Stop waiting and start engaging! 3 shifts to make sustainability actionable

A series of articles on making sustainability actionable and personable, with ideas and initiatives to provoke thinking and spark action.
April 21, 2023
5
min read
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Why do organizations struggle with prioritizing sustainability? It’s clear that the urgency to take action has increased exponentially. Whether it is directives from the board, pressure from investors, agitation from employees, or societal expectations, corporate leaders know they need to act now. Yet many companies are stuck, weighed down by inertia. Their programs and initiatives languish. So, what’s the hold up? And what can we do about it?

Too often, companies respond by setting “moon-shot like” visions and ambitions. They establish lofty Net Zero targets or even bigger societal goals – but then find it difficult to know where to start. It’s too easy to feel overwhelmed by the bold vision and all the changes that you must make to your organization’s operating models, systems, processes, and ways of working to make a sizeable shift.

Furthermore, many organizations’ sustainability strategies, and their execution, sit with a tiny team that works in a silo. This is an issue. Real change takes a village, so your organization needs to focus on engaging all its people to create the ownership necessary to drive change.

The good news is that this is possible. Throughout this series of articles on making sustainability actionable and personable, we’ll discuss ideas, initiatives, and ways of thinking adopted by leading companies across multiple sectors to provoke thinking and spark action.

Empowering your team to lead your organization’s sustainability initiatives may seem like tall marching orders – but getting the ball rolling is not as difficult as it seems. Begin with prioritizing the small changes that will make a big impact.

Start with mindset to move the organization

The first step in helping people take action is enabling them to shift their mindset. We view mindsets as beliefs or way of thinking that determines your outlook or mental attitude. Below the surface, mindsets are fueled by your underlying thoughts and feelings, which ultimately drive your behaviors, choices, and actions. Driving action and results requires a change in behavior, and behavior change starts with shifting mindsets.As your organization puts sustainability at the heart of its purpose, strategy, and culture, we have found through our work that there are three key mindset shifts your people need to make to ensure their good intentions around sustainability actually turn into action.

  1. Shift from "This is too overwhelming …I've no idea where to start!" to "I'm a part of the solution."
    The overwhelming complexity of sustainability can lead to the sense that no one person, team, or organization can make a difference. This causes paralysis from the boardroom to the front line.

    To combat this limiting mindset, you need to help your people realize that everyone can make an impact and that they are an important and necessary part of the change. This starts with connecting each person’s role to the business’s sustainability vision.

    To do this, invest in building “sustainability acumen.” Similar to how developing business and financial acumen helps people take ownership of how their role impacts business results, developing sustainability acumen enables employees to see their part in making shifts towards sustainability and how their behavior ultimately impacts business results.

    Start by defining sustainability in terms of your organization’s purpose, strategy, and focus areas. Then, use experiential learning that puts people into future state scenarios and contexts to help your people see how they can live the new strategic vision in their daily work.

    For example, in 2020, the CEO of a leading UK bank launched the organization’s new purpose and strategy, which was anchored in sustainability and would require a different approach to engaging with their customers, clients, society, future generations, and investors.

    In service of achieving this vision, the bank launched several initiatives to embed its sustainability goals across the business. One of these was to immerse 5,000 leaders in future state scenarios where they grappled with the tensions and polarities of the different ways of working required to achieve the organization’s vision. The leaders were introduced to simple tools to help them make decisions in difficult moments and had the opportunity to practice. As a result, over 4,000 actions have been taken to pursue the company’s new sustainability-focused purpose and strategy. The leaders were able to translate the organization’s overarching sustainability goals into tangible actions for themselves and their teams.
  2. Shift from "I need to lead us through this change" to "I lead in uncertainty and disruption."
    The past few years can be characterized by two words: uncertainty and disruption. While many leaders and organizations associate this characterization with risk, a world of constant change is the reality of the future, especially when it comes to sustainability.

    To embrace change as constant, leaders and organizations need to shift their mindset from the assumption that “disruption causes risk” to the understanding that “risk is a result of a lack of disruption.” If your organization isn’t constantly pivoting in anticipation of the future, it will fall behind.

    This is especially true when it comes to sustainability initiatives. In the world of sustainability, new information, technology, and opportunities are limitless. The longer your organization waits to begin implementing its sustainability strategy, the further it falls behind. Instead of waiting for the perfect strategy or initiative, leaders need to embrace uncertainty and take on an innovation mindset. In this context, innovation is the discipline of solving problems in new ways under conditions of uncertainty. In practice, an innovation mindset will enable leaders to test new ideas by failing fast and cheaply. Then, with new knowledge and learnings in hand, they can quickly pivot towards better innovations, initiatives, and strategies.

    For example, a U.S.-based energy company recently set a goal to reduce emissions by at least 50 percent by 2035. In the process sought to create new “green” customer experiences and products.

    To create these new experiences, the organizations’ leaders needed to adopt an innovation mindset. They embarked on a week-long innovation challenge with the goal of ideating a new portfolio of solutions to implement within the business. This challenge enabled the team to adopt the mindset that new and disruptive ideas were worth exploring, even if imperfect.

    Following the challenge, top solutions were selected to go through an innovation pipeline, where they would be tested to “fail fast and cheap.” Ultimately, the winning solutions would be launched into the marketplace.
  3. Shift from “Cause and effect” to "Holistic” thinking.
    Across the business landscape, value chains have been rigorously optimized for efficiency, which has led to a very linear “cause and effect mindset.” This approach has enabled many incredible innovations, such as Taylorism and the revolution of factory manufacturing. However, tackling the challenges that sustainability presents requires a different mindset.

    To make a real difference, organizations need their people to be able to grapple with competing priorities, hold multiple truths simultaneously, embrace paradoxes, and see the different relationships between the many elements in a complex system.  The challenge though is that most leaders have yet to be trained to think this way! In fact, it’s normally the opposite. To ensure that people, the planet, and profit can all benefit, organizations need to develop their people’s ability to think holistically.

    Leaders need to believe that they can overcome “trade-off inertia” and build disruptive business models where everyone wins. When people shift their approach to solving problems from linear thinking to a holistic framework, the possibilities are limitless.

    For example, in 2018, a multinational mining company launched a strategy where innovation and sustainability were at its core. To achieve its deliberately ambitious goals, the company’s leaders were challenged to think more holistically in their day-to-day decision-making. The organization embarked on a program to help its leaders develop “full impact decision making.”

    This would enable leaders to leverage a wider systems view of what could happen when making decisions and consider second, third, and fourth-tier impacts across multiple stakeholder groups and time horizons. To develop this capability, leaders were immersed in a digital simulation experience that enabled them to practice running the business’s strategic operations over the course of 15 years. Leaders encountered sustainability-related challenges and “wicked problems” that had both short- and long-term impacts on the business. They were also challenged with balancing different stakeholder groups and key financial, environmental, and societal performance metrics that mapped to the company’s KPIs. The organization also invited external partners to the program, which included deliberately dissenting voices, enabling leaders to experience challenges from a different frame of reference. Ultimately this experience helped them gain the critical, holistic thinking approach necessary for leading sustainability for the organization’s future.

It’s no secret that an increased focus on sustainability is critical for the longevity of our people, planet, and profits. The great news is that you likely already have all the people you need with the passion, ideas, and roles to make a difference – you just need to empower them to take action. Start by having a two-way dialogue with your people. Listen to them. Encourage them to test out new ideas. Now, this isn’t a free for all where people get to do whatever they want. But with aligned focus, holistic understanding of the challenge, and disciplined experimentation, your team can simultaneously learn and drive progress, moving forward together.

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May 20, 2025
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Demystifying culture change to unleash your momentum in the market
Is culture accelerating your strategy—or slowing it down? Learn how leaders turn invisible habits into momentum in this guide to culture change.

You already know strategy matters. You’ve likely spent months—maybe years—crafting one that’s bold, clear, and built to win. But when progress stalls, the issue often isn’t the strategy itself—it’s whether the organization can move with it.

That’s where culture comes in.

The culture that once fueled your success may no longer be fit for what’s next. And even if things look fine on the surface, early signals might be telling a different story—signs your culture isn’t accelerating your strategy the way it used to.

Culture is what turns intent into impact. It’s not the values on the wall or the message at a town hall—it’s the unwritten rules that shape how people decide, collaborate, and lead. It’s how things really get done.

When those patterns align with your direction, momentum builds. When they don’t, even the best strategy struggles to stick.

→ Let’s chat about leveraging culture to manage change fatigue at your organization.

You see it in:

  • The stories people tell about what gets rewarded
  • The choices teams make under pressure
  • The habits that show up when no one’s watching

And in the everyday:

  • How decisions get made
  • How people collaborate
  • How accountability is managed
  • How change is received

If your strategy has shifted but progress still feels stuck—or strained—it’s worth asking:

Is your culture still serving your business, or is it starting to slow you down?

A case in point

Two years ago, BTS partnered with a global organization that had just launched an ambitious growth strategy. Excitement was high—but results didn’t follow.

Leaders were frustrated by a lack of speed and ownership. Employees said they didn’t feel empowered. The word that kept surfacing? Bureaucracy.

That term became a catch-all for inefficiency, but no one could quite define it. So we helped them unpack what was really going on:

  • Unclear decision rights
  • Too many committees for too many decisions
  • Outdated knowledge-sharing systems
  • Manual processes slowing everything down

We visualized the findings in a “bureaucracy tree” to connect the dots. That clarity helped leaders prioritize where to focus first. And that’s when momentum returned.

The power of pivotal moments

The breakthrough didn’t start with a bold new initiative. It started with a shift in focus—from broad ideas to specific moments.

We worked with leaders to identify the everyday situations where culture is shaped and signaled: subtle, unscripted moments that reflect what’s truly expected and rewarded.

  • A decision point with no obvious answer: do we act, or wait for perfection?
  • A team member hesitates: do we jump in to solve, or create space for them to step up?

When leaders could name these moments, they could begin to shape them—making small, deliberate choices that sent a different signal. These weren’t one-time actions. They were repeatable patterns, practiced consistently.

And they’re just as available to you. Start by asking: where are the moments I tend to default to safety, silence, or control? And how could I begin to respond differently to shift the story?

Breaking old habits and building new ones

With these pivotal moments in mind, the leadership team reflected on their own patterns. How were they showing up? What were they reinforcing?

They focused on three shifts:

  1. Stop reinforcing slow, complex decision-making
  2. Start modeling clarity, ownership, and speed
  3. Shift systems that quietly rewarded caution over empowerment

These weren’t abstract goals. They were grounded in real behaviors:

  • How many people are involved in a decision?
  • Are roles and responsibilities clear?
  • Are our tools helping—or slowing us down?

By focusing on what people could see, track, and practice, change became tangible. It gave people something to act on—and believe in.

Scaling change through experimentation

The organization didn’t treat culture change as a campaign. They treated it as a learning process.

Top leaders ran small, coordinated experiments—turning abstract values into visible behaviors.

In one experiment, leaders committed to returning authority to managers who had “delegated decisions up” to them. In another, they redefined decision rights to cut through ambiguity and accelerate action.

These weren’t pilots. They were deliberate repetitions of new behaviors, designed to build muscle memory across the organization.

The results:

  • Decisions moved faster
  • Long-stalled initiatives were shut down
  • A new product feature launched in half the usual time
  • Employees reported feeling more empowered and accountable

If you’re wondering what this could look like for your organization, start here: What’s one behavior you could test out—or let go of—for a week? What’s one decision you could delegate? One moment you could coach instead of solve?

That’s how momentum builds—quietly, visibly, and fast.

Four common patterns to surface

Now that you’ve seen how small cultural habits shape (or stall) strategy, the next step is to spot where those habits are hiding in your organization. Here are four patterns we often see when momentum is missing—along with what they may be signaling.

   Element of Culture What It Shapes What It Might Look Like Today Why It Might Be Time to Rethink     Decision making Speed, ownership, and accountability Teams slow down not because the path is unclear, but because they’re unsure who’s empowered to choose it. Decisions stall in ambiguity—or escalate unnecessarily. Legacy approval structures often reflect yesterday’s risks. Today’s pace requires alignment over consensus, and trust in judgment at every level.   Meeting norms Focus, decision velocity, and participation Meetings are packed with updates, but few decisions get made. Real conversations happen in sidebars—after the meeting ends. When meetings become status dumps, they signal that the real work happens elsewhere. Reclaim meetings for collaboration and visible decisions to shift how teams show up—and move with more speed.   Leadership modeling Credibility and cultural integrity Leaders talk about agility or empowerment—but in high-stakes moments, default to control, caution, or top-down decisions. Culture isn’t shaped by slides—it’s shaped by what leaders do when it counts. If words and actions diverge, people follow the behavior. Find misalignments and try a new tack.   Feedback Learning, adaptability, and momentum Leaders see something misaligned—but let it go to avoid discomfort or protect relationships. Feedback is delayed, diluted, or disappears. Without feedback, small misalignments calcify. Cultures that learn fast don’t wait—they normalize feedback as a lever for shared growth.    

Which one shows up most in your team? That’s your next pivotal moment.

Shining a flashlight on your invisible “monsters”

When it comes to culture, the hardest part is often what you can’t see—or don’t know how to name.

Think back to childhood. Most of us, at some point, were convinced there was a monster in the closet or under the bed. In the dark, a pile of clothes becomes something menacing. A shadow turns into something to fear.

But then the light comes on. You see clearly. The fear fades. What once felt huge and scary becomes harmless—even a little silly.

That’s what culture can feel like inside an organization. Bureaucracy. Resistance. Complexity. These forces seem big and hard to define. They slow us down and sap momentum. But more often than not, they’re just old habits and assumptions lurking in the dark.

When leaders learn to spot the subtle, pivotal moments that shape behavior, they turn the light on. What felt intangible becomes specific. What felt impossible becomes actionable.

You don’t need a total reinvention. You need clarity—a way to see what’s really happening and where to shift, simply and deliberately.

When to bring in reinforcement

Not every culture challenge needs an outside partner. But some moments call for reinforcement—especially when change needs to stick at scale.

At BTS, we help organizations turn invisible cultural friction into visible forward motion. Whether you’re shaping a new strategy, integrating after a merger, or building a leadership culture that unlocks ownership—we help leaders shift from insight to impact.

Here are a few signs it might be time to partner

  • You’ve named the strategy—but execution keeps stalling.
  • You see the issues—but can’t align on how to shift behaviors.
  • Leaders are bought in intellectually, but behavior hasn’t changed.
  • Teams say the right things—but culture feels stuck in old habits.

If you’re facing one of these moments, it’s not a failure—it’s a signal. The good news? You don’t have to tackle it alone.

Let’s talk about what it would take to move from insight to sustained culture change.

Blog Posts
October 16, 2024
5
min read
Leading with others: Embracing a new era of leadership
Explore how 'leading with others' redefines leadership as a collective responsibility, fostering collaboration, innovation, and resilience.

The landscape of leadership is evolving as newer generations challenge traditional hierarchies. Outdated practices, focused on a top-down power dynamic, have fostered an “us vs. them” mentality, stifling collaboration, slowing innovation, and hindering sustained growth.In response, Future Relevant Organizations are adopting "next practices" that recognize and celebrate contributions, influence, and impact of contributions at all levels of the organization. Central to this shift is the movement from “leading others” to “leading with others,” recognizing that leadership isn’t confined to those in senior positions.“Leading with others” encourages a more inclusive, collaborative approach by:

  • Encouraging employees to lead and influence across boundaries.
  • Inspiring shared purpose and accountability toward collective goals.
  • Prioritizing well-being, fostering psychological safety, and enabling open idea-sharing.
  • Viewing vulnerability as a strength, recognizing that no one has all the answers.
  • Maintaining focus and thoughtful engagement amidst uncertainty.

A biopharma company with a historically top-down leadership structure offers a clear example of the transformative power of this shift. While the company had enjoyed impressive growth, it faced competitive and pricing pressures from disruptive innovation, regulatory challenges, and supply chain vulnerabilities, all of which called for a fresh approach to leadership. Innovation and expansion were crucial to sustaining success.Recognizing the need for change, the company embraced the idea that leadership and influence aren’t confined to those at the top. Here’s how this new approach reshaped their organization:

  • Empowering all levels: Leadership became less about titles and more about fostering a culture where every employee felt valued and capable of contributing. Through well-crafted experiences, 5,000 employees enhanced their self-awareness, challenged established norms, and adopted a long-term perspective aimed at collective growth.
  • Redefining leadership: Leadership shifted from micromanagement to empowering others to make meaningful contributions. Employees were given greater agency and ownership, leading to increased adaptability in a dynamic market.
  • Building trust through vulnerability: The organization encouraged vulnerability, quickly building trust across teams in an evolving, loosely connected environment. This strengthened team dynamics and established a supportive community ready to face new challenges.

Next practices: Shared leadership responsibility

The shift toward “leading with others” is not simply a change in leadership style; it is a strategic imperative. By embracing diverse perspectives and treating leadership as a collective responsibility, organizations gain more valuable insights that drive better decision-making and innovation. Companies that adopt this approach are better prepared to adapt to change, seize new opportunities, and build a culture where everyone is engaged in shaping the future.

“Leading with”: A more inclusive path forward

Adopting a “leading with others” mindset requires more than just structural changes—it calls for a fundamental shift in how leadership is understood at all levels. Leaders must actively create environments where contributions from all employees are expected, not optional. This inclusive leadership approach fosters a deeper sense of ownership and accountability, empowering employees to align their actions with the organization’s long-term goals.As the business landscape continues to evolve, organizations that embrace this collective approach to leadership will be better positioned not only to navigate uncertainty but also to thrive in the future ensuring future relevance.

Blog Posts
July 28, 2023
5
min read
Training your way to culture change? Think again.
Andy Atkins, VP, shares reasons that training alone cannot sufficiently change culture across the organization.

How many times have you and your colleagues on the leadership team grappled with a culture problem?

The answer may not be obvious at first. Here are a few ways we see companies taking on culture change, often under the guise of a different name:

  • Adopting and socializing a new customer-first go-to-market strateg
  • Shifting from working heads-down in silos to formal, cross-functional collaboration
  • Turning the tide to incite more inclusive behaviors

When starting to make these shifts, the go-to answer is often: “Let’s talk to HR – maybe we can get some training so people will start doing things differently?” And HR responds with, “Great – let’s go!”

Then, months go by, and the needle hasn’t moved. This leaves you and your organization right back where you started. Despite the plethora of online courses, internal seminars, and team sessions available, you are frustrated by the lack of change. What gives?

Training individuals is not the answer. While training is critical for people to learn new things, it is not a comprehensive culture fix. Training alone is insufficient to change culture across the organization.

Research conducted by Kim Cameron and Robert Quinn from University of Michigan’s Ross Business School, and also by Edgar Schein from MIT’s Sloan School of Management has shown that effective culture change happens in groups because group norms, organizational mindsets, and team behaviors overpower individual desires. Just as strategic initiatives are born from a shared organizational vision, culture also cascades from collectively held mindsets, behaviors, and values.

When companies focus on individual development efforts to reinforce the culture they aspire to embody, they miss their biggest point of leverage. Changing your culture requires mobilizing both individuals and the collective behind a shared sense of urgency and responsibility.

Moving beyond the HR talent lens to deliver a culture shift

When making organizational changes, of course HR needs to be involved. However, to successfully enable culture shift, you need to go beyond training and address several other elements, such as: process engineering, information access, governance, and decision making, which can all be affected by culture change. If you are not thinking about these (and more), you are training your way to culture change.

To mobilize your organization and bring your culture shift to life, consider these three elements:

1. Cultural assessment and definition—creating the foundation for change

The first step in shifting your organizational culture is to ground yourself in the current one. If you don’t have a deep understanding of your existing culture, you may miss opportunities to identify and address major cultural roadblocks that will hinder your future state. You also might overlook key cultural strengths that you could leverage to propel the organization forward. (To learn more about cultural assessment, check out this white paper.)Assessing your current culture at the following four levels will enable you to uncover the nuances, behaviors, systems, and mindsets necessary to get you where you need to go:

  • Individual – relationship to self and others
  • Team – working in groups
  • Organization – what drives action
  • Business environment/context – view of change

When organizations lean on training as a band-aid, they miss the opportunity to toggle other systemic elements that profoundly impact culture, such as compensation alignment, process engineering, access to information, and feedback, among others.Here are a few game-changing questions that leaders can ask to define and build toward a strong culture:

  • How can we build momentum towards the desired business results?
  • What processes and systems are enabling or defeating the change?
  • Are the current performance management systems getting us where we need to go?
  • Am I assessing my team on the right capabilities?

2. Cultural scaling—creating alignment, processes, and systems

While shaping culture at the individual level is easier, people seldom produce their best work in siloes. To change culture, your organization must change the way people work in teams. This element, which can be done in concert with individual training, is about aligning team processes and embedding them in the organization.Changes in team effectiveness require supporting systems. To ensure your systems are aligned to your organization’s cultural vision, ask these two critical questions:

  • Do the current talent lifecycle activities, organizational capabilities, and work processes across your business support the changes you hope to see?
  • Which legacy systems and processes could derail the culture change you seek?

When leveraged correctly, processes and systems should create boundaries and provide guardrails that encourage culturally constructive behaviors, mindsets, and problem-solving methods.

3. Individual training—activating individuals to support the shift

The third element of shifting the culture is where training comes into play: activating individuals to do things differently. When asking HR to take the lead on training, consider these two aspects to ensure you are readying the whole organization for the culture shift you seek:

  • Change-ready leadership to help address individual readiness. In addition to broader efforts to assess, define, and scale organizational systems and capabilities that enable alignment and foster culture, it is critical to evaluate and enable individual readiness. Shifting the culture is a burden shared by not only business leaders and CHROs, but also by those leading talent management and leadership development who are responsible for preparing individual leaders.
  • Identify behavior shifts and lead accordingly. Change-ready leaders prioritize enduring behavioral shifts over “check-the-box” or surface level ones. When it comes to culture, quick fixes are often the enemy. Change-ready leaders also hold individuals accountable through feedback and by example. Leaders who model the behaviors they wish from their teams build trust and gain buy-in when it matters most. This might include challenging actions and decisions such as encouraging those who prefer not to shift their current behaviors to move on from the organization.

Organizational culture is a living, breathing, intangible thing. Just like a brand, we know it and feel it daily, despite its intangibility. Business leaders, you have the power to ignite the change you seek by leveraging assessment and definition, scaling, and individual training. Over time, these efforts will produce new behaviors and ways of working, ultimately creating the new organizational culture and a long-lasting legacy for your organization.

Sources

  1. Cameron, Kim S., and Robert E. Quinn (2011). Diagnosing and Changing Organizational Culture: Based on the Competing Values Framework. John Wiley & Sons, Hoboken.
  2. Schein, E.H. (2010) Organizational Culture and Leadership. Vol. 2, John Wiley & Sons, Hoboken.

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Insights
February 3, 2026
5
min read
Build, buy, or wait: A leader's guide to digital strategy under uncertainty
A practical guide for leaders navigating digital and AI strategy under uncertainty, exploring when to build, buy, license, or wait to preserve strategic optionality.

Technology choices are often made under pressure - pressure to modernize, to respond to shifting client expectations, to demonstrate progress, or to keep pace with rapid advances in AI. In those moments, even experienced leadership teams can fall into familiar traps: over-estimating how differentiated a capability will remain, under-estimating the organizational cost of sustaining it, and committing earlier than the strategy or operating model can realistically support.

After decades of working with leaders through digital and technology-enabled transformations, I’ve seen these dynamics play out again and again. The issue is rarely the quality of the technology itself. It’s the timing of commitment, and how quickly an early decision hardens into something far harder to unwind than anyone intended.

What has changed in today’s AI-accelerated environment is not the nature of these traps, but the margin for error. It has narrowed dramatically.

For small and mid-sized organizations, the consequences are immediate. You don't have specialist teams running parallel experiments or long runways to course correct. A single bad platform decision can absorb scarce capital, distort operating models, and take years to unwind just as the market shifts again.

AI intensified this tension. It is wildly over-hyped as a silver bullet and quietly under-estimated as a structural disruptor. Both positions are dangerous. AI won’t magically fix broken processes or weak strategy, but it will change the economics of how work gets done and where value accrues.

When leaders ask how to approach digital platforms, AI adoption, or operating model design, four questions consistently matter more than the technology itself.

  • What specific market problem does this solve, and what is it worth?
  • Is this capability genuinely unique, or is it rapidly becoming commoditized?
  • What is the true total cost - not just to build, but to run and evolve over time?
  • What is the current pace of innovation for this niche?

For many leadership teams, answering these questions leads to the same strategic posture. Move quickly today while preserving options for tomorrow. Not as doctrine, but as a way of staying adaptive without mistaking early commitment for strategic clarity.

Why build versus buy is the wrong starting point

One of the most common traps organizations fall into is treating digital strategy as a series of isolated build-vs-buy decisions. That framing is too narrow, and it usually arrives too late.

A more powerful question is this. How do we preserve optionality as the landscape continues to evolve? Technology decisions often become a proxy for deeper organizational challenges. Following acquisitions or periods of rapid change, pressure frequently surfaces at the front line. Sales teams respond to client feedback. Delivery teams push for speed. Leaders look for visible progress.

In these moments, technology becomes the focal point for action. Not because it is the root problem, but because it is tangible.

The real risk emerges operationally. Poorly sequenced transitions, disruption to the core business, and value that proves smaller or shorter-lived than anticipated. Teams become locked into delivery paths that no longer make commercial sense, while underlying system assumptions remain unchanged.

The issue is rarely technical. It is temporal.

Optimizing for short-term optics, particularly client-facing signals of progress, often comes at the expense of longer-term adaptability. A cleaner interface over an ageing platform may buy temporary parity, but it can also delay the more important work of rethinking what is possible in the near and medium term.

Conservatism often shows up quietly here. Not as risk aversion, but as a preference for extending the familiar rather than exploring what could fundamentally change.

Licensing as a way to buy time and insight

In fast-moving areas such as AI orchestration, many organizations are choosing to license capability rather than build it internally. This is not because licensing is perfect. It rarely is. It introduces constraints and trade-offs. But it was fast. And more importantly, it acknowledged reality.

The pace of change in this space is such that what looks like a good architectural decision today may be actively unhelpful in twelve months. Licensing allowed us to operate right at the edge of what we actually understood at the time - without pretending we knew where the market would land six or twelve months later.

Licensing should not be seen as a lack of ambition. It is often a way of buying time, learning cheaply, and avoiding premature commitment. Building too early doesn’t make you visionary, often it just makes you rigid.

AI is neither a silver bullet nor a feature

Coaching is a useful microcosm of the broader AI debate.

Great AI coaching that is designed with intent and grounded in real coaching methodology can genuinely augment the experience and extend impact. The market is saturated with AI-enabled coaching tools and what is especially disappointing is that many are thin layers of prompts wrapped around a large language model. They are responsive, polite, and superficially impressive - and they largely miss the point.

Effective coaching isn’t about constant responsiveness. It’s about clarity. It’s about bringing experience, structure, credibility, and connection to moments where someone is stuck.

At the other extreme, coaches themselves are often deeply traditional. A heavy pen, a leather-bound notebook, and a Royal Copenhagen mug of coffee are far more likely to be sitting on the desk than the latest GPT or Gemini model.

That conservatism is understandable - coaching is built on trust, presence, and human connection - but it’s increasingly misaligned with how scale and impact are actually created.

The real opportunity for AI is not to replace human work with a chat interface. It is to codify what actually works. The decision points, frameworks, insights, and moments that drive behavior change. AI can then be used to augment and extend that value at scale.

A polished interface over generic capability is not enough. If AI does not strengthen the core value of the work, it is theatre, not transformation.

What this means for leaders

Across all of these examples, the same pattern shows up.

The hardest decisions are rarely about capability, they are about timing, alignment, and conviction.

Building from scratch only makes sense when you can clearly articulate:

  • What you believe that the market does not
  • Why that belief creates defensible value
  • Why you’re willing to concentrate risk behind it

Clear vision scales extraordinarily well when it’s tightly held. The success of narrow, focused Silicon Valley start-ups is testament to that.

Larger organizations often carry a broader set of commitments. That complexity increases when depth of expertise is spread across functions, and even more so when sales teams have significant autonomy at the point of sale. Alignment becomes harder not because people are wrong, but because too many partial truths are competing at once.

In these environments, strategic clarity, not headcount or spend, creates advantage.

This is why many leadership teams choose to license early. Not because building is wrong, but because most organizations have not yet earned the right to build.

Insights
January 23, 2026
5
min read
The silent productivity problem: prioritization
Andy Atkins shares a practical and timely perspective on how leaders can address the root causes of prioritization by focusing on three essentials: tasks, tracking and trust.

This article was originally publish on Rotman Management

IN OUR CONSULTING WORK with teams at all levels—especially senior leadership—my colleagues and I have noticed teams grappling with an insidious challenge: a lack of effective prioritization. When everything is labeled a priority, nothing truly is. Employees feel crushed under the weight of competing demands and the relentless urgency to deliver on multiple fronts. Requests for prioritization stem from both a lack of focused direction and the challenge of efficiently fulfilling an overwhelming volume of work. Over time, this creates a toxic cycle of burnout, inefficiency and dissatisfaction.

The instinctive response to this issue is to streamline, reduce the number of initiatives, and focus. While this is a step in the right direction, it doesn’t fully address the problem. Prioritization isn’t just about whittling down a to-do list or ranking activities by importance and urgency on an Eisenhower Decision Matrix; it also requires reshaping how we approach work more productively.

In our work, we have found that three critical factors lie at the heart of solving prioritization challenges: tasks, tracking and trust. Addressing these dimensions holistically can start to address the root causes of feeling overwhelmed and lay the foundation for sustainable productivity. Let’s take a closer look at each.

Insights
December 2, 2015
5
min read
Business Simulations: Why Are They Effective

You’re buckling in for an overseas flight in a brand-new Boeing 777. The pilot comes on the PA: “Ah, ladies and gentlemen, our flight time today will be six and a half hours at a cruising altitude of 33,000 feet. And I should mention that this is the first time I have ever flown a 777. Wish me luck.”

Before setting foot in the real world, pilots, military personnel and disaster response teams use intense simulations to learn how to respond to high-intensity challenges.Why should we place corporate leaders and their teams in situations without first giving them a chance to try things out? The risks are huge — new strategy investments can run into the hundreds of millions of dollars. BTS offers a better way to turn strategy into action: customized business simulations.

‘Now I Know What it’s Like to be CEO’

A customized business simulation of your enterprise, business unit or process, using real-world competitive dynamics, places leaders in a context where they step out of their normal day-to-day roles and gain exposure to the big picture. Participants make decisions in a risk-free environment, allowing them to experience critical interdependencies, execution best practices and the levers they can use to optimize their company’s key performance indicators. It takes the concept of a strategy and makes it personal, giving each individual the chance to see the direct impacts of their actions and the role they play in strategy execution.

Leading corporations are increasingly turning to business simulations to help build strategic alignment and execution capability when faced with the following business challenges:

  • Key performance objective and new strategy implementation.
  • Accelerating strategy execution and innovation.
  • Improving business acumen and financial decision making.
  • Transforming sales programs into business results accelerators.
  • Leadership development focused on front-line execution.
  • Implementing culture change as tied to strategy alignment.
  • Modeling complex value chains for collaborative cost elimination.
  • Merger integration.

Within minutes of being placed in a business simulation, users are grappling with issues and decisions that they must make — now. A year gets compressed into a day or less. Competition among teams spurs engagement, invention and discovery.

The Business Simulation Continuum: Customize to Fit Your Needs

Simulations have a broad range of applications, from building deep strategic alignment to developing execution capability. The more customized the simulation, the more experience participants can bring back to the job in execution and results. Think about it: why design a learning experience around generic competency models or broad definitions of success when the point is to improve within your business context?  When you instead simulate what “great” looks like for your organization, you exponentially increase the efficacy of your program.

10 Elements of Highly Effective Business Simulations

With 30 years of experience building and implementing highly customized simulations for Fortune 500 companies, BTS has developed the 10 critical elements of an effective business simulation:

  1. Highly realistic with points of realism targeted to drive experiential learning.
  2. Dynamically competitive with decisions and results impacted by peers’ decisions in an intense, yet fun, environment.
  3. Illustrative, not prescriptive or deterministic, with a focus on new ways of thinking.
  4. Catalyzes discussion of critical issues with learning coming from discussion within teams and among individuals.
  5. Business-relevant feedback, a mechanism to relate the simulation experience directly back to the company’s business and key strategic priorities.
  6. Delivered with excellence : High levels of quality and inclusion of such design elements as group discussion, humor, coaching and competition that make the experience highly interactive, intriguing, emotional, fun, and satisfying.
  7. User driven: Progress through the business simulation experience is controlled by participants and accommodates a variety of learning and work styles.
  8. Designed for a specific target audience, level and business need.
  9. Outcome focused , so that changes in mindset lead to concrete actions.
  10. Enables and builds community: Interpersonal networks are created and extended through chat rooms, threaded discussions and issue-focused e-mail groups; participants support and share with peers.
Better Results, Faster

Well-designed business simulations are proven to significantly accelerate the time to value of corporate initiatives. A new strategy can be delivered to a global workforce and execution capability can be developed quickly, consistently and cost-effectively. It’s made personal, so that back on the job, participants own the new strategy and share their enthusiasm and commitment. This in turn yields tangible results; according to a research report conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit and sponsored by BTS, titled “Mindsets: Gaining Buy-In to Strategy,” the majority of firms struggle to achieve buy-in to strategy, but those that personalize strategy throughout their organization significantly outperform their peers in terms of profitability, revenue growth and market share.

Business Simulations: Even More Powerful in Combination

Comprehensive deployment of business simulation and experiential learning programs combines live and online experiences. The deepest alignment, mindset shift and capability building takes place over time through a series of well-designed activities. Maximize impact by linking engagement and skill building to organizational objectives and by involving leadership throughout the process.

Putting Business Simulations to Work

Simulations drive strategic alignment, sales force transformation, and business acumen, financial acumen and leadership development, among other areas. A successful experiential learning program cements strategic alignment and builds execution capability across the entire organization, turning strategy into action. Results can be measured in team effectiveness, company alignment, revenue growth and share price.

Learn more about business simulations

Learn how BTS Business Simulations can help with your initiatives.

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