most leaders miss. It wasn't "here's the new tasks and rules." It was, "once you learn how to do this, the sky's the limit. You can be even more creative." If your rollout feels like a new set of rules constraining your people, you’ve built the wrong thing.

Pair deep expertise with fresh eyes. The disproportionate share of our breakthroughs came from a tenured tinkerer with total command of the work, paired with someone new to the role who hadn’t yet built the muscle memory of how it had always been done. Without that pairing, you get incremental improvements to the work you already know how to do, instead of a reinvention.

Refuse the “people are too busy” reflex. When I brought the rollout to the global leadership team, the excuses came fast. “Our people are too busy. They’re burnt out. Q1 is going to be busy. No one’s going to have time.” My response: “This is a chance to eliminate the tasks you dread and expand what you love. I know it is a short push of extra work, and I think after the fact you and your team will feel joy and pride and say it was the best time we ever spent.” This is the moment most AI rollouts die.

Senior leaders must lead by example and do the work themselves. This is not middle manager’s job. This is not something you delegate. Even though you don’t build simulations anymore, you must know what this is. One of our partners proactively put time on senior leaders’ calendars and forced them to do the work. Once they started building, the excitement grew, and they could advocate for the rollout because they understood it. If your executives haven’t put their hands on the keyboard, you don’t have a rollout. You have a memo.

What we’re seeing across clients.

We’re now running this play with client organizations across industries and geographies. The companies whose flywheels are accelerating paired their A-players with their early-career talent, pulled IT and legal into the working sessions, refused the “too busy” reflex, and put their senior leaders’ hands on the keyboard. The companies whose flywheels are stuck almost always have a leadership pattern at the center of the stall. Not a tooling pattern. Not a governance pattern. A leadership pattern.

If this resonates, let’s talk.

If you read Part 1 and asked yourself whether your flywheel was turning, the question I’d add now is sharper: do you have the conditions in place for a diamond to appear? If yes, you’re already moving. If no, the technology will not save you.

Here's where we're starting with clients: a working session, half day to a full day, with a small group that owns one of your highest-friction processes. Together we map where your first diamond is most likely to land, how to set up the side-by-side trial, and what your version of "burn the boats" should look like.

The destination, if we do this right, is a self-reliant culture of applied AI inside your company. 5, 10, 15 diamonds compounding into a fundamentally different way of operating. From what I have experienced this is a once in a career opportunity for dramatic shareholder value creation if you get that muscle going. I say that because I'm watching it happen, in real time, inside our own company and across our client base.

If you want to get your flywheels spinning and map your first diamond, start here. Bring your hardest workflow. We'll bring the playbook.

Organizations have long wanted to scale coaching, but have been limited by cost and capacity. With AI, that's beginning to change as new platforms make coaching more accessible, flexible, and available on demand, extending support beyond a select group of leaders to entire populations.

For talent leaders, this shift creates both opportunity and complexity. With greater reach comes a new set of trade-offs: how to balance access with depth, flexibility with accountability, and efficiency with meaningful development.

The limits of unlimited (coaching).

Unlimited coaching sounds like the obvious answer. Remove the barriers, give everyone access, let people engage on their own terms. What's not to like?

In practice, quite a bit.

When coaching has no defined structure or cadence, engagement tends to become episodic - people show up when something feels urgent and step back when it doesn't. The coaching relationship never quite deepens. Conversations cover ground but don't build on it. And the development that was supposed to happen keeps getting pushed to the next session, and the next.

Three patterns emerge:

1.  Sporadic engagement over sustained development. Without a rhythm to anchor the work, coaching becomes reactive. Clients bring whatever is most pressing that week rather than working toward something larger. Progress happens in bursts, if at all.
2. ‍Insights that don't compound. Great coaching reveals patterns over time - things a client can't see in one session but can't unsee after several. Without continuity, and without a consistent coaching relationship to hold the thread, each conversation starts close to zero.‍
3. Outcomes that are hard to measure. No milestones. No defined endpoint. No clear way for the organization, or the client, to know whether it's working. Activity fills the gap where impact should be.

The result is a model that's easy to scale and hard to defend. Which is exactly the problem talent leaders are navigating right now.

The relationship is the lever.

Decades of research into what makes coaching work keeps arriving at the same answer: it's the relationship. Not the platform, not the methodology. The relationship.

When a coach and client build trust over time, developing shared language, and returning to the same themes with increasing depth, something shifts. Conversations get more honest. Insights stick. The client starts doing the work between sessions, not just during them. That's when coaching becomes genuinely transformative, and it can't be rushed or replicated in a one-off session.

The ICF and EMCC are clear on this: continuity is what dives outcomes. The coaching engagements that produce lasting change are the ones where each session builds on the last, not the ones that simply offer more access.

Three principles make that possible: Consistency, Continuity, and Completion.

1. Consistency

The foundation everything else is built on.

The temptation when designing a coaching program is to treat flexibility as a feature - let people book when they want, swap coaches freely, engage on their own schedule. But frequent coach changes reset the clock. Every new coach has to earn trust, learn context, and find their footing with the client. That's time spent getting started, not getting somewhere.

A stable coaching relationship works differently:

• The coach starts to see around corners, uncovering patterns the client can't see on their own
• The client stops performing and starts being honest
• The relationship itself becomes a source of accountability, not just the sessions

Consistency doesn't constrain the work. It's what makes the deeper work possible.

2. Continuity

What turns a series of sessions into genuine development.

Without continuity, coaching tends to be additive at best- each session offers something useful, but nothing compounds. With it, the work builds on itself in ways that can't happen in isolated conversations.

What continuity makes possible:

• A limiting belief surfaced in session three becomes a thread that runs through the rest of the engagement
• A behavioral pattern the client couldn't see at the start becomes impossible to ignore by the end
• Space opens up for the harder work - the kind that requires sitting with discomfort across multiple sessions, not resolving it quickly and moving on

That slower, deeper work is where lasting change actually happens. It doesn't come from more sessions. It comes from the right sessions, in the right order, with the same person.

3. Completion

The most underrated principle of the three.

In a world of unlimited access, there's no finish line, and without one, it's surprisingly hard to know what you're working toward, or whether you've gotten there. A defined endpoint changes the entire shape of an engagement.‍

A clear endpoint creates urgency and focuses every session on what matters most.

• Shifts the question from "what should we talk about this week?" to "what do we need to accomplish before we're done?"
• Gives both coach and client a body of work to look back on, not just a log of conversations

For talent leaders, this is also what makes coaching legible as an investment. Sessions logged is an activity metric. A cohort of leaders who completed a structured engagement and can articulate what changed, that's a result.

Don't just scale it, design it (here’s how)‍ 

The opportunity in front of talent leaders right now is significant. The organizations that will get the most from this moment are the ones that treat coaching design as seriously as coaching delivery.

Practical design decisions:

• Define the arc before you launch: set the number of sessions, the cadence, and the goals upfront, not after people have already started booking
• Protect the coaching relationship: Make coach switching the exception, not the default, and design your program to discourage unnecessary re-matches
• Build in milestones: create structured check-ins at the midpoint and end of each engagement so progress is visible to both the coach and the organization ‍
• Separate on-demand support from developmental coaching: Use AI-enabled tools for in-the-moment guidance, and reserve structured engagements for the deeper work ‍
• Measure completion, not just activation: Track how many people finish an engagement, not just how many start one

Questions to pressure-test your design:

• Does every participant know what they're working toward before their first session?
• Can your coaches see enough context about a client's journey to pick up where they left off?
• Would you be able to show, at the end of a cohort, what changed, and for whom?

Access opened the door. Intention is what makes it worth walking through.

Three decisions that changed everything.

Two years ago, we made three deliberate decisions about how BTS would move with Applied AI.

We would become our own Customer Zero.

While others were building strategies, defining governance, and waiting for clarity, we made a different call: we decided not to wait. Not because the stakes were low, but because they were high. And because in a space evolving this quickly, clarity wouldn’t come from planning. It would come from movement.

So instead of starting with a roadmap, we started with three principles:

1. No top-down mandate. The people closest to the work figure it out.
2. IT must evolve from gatekeeper to enabler - leading AI trials and fast experimentation.
3. Don’t wait for certainty.

We set the organization in motion, and once we did, things started to move quickly.

What if we started this company today?

Waiting for certainty is itself a choice, and it’s costing companies more than they realize.

We started where we knew the work best: our simulations. No perfect plan, just teams moving, trying, and iterating.

Simulations are core to who we are at BTS. Companies that simulate don’t just make better decisions; they execute faster and build more engaged cultures.

The team asked a simple question:

"What if we were to start our company today?”

That question started the flywheel.

They asked IT for a few licenses and started building - vibe-coding, writing agents, and testing tools - moving at a pace that would make any VC-backed start-up smile.

The messy middle.

At first, the team was underwhelmed._‍

The early reports were blunt:

“Not good with math.”

“Poor graph capabilities.”

The team wasn't discouraged. They kept tinkering - jumping between tools, staying on top of new releases, experimenting constantly.

This was a small team, across 24 countries, building off each other’s ideas. Laughing at crazy creations. Breaking things. Iterating in a sandbox alongside real clientwork.

Each cycle produced something:

• A sharper scenario
• A faster build
• A more powerful simulation

The flywheel was turning, and it was generating something real.

When the diamond appeared.

Then something shifted.

The team moved into client trials across five countries. They figured out ISO compliance and built the architecture to handle the complexity, the “spaghetti.”

And what emerged wasn’t incremental:

• What used to take weeks started happening in days.
• Limited creativity started to feel like unlimited innovation.
• Clients became self-serving.
• Agentic simulations were built directly into client systems for real-time updates and preparation.

This was our first AI diamond - a high-impact outcome created by many cycles of experimentation compounding into real value.

It only appeared because we kept the flywheel turning, each cycle increasing the odds that something would break through.

95% adoption in eight weeks.

Then it was time to take the AI diamond global.

BTS is decentralized and highly entrepreneurial. We operate across 24 countries and 38 offices, where local teams have real autonomy.

And historically? That’s meant a low appetite for adopting something built somewhere else and pushed from the center.

So we expected resistance.

Instead, something surprising happened.

In the first eight weeks, we saw 95% adoption across our global footprint.

It felt completely different from our own digital initiatives, ERP implementations, top-down rollouts of the past.

This moved on its own. Why? 

We realized it didn’t start with a framework or a model, it started with a feeling.

The feeling of being at the leading edge of one’s craft and profession.

• Joy
• Excitement
• Pride

As we watched this play out across teams it stopped feeling like isolated wins.

There was a pattern to it. A repeatable, organic, innovation motion.

And the flywheel didn’t stop with simulations.

It spread across finance, sales enablement, legal, operations, and client delivery. Some cycles led to small improvements, and others revealed new diamonds.

Not becausewe planned for them, but because we built the conditions for people to find them.

The question I'd ask any CEO right now: Is your flywheel turning, or are you still waiting for the perfect plan?

In part 2, I’ll share the key success factors behind the breakthrough, and what we’re now seeing across more than 120 global clients.

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