Yumi joins BTS: A new era of empowered, inclusive change
Yumi joins BTS: A new era of empowered, inclusive change
In this episode of Fearless Thinkers, Rick Cheatham, hosts Katy Young, Senior Vice President and Partner at BTS, and Emanuele Scotti, Co-founder and CEO of Yumi, a recent addition to the BTS family. Emanuele unveils the fascinating story behind Yumi's evolution into a powerhouse of HR innovation, drawing inspiration from the collaborative spirit of Waze. Discover how Yumi, their groundbreaking tool, harnesses collective intelligence to empower individuals within organizations, making change not just manageable, but thrilling. Katie shares insights on inclusive change and the thrilling challenge of scaling it across diverse organizations.
Most of us want to lead in a way that matters; to lift others up and build something people want to be part of.But too often, we’re socialized (explicitly or not) to lead a certain way: play it safe, stick to what’s proven, and avoid the questions that really need asking.
This podcast is about the people and ideas changing that story. We call them fearless thinkers.
Our guests are boundary-pushers, system challengers, and curious minds who look at today’s challenges and ask, “What if there is a better way?”If that’s the energy you’re looking for, you’ve come to the right place.
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Masami: Welcome to Fearless Thinkers, the BTS podcast. My name is Masami Cookson and our host is Rick Cheatham, Head of Marketing at BTS. On today's show, Rick sits down with Katie Young and Emanuele Scotti. Katie Young is a Senior Vice President and Partner at BTS. Throughout her career, she has partnered with leading organizations across industries to enable change, from shifts in strategy and business models, to evolution in culture, operating models, and ways of working. She is a published author and active thought leader on the BTS blog. Emanuele is the Co-founder and CEO of Yumi, which recently joined the BTS family. Emanuele is a senior advisor who helps organizations design and implement new digital frameworks. He frequently speaks and writes on the topic of digital innovation. Hey Rick, how's it going?
Rick: It's going really well, actually. Well, with the exception of my budding addiction to Duolingo.
Masami: Oh my.
Rick: Yeah, I've got a trip to Brazil, this summer and I was like, I should probably pick up some Portuguese. And, the whole concept of gamification in learning language has proven to be very effective, at least on me.
Masami: That's amazing. I'm a lover of Duolingo myself.
Rick: Oh, yeah. Well, and it's actually a great tie in to today's show because, Katie, who, per your intro has always been a great partner to our clients in implementing significant changes in their business with our partnership with Yumi, we now have the capability to put in the palm of any individual's hand, the power to make that change personal. And, it really does enable us to shift at scale. It's an exciting conversation.
Masami: Amazing. Can't wait to hear more.
Rick: So Katy, welcome back! And Emanuele, welcome to the show.
Katy: Thank you.
Emanuele: Thank you so much.
Rick: So Emanuele, I would love to start with you today. Could you maybe tell our listeners that aren't familiar with Yumi, a little bit of the story of how you guys came to be?
Emanuele: Sure. The story is, I was a fan of Waze, since the very beginning. The navigation app built collaboratively by the community of users is like Wikipedia or other social applications. It's a fantastic example of collective intelligence. By sharing experiences and personal data, the community can build something that makes their lives easier, decrease traffic jams, and reduce the need for outside management, such as traffic cops. Even for the city mayor, Waze can be a wonderful dashboard to see. How citizens use streets and places and design improvement accordingly. We at Yumi had the insight to build something similar to Waze in our work in HR and change management. Leveraging data, collective intelligence, and self-regulation seemed like a good idea at the time. In a certain way, organizations are like cities, and everyone wants to live their work better, autonomously. Driving the journey when possible. And the CEO is like, the city mayor and the mayor would like to see the city from above and understand where there is traffic and action needs to be taken and where things flow smoothly. Yumi is a tool to navigate better through the organization, leveraging data and suggestions to work better with others and providing to every node of the ecosystem, maps and nudges to avoid problems and to evolve better behavior. From our point of view, this is a paradigm shift from a system based on command and control where the feedback and growth are delegated to external agency, mainly the manager to an approach on collective intelligence, where the system learns and grows on its own. After that, we made different attempts to turn these insights into reality. Some of them evolved positively, others failed. We use mechanism and tone of voice very far from traditional corporate software or traditional HR software so that the user feels very, very positive. And when we met BTS, the global leader in change and cultural transformation, we understood that this was the play for us.
Rick: Wow, so that was a lot that you've given us to think about. I guess the first thing would be, I understand what the word collective means and what the word intelligence means, but when you use collective intelligence, what precisely do you mean?
Emanuele: I mean that the colleagues that I work with, know me very well. better for sure than the HR department or my boss. And this form of intelligence is often, it's difficult to capture, to collect and to drive. And to have a technology that can, select, and leverage the intelligence that is inside, every single person of the team of the organization. And if we could leverage this intelligence, we can make a big empowerment of the single employee and of the organization.
Katy: Mm hmm. This is why we were so excited at BTS to have Yumi join our family and be a part of our portfolio in terms of how we serve clients because we're extremely aligned on the idea that change has to be something that's inclusive in an organization. It can't be something that just happens to people or is passively received or is forced upon people. It has to be something that the organization is truly engaged with and people feel a part of, and they feel like they're contributing to it. In addition, the challenge with that, of course, is scale. How do you include thousands, tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of people in change in an organization? And that's really the power that we see in Yumi partnered with the rest of our capabilities at BTS to really drive that kind of scale and impact in an organization.
Rick: That's awesome actually, to think about the ability for people to go on that journey as a whole versus being surprised or worrying about what's coming next. Earlier, Emanuele, when you were talking about how the map sort of changes, if I'm paraphrasing correctly, based on that collective intelligence we were just talking about, what does that look like? Can you give us an example of how that might actually work?
Emanuele: It works in a very simple way. The app asks to every single user to track some interesting data on their work experience. For example, how went that meeting, how was that day, who gave important support during the last week, how was the evaluation of the other attendee at the same meeting, or how was the day for the people you are working with. So, you produce some value for the community and the community provides back to you some insights. So you are tracking the information because you have an interest in receiving some value from the community. And so with no more than two, three minutes a day, you, for the time frame of four or six weeks, in a scenario that we call a campaign, the Yumi campaign, you can, in this give and take dynamic, give and receive some value from the system.
Katy: I think that really aligns with again, Rick, how we think about change in an organization, because I think where we see often change going wrong and I could talk all day about how typically change efforts really over index on, focus on, organizational structures, processes, things like that, and really under index on the people side of change, which is really what the whole BTS, you know, business is based on. But specifically, when we are thinking about the people side of change, what's so critical is that we figure out a way to make it two-way in terms of how we engage with people in the organization. So what Emanuele is really talking about is the power to help individuals throughout an organization really supported with the mindset and behavior shifts on the job that are going to be required to make the organization successful with change. So they're receiving these positive nudges, reinforcement feedback from their peers, tips on how to do things fundamentally differently, but it's done in a really helpful way so it doesn't feel like change is being forced on people. And at the same time, it's asking people for their experience and their opinion, which makes it really exciting for people to feel like they're actually actively participating in the change. So people are able to share, here's what's working for me. Here's what's not working for me. Here's what more support that I need. Here's what I observe in my team. Here's what I observe in the organization. So that experience for people makes them feel really involved and engaged. And then of course, as Emanuele was saying about the power, then, of the data that the system is going to give us, is that then we have so much insight into what's going on in the organization. So, typically the people side of change is managed through essentially communication, which, sort of, one-way pushes information within the organization. The beauty of the sort of daily element of Yumi is that we can actually get into the daily work experiences of individuals and teams and actually see what's happening and what people are experiencing at every level and every part of the organization.
Rick: So Katy, let me just go a little bit deeper. Okay. In fact, into what you just said, and that is that daily connection with change, and including it in the flow of work. I realized that this is one of those things that probably for a lot of people, might feel like too much. So I guess I'm wondering, in your experience, how is it that the daily reminders don't potentially make things harder for people?
Katy: I think that's a really interesting question. And I think, the biggest thing we hear from our clients is that people are experiencing change fatigue. I don't think there's an organization that doesn't, at this point, experience change fatigue. Our point of view at BTS, of course, is that that is the the new normal and, part of our job in working with Yumi or any of the rest of our tools, is to help build change readiness in organizations while we do the work. But we also have to be very careful about how we engage with people so that it doesn't feel like something additional, something extra, something burdensome, or as you said, kind of a constant reminder that I'm supposed to be changing all the time. It helps people see these kind of big macro shifts that are being discussed actually at a day-to-day level aren't giant asks in terms of “me fundamentally doing everything differently,” it's small things, small behavior shifts, small mindset shifts that can add up to a lot.
Emanuele: The idea is that we could try to put the people more at the center of the organizations and, make the work, more, meaningful in a certain way, connecting more with others, especially when we work from home or from remote and sharing an important part of the work experience. Rick: I guess what I'm hearing you say is, it's not reminders of the big changes. It's not daily reminders that we've got to, really rethink our go to market strategy or whatever the shift is that we're talking about. It's actually getting people to realize that it's small shifts potentially every day that make the difference. Am I tracking?
Emanuele: What we discovered, reading a lot of scientific research about what drives engagement and behavioral change, is very interesting, and is an opportunity also to have a more broad and comprehensive approach to the human being inside the organization. Because when we see, in a lot of organizations, also with our clients, the traditional leadership approach, that is using, external motivators to drive, engagement, like, what we call stick or carrots. And, we know that, if for us, the work is meaningful is important, is a big source of energy. Sticks and carrots are at the end of the day are very demotivating. The engagement, leveraging behavioral economics or neuroscience, is more based on intrinsic motivators. I do what I do because it is absolutely exciting, interesting, meaningful for me, has a purpose for me. And so in this new framework where I don't need sticks or carrots to do something that is meaningful for me, but, I need other stuff. We need more empowerment. We need a new kind of leadership to boost autonomy. And the third part that we were mentioning before is the connecting with others.
Rick: Thanks for that. It really helps to clarify some of the differences between the way that things have been in the way that, they actually should be if we're going to be successful making these types of shifts. One thing you just said, Katy, that I'm curious about your perspective on, and that is this kind of concept that I have some level of autonomy on “what this means for me” and “how that works for me.” How do you kind of reconcile that with, what we would consider in the past, like a playbook or, a best practice for ways of working?
Katy: Anyone in an organization chooses what they're going to do at any given time of the day. They're not being forced to do anything. And so at the end of the day, execution of anything in an organization happens from the small choices that people are making thousands of times throughout their day in terms of how they spend their time, how they interact with other people, small choices that they make, large choices that they make. Embracing the fact that people have autonomy and are able to make all these choices that they're making on a daily basis, but supporting them so people are getting this sense of positive reinforcement on the things that are really working, and some tips and some suggestions on things that they could be doing to be even more successful with their teams and within the organization. And of course they can do with that information what they will.
Rick: Cool. That actually provides some great clarity for me. Thank you. So, then I'll just kind of throw this one out – this one pops out to me, Emanuele, in something that you just said, in the traditional leadership approach, I would think it would be difficult for, leaders to kind of, for lack of a better way of saying, pass the responsibility for the pace and the process over to the team versus, what you said all the way back in the beginning, that kind of command and control. By the beginning of Q2, this is going to be how it all works.
Katy: Another part of way we view change, Rick, is that change, particularly today, but to some extent always, has been and needs to be iterative. Change can't be some sort of a linear path from A to B. We need to actually understand how things are evolving in our organization, how things are evolving in our external climate, and be adaptive because that's the nature of how we need to be able to evolve organizations today. So, what this is really helpful for is that we actually are able to get data about what's happening in the organization and iterate and adapt our approach, instead of just sort of communicating things out and hoping for the best and seeing what happens. We're actually able to not only support people on the job and making small shifts every day, but then we actually understand, okay, what's actually happening in the organization? What are people doing? What are they struggling with? What are we successful with? Where are the pockets in the organization of success and pockets in the organization where we're seeing things lagging, for example, and then we're able to use that data to actually adapt our approach and continue to evolve and iterate over time. And I think that's another extremely powerful aspect of this.
Emanuele: My experience with Yumi is that, when you find leaders that recognize themselves, not as cops of the organization, but more the designer, the architect of the city that the people are using by themselves – it is a data driven and iterative process. Where, for other assets off the organization, you can see what is happening, as the results of your decision through data, and, this is quite interesting also to see how, this kind of leaders of every level are going to feel that the issue is not just, inside them is some issue that, arrives from, a bad, style of leader or a bad behavior interacting with other, but it's just a managerial task to try to change my behavior as a leader of this team and to verify, which are the results of this change. And this is, my experience, a new wave of change also for leaders.
Rick: And, I love what you both just pulled out for me in that, which is this concept of the data driven approach that we don't even have to always ask, but we can actually see based on real measurable activity – what, if anything, do we need to do different as leaders to actually enable these shifts to happen? Katy: Absolutely.
Rick: Well, I guess what would probably be helpful for our listeners now is if you could, tell us a little story, give us an example of what this potentially looks or feels like in action.
Emanuele: One case is about new value spread out within the organization where the company changed the company values after decades. This customer needs to embed new values inside the organization. And the project started through the customization of the new values inside the platform. This is one part of the project. Very important. Very useful. The platform as the opportunity to describe, in a certain way, the challenge that the company is looking for, in terms of, new behavior, respected the new habits, new key factors to observe. And so we made this work 46 weeks in advance, and then we launched The Yumi campaign. We made three different Yumi campaigns in an elapsed time of weeks, 12 months. In an absent time of one year, and, during the campaign, starting from this very simple feature we mentioned before, how was your day? At the end day, platform sent a notification to each user through the smartphone. How was your day? Why? And who was with you? And from this, every user can track the day, can share with other colleagues, so the user, each leader and the leadership or the HR department receive a more comprehensive, also more complex, dashboard, with all different insights, on the different data captured by the platform, organized for the organizational structure, but also for some demographic, families, from the tenure, for example, for the job families or for the generation. So every single actor in the organizational ecosystem can receive data, nudging, suggestion to modify and to track how different behaviors, as an effect, on the other part of the organization.
Katy: You know, Rick, what I think is so cool about this is you can imagine the power of this data that the organization is getting. I think it's very easy to understand why the organization wants this, why the leaders of the organization want this data to be able to understand and adapt their approach and be more effective. But the data is only available if people are actually using it – the app.
Rick: Incredibly exciting. I appreciate so much, you both giving us your time today and, can't wait to hear more great stories of how we're able to enable change through a real community effort on the client side. So, thanks!
Emanuele: Thank you so much, Rick.
Related Content
At BTS, we’re constantly challenging ourselves to innovate at speed. And right now, it feels like we’re standing at the edge of something massive. The energy? Electric. The velocity? Unprecedented. For many of us, the current pace feels a lot like the early days of the pandemic: disorienting, high-stakes, and somehow exhilarating. And honestly—it should feel that way. Our teams have been tinkering with AI, specifically LLMs, for the past 2.5 years and it has really been in the last eight months that I can see the profound impact it is going to have for our clients, for our services and our operating model.
The opportunity isn’t about the technology. The world has it and it’s getting better by the minute. The issue is people and people’s readiness to adopt it and be re-tooled and re-skilled. It’s about leadership. AI is deeply personal, it’s surgical. In fact, that’s its genius. So, getting full scale adoption of AI, re-tooling everyone in the company by workflow, so that they can invent new services, unlock new customer value, unlock new levels of productivity, even use it for a better life, is the current race. The central question I’ve been wrestling with, alongside our clients and our own teams, is this:
What does AI actually mean for leadership and culture?
And the answer is clearer by the day: AI isn’t just a new toolset. It’s a new mindset. It demands that we rethink how we lead, how we learn, and how we build thriving organizations that can compete, adapt, and grow.
The productivity paradox revisited
Let’s start with the elephant in the boardroom. There’s been a lot of buzz around AI and its promises. But many leaders have quietly wondered: Will any of this actually move the needle? A year ago, we were asking the same thing. We had licenses. We had curiosity. We had early experiments. But the results were modest, a 1% productivity gain here or there. But by April, we were seeing:
- 30–80% productivity gains in software engineering
- 9–12% gains in consulting teams
- 5%-20% improvements in client success and operations
Just as importantly, the innovation unlock and creativity across our platforms due to vibe coding along with new simulation layers, is leading to new value streams for our clients. This isn’t theoretical. It’s not hype. It’s real. The difference? Adoption, ownership, and a shift in how we lead in order to energize the AI innovation within our teams. The challenge now isn’t whether AI creates value. It’s how to unlock and scale that value across teams, geographies, and business units—and do it fast.
Two Superpowers of the Agentic AI Era
In working with leaders across industries, I’ve come to believe in two superpowers (there are more as well) that will unlock the potential of this AI era: Jazz Leadership and a Simulation Culture.
1. Jazz Leadership
Forget the orchestra (although personally I am a big fan.) The successful team cultures that are innovating with AI feel more like jazz. In jazz, there’s no conductor. There’s no fixed sheet music. There are core bars and then musicians make up music on the spot based on each other’s creativity, building off of each other’s trials, riffs and mistakes, build something extraordinary together. This is how experimenting with AI today, in the flow of work, feels like.
For each activity across a workflow, how can new AI prompts, agents, and GPTs make it better, codify high performance, drive speed and quality simultaneously? How can we try something totally different and still get the job done? How might we re-invent how we work? That’s how high-performing teams operate in the AI era. The world is moving too fast for command-and-control leadership, a perfect sheet of music with one leader who is interpreting the sheet music and directing. What we need instead is improvisation, trust, shared authorship, courage and a playful spirit because there are just as many fails as breakthroughs.Jazz leadership is about creating the conditions where:
- Ideas can come from anywhere
- People see tinkering and testing as key to survival and AI failures mean your team is at the edge of what’s possible for your services and ways of working
- Leaders say, “I don’t have all the answers, but I’ll go first, with you”
- People feel “I’m behind relative to my peers in the company” and the company sees this as a good sign because the pace of learning with AI means higher chance of success in the new era
At BTS, we recently promoted five new partners who embody this mindset. They weren’t the most traditional leaders. But they were the most generative. They coached others. They experimented and are constantly re-tooling themselves and others. They inspired movement. They are keeping us ahead, keeping our clients ahead and driving our re-invention. Jazz leaders make teams better, not by directing every note—but by setting the stage for breakthroughs. It is similar to the agile movement, similar to how it felt in Covid as companies had to reinvent themselves. It’s entrepreneurial, chaotic and fun.
2. Simulation Culture
The ability to simulate is a super-power in this next agentic, AI era. Simulation has always been part of creating organizational agility, high performance and leadership excellence. But AI and high-performance computing have transformed it into something bigger, faster, and infinitely more powerful. It means that building a simulation culture is within all of our grasp, if we tap its power.Today, companies simulate:
- Strategic alternatives - from market impact all they way to detailed frontline execution
- New business, new markets and operating models
- Major capital deployment e.g. build a digital twin of a factory before breaking ground
- Initiative implementation
- Workflows current and future
- Jobs to assess for talent and critical role readiness
- Customer conversations and sales enablement motions
With a simulation culture, where you regularly engage in scenario planning and expect preparation and practice as a way of working, billions in capital is saved, cross-functional teams are strengthened, high performance gets institutionalized, win rates increase, earnings and cash flow improves.
Where to get started
Below are a few examples of what leading organizations are doing. Consider testing these in your own organization:
- Conversational AI bot platforms used to scale performance expectations and the company’s unique culture.
- Agentic simulations built into tools so people can prepare and practice with 100% perfect context and not a wasted moment.
- Digital twins of the job created so that certifications and hiring decisions are valid.
- Micro-simulations spun up in hours to align 50,000 people to a shift in the market or a new operational practice.
Final Thoughts
- Lead like a jazz musician. Embrace improvisation, courage and shared creativity.
- Build a simulation culture. Because in a world that’s moving this fast, practice isn’t optional—it’s how we win.
This is a brave new world. Not five years from now. Right now.Let’s shape it—together.
In today’s business environment, strategy no longer unfolds neatly from vision to execution. Disruption is constant, complexity is accelerating, and expectations are shifting in real time. In this context, strategy that is overly scripted becomes brittle. The organizations that thrive today are the ones that have learned to improvise. Not reactively, but with intention, agility, and confidence. To many executives, the idea of “strategy improv” might sound risky or chaotic. In truth, great improvisation is neither. It is a learned discipline rooted in presence, trust, and adaptability. It is what enables teams to respond purposefully in the face of the unexpected. And it is quickly becoming a core leadership capability for our times.
Why strategy needs to shift
For decades, the dominant model of strategy has been based on control. A select few defined the vision, cascaded goals through layers of the business, and expected execution to follow. Success was measured by fidelity to the plan. The world no longer works that way. Markets are volatile. We are in a technology super cycle. Customer needs evolve faster than product roadmaps. And the economic, geopolitical, and environmental future is increasingly uncertain. Rigid strategies struggle to survive this level of flux. They become outdated before implementation begins. Worse, they force teams into patterns of execution that ignore emerging data, evolving context, or untapped insight. What is needed now is not more precision. What is needed is more adaptability.
Strategy as intention, not prescription
In improvisational terms, a strategic plan is no longer a fixed script. It is a shared intention. It is a direction, not a destination. It is a compass, not a map. The core strategic question is no longer, “What is our five year plan?” but instead: “How do we respond wisely, quickly, and collectively to whatever emerges in service of our purpose?” This does not mean abandoning structure or discipline. In fact, it demands more of both. But the emphasis shifts from defining every move in advance to cultivating the conditions where people can make smart decisions in the moment. Here is the distinction:
- A goal says: “We will grow 17 percent in revenue.”
- An intention says: “To grow 17 percent, we will delight our clients, grow our impact, and operate with excellence to unlock long term value.”
The first is measurable. The second is both meaningful and measurable. And it is meaning that enables action when the path becomes unclear.
What improv really means
Improv in business is ripe for misunderstanding. It is not winging it or hoping for the best. Great improv is highly disciplined. It is grounded in preparation, presence, and shared principles. Here are a few improv principles that matter most for leaders and teams:
- Yes, And… Build on what is already in motion instead of shutting it down. That is how momentum grows.
- Make Your Partner Look Good. Execution is collective. Leaders who elevate others create trust and shared ownership.
- Be Present. You cannot rely on what worked yesterday or predict what comes tomorrow. Execution happens in this moment.
- Listen for What Is New. Do not just confirm your beliefs. Notice weak signals, dissenting voices, and emerging shifts.
- Commit to the Scene. Once you step in, go all in. Half-hearted execution drains energy and derails progress.
These are not stage tricks. They are everyday disciplines for how leaders and teams show up together when the path is not clear.
The boundary: What can and cannot be improvised
Not everything can or should be improvised. You cannot spin up a new factory in six weeks or redo a regulatory filing on the fly. Capital projects, infrastructure, hiring pipelines, and compliance require structure, discipline, and lead time. Within those guardrails, much of execution is improv. The actions and moves you make can and show flex with the need and the moment. Such moves might include:
- How you respond to a customer this week
- How you redeploy resources when a competitor surprises you
- How you adjust product features in response to early user feedback
The art is knowing the difference. Improv lives inside the boundaries, not outside them. And that is where the advantage lies.
We know it works
We have already seen this in action. During COVID, strategy as improv was not optional. Plans dissolved overnight. Leaders had to pivot in real time, trust their teams, and reimagine value on the fly. Many succeeded, not because they had the perfect plan, but because they had the capacity to improvise. Consider two everyday situations:
- Telecommunications company: With hardware and software tightly linked, this company faced constant tension between short-term changes in a release and the permanence of installed infrastructure. By learning to improvise in the short term with software while anchoring their long-term vision in hardware roadmaps, they delivered quick wins without derailing future value. To do so, leaders had to abandon siloed “hardware first” or “software first” thinking and live in both worlds at once.
- Global manufacturer: Preparing for volatility in regulation and transportation, this company had shifted to thinking of its manufacturing footprint as a portfolio of capabilities rather than fixed plants. When sudden shifts hit sooner than expected, they could improvise quickly, rebalancing capacity across countries, not because they were ready but because they had already rehearsed some of the moves. The adjustments were urgent, but they felt planful.
These are not exotic cases. They are reminders that when strategy execution meets reality, it is the organizations that can improvise with purpose that thrive.
From plans to response
The core strategic question has changed. It is no longer, “What is our five year plan?” but instead: “How do we respond wisely, quickly, and collectively to whatever emerges?” Capacity, creativity, and commitment to the purpose and intention of the strategy, not certainty, are now the keys to competitive advantage. Those attributes are built through people: their judgment, their alignment, and their ability to act in service of shared priorities.
How to build strategic improv into your organization
Improv is not just an individual skill. It is an organizational capacity. Here are five practical ways to embed it into how your teams work:
- Ground the organization in purpose and priorities. Make sure everyone knows the “why” behind your strategy. Not just the outcomes you are chasing, but the value you aim to create. Purpose creates the throughline that allows teams to improvise without drifting.
- Build enterprise perspective at all levels. Give people visibility into how their choices affect the whole. When teams understand upstream and downstream impacts, they act with greater confidence and coordination.
- Normalize adaptation, not perfection. Shift the narrative from flawless execution to responsive evolution. Celebrate learning, reward and highlight intelligent risk taking, and treat change as a constant, not a crisis.
- Practice collective sensemaking. Create space for cross functional conversation, reflection, and signal sensing. Encourage teams to bring forward what they are noticing, not just what they are reporting.
- Train for improvisation. Just as improv actors practice, so can your leaders. Build their capacity to navigate ambiguity, connect dots, and co-create solutions in real time. The payoff is not just agility. It is resilience.
Final thought
Strategy execution today is less about control and more about capability. It is less about knowing the answers and more about creating the conditions where your people can discover the right answers for now, together. Companies that thrive in uncertainty will not be the ones with the tightest plans. They will be the ones that can improvise with purpose, with confidence, and with each other. When the world will not wait, improv is not optional. It is the new strategic advantage.
Nearly every leader I talk to knows the old planning model doesn’t make sense anymore. Multi-month cycles. Layers upon layers of initiatives. Budgets that quietly replace strategy as the plan. By the time it’s all done, the competitive landscape has already shifted under their feet. And yet, many companies still do it this way. They can feel the mismatch as they strive to move fast. They just don’t know what to do instead. The old game was setting direction. Decide where to go. Communicate it. Cascade it down. It made sense when the future looked enough like the past that you could be certain of your choices. But certainty is gone. In its place: disruption, surprise, and acceleration. Which means the work of leaders has shifted. The new game is adapting direction.
What needs to be new and different
If strategy execution today is about improv, then strategy setting is no longer about choreography. It requires a more flexible approach. Here are four flaws of traditional strategy planning, and what leaders can do differently:
1. Stop pretending there’s only one future.
We know the future won’t unfold exactly as envisioned. Customer needs shift. Competitors surprise you. Economies wobble. So why do we plan for just one version of what’s next? When one “winning” idea emerges too fast, it often gets momentum without being stress-tested. A better approach:evaluate multiple distinct directions at the same time. One executive team we worked with had five competing visions for doubling the business in three years. Instead of forcing consensus, we worked with them to think through the core choices for each, including customer focus, product bets, and geographic expansion. Once leaders saw the real implications, they quickly ruled one option out. The eventual plan blended elements of the others, with contingencies built in. Thinking through alternatives gave them confidence and resilience when the inevitable twists came.
2. Make choices real before you announce them
Too many strategic plans race to the declaration moment at the Town Hall: here’s the big idea, now go execute. The problem? Leaders rarely know what they’ve actually signed up for, or what needs to change in how the work gets done. If you believe that strategy execution requires improv, then even in setting strategy you need to imagine what comes next and rehearse moves, implications, and ripple effects across future time horizons, albeit in a simpler but realistic form. One client we worked with knew that acquisitions were essential to their growth. They had several targets in sight and negotiations underway, but no imminent deal. Instead of waiting, we ran the extended leadership team through a series of acquisition scenarios with different strategic intent that examined variables such as deal size, level of integration, and adjacency of the added business. As they worked through each scenario, they not only got a view into the nature of potential targets but also what changes they, as the leaders of the organization, needed to make now. They were choosing what kind of organization they would become. Based on what they were learning, they were able to make key decisions to position themselves for future success. They agreed on new hiring profiles, streamlined decision processes, leadership shifts, so they’d be ready when the right deal came. Strategy shifted from a conceptual statement to a real, lived preparation for a different future.
3. Work across time horizons.
People can change fast. Infrastructure and capital cannot. Budgets, board approvals, and physical assets move slowly. Leaders need to intentionally plan for what can change now, what will take time, and what’s locked in, while still identifying the opportunities at each stage. Take a pharma company with a pipeline bursting with new drug development. If even half their drugs made it through approval, their manufacturing capacity would be insufficient. Together we built an adaptable manufacturing plan, anchored on essentials, with clear trigger points for future decisions. When 70% of the drugs cleared approval, they were ready. Without that horizon-based thinking, they would have been caught flat-footed.
4. Align at the right level of detail.
Here’s a trap: mistaking varied interpretation of the strategy for purposeful improvisation. They are not the same. Without clarity and alignment at the top, every leader fills in gaps differently. That isn’t agility, it’s chaos. Leaders must turn the conceptual strategy into something tangible and real, in order to be able to align and lead the organization in the same direction. Strategic modeling allows leaders to test choices at the right level of fidelity, so they know what they’re actually agreeing to. Growing “a lot” versus growing 37% are not the same thing. The detail that is uncovered in the modeling exercises provides enough clarity to shape coherent execution, while still leaving room for adaptive moves over time.
From map to compass
Old strategy setting was about certainty. New strategy setting is about clarity of intent and readiness to adapt. It’s less a map and more of a compass. If your strategy and planning process still looks like a marathon toward a finished plan, ask yourself: are you preparing for the world you wish you had, or the one you actually face? The trick is helping leadership teams shift from setting direction to adapting direction—so strategy setting and execution can adapt. The future won’t wait for your plans.
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