Why effective AI strategy is really about behaviour
Helping leaders build a better AI strategy
How do you get a leadership team talking honestly about AI?
Not about the technology or specific tools, but the strategic questions:
- Why would they want people to use AI, and what for?
- What would effective, responsible AI look like in their organisation?
- How, as leaders, do they start making that happen?
Even at a senior level, people can find it hard to be honest about AI, so if you frame the discussion as “how do we get people to use this?” you shut down open discussion before it starts. The questions of whether you should do it, and why, are taken as answered. All that’s left to talk about is how.
In many organisations there’s a sense that AI adoption matters, and that it’s urgent – but leaders have little shared understanding of what the technology does, or how it’s really changing work. If there’s no room to figure that out and find common ground, the friction doesn’t disappear. It emerges later in the form of inefficiency, cultural damage, and business risk.
When Charity Finance Group asked Acteon to organise a board-level AI strategy session for their trustees and senior team, we didn’t open with tools, policies, or rollout planning. We started somewhere more useful: why might AI matter for an organisation like this, and what would responsible, confident adoption actually look and feel like?
Why starting with a conversation works
Meaningful work on strategy needs a structure, but not one that assumes the facilitator or the person who called the meeting knows all the answers. Acteon’s approach draws on behavioural science: the way someone responds changes depending on whether they’re alone or in a group, so we design the session around that.
Where possible, we start the conversation at an individual level before any group work, and in the room we try to give everyone tangible ways to show what they really think. The purpose isn’t to reach agreement, it’s to help people work out what matters.
It’s helpful to map where the organisation sits today against where leaders want it to be, noticing where colleagues hold different views, and exploring the tensions that lie behind them. Disagreement can create the sense that there’s a simple binary choice:
- Do we want speed or critical thinking?
- Do we want efficiency or accountability?
- Do we want to meet our targets or protect our culture?
But often neither of those options is ‘right’ – or even ‘better’. You might want both. It’s more useful to see them as creating a spectrum of possibilities, with the balance somewhere between the extremes and changing over time.
These polarities can’t be ‘solved’ – so what matters for any leadership group is recognising when one force dominates at the expense of the other, or when the tension between them is being ignored.
Strategy relates to human behaviour
AI strategy can feel impossibly abstract, especially for people who don’t work in technology. It’s pretty easy to commit to an aspirational principle like “we use AI ethically, responsibly, and transparently” – but much harder to explain how someone actually does that as part of their job.
So it helps to make this concrete by taking real examples of AI use and asking the group to decide whether it’s OK or not. When people aren’t sure – or they can’t confidently agree what’s acceptable – that deserves attention.
AI risks and opportunities are fundamentally human risks and opportunities. They’re linked to what individual employees do. Do I check the AI summary against the source? Do I upload data that I shouldn’t? Do I hand this decision over to an agent?
Being specific is the fastest way to get people working together and developing a shared language. And as they consider different scenarios, they begin to generalise and get clearer about what they want the strategy to achieve.
Common understanding makes progress possible
The first session isn’t intended to create a finished AI strategy. It’s more useful than that. By finding common ground, the group builds a sense of how AI is playing out in their organisation, how they could navigate the tensions it creates, and how those forces shape the way people work.
Once that’s clearer, the group can consider these strategic questions:
- What balance do we want as AI changes our work?
- What would employees do differently if we get that right?
- What can leaders do now to start making that happen?
What CFG’s Co-Chief Executive says
“This is such a useful and productive way to approach AI strategy,” said Charity Finance Group’s Co-Chief Executive, Sarah Lomax.
“The Acteon session was the first time we’d discussed why we would adopt AI, and what it means for us to do it responsibly. Seeing the range of board members’ views helped us understand how we can start finding the right balance. We came away with a better sense of the strategic choices we’re making now, why we’re making them, and what we expect to change as a result.
“We’ll continue this work as we explore and navigate what this means for us and for charity finance, not just internally but as a learning and membership organisation.”
Talk to us
If your board or leadership team needs to get to grips with AI strategy – or to make your strategy work more productive and useful – get in touch.
We can help you build a shared language, find common ground, and make better progress by connecting your strategy to what your people actually do every day.