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Alignment as a practice, not an outcome
"In a world where intelligence is ubiquitous, the new alpha isn't informational or market advantage, but alignment," says Managing Partner Nikki Cicerani. As the traditional strategic planning cycle collapses, how organizations are trying to achieve—and more importantly, sustain—alignment is evolving.
Nikki says the CEOs she's working with are grappling with similar challenges: how do we engage the make-or-break layer of leadership that isn't in the room? How much transparency about difficult truths does accountability require? Leaders are looking to design a strategic process that goes beyond the goal of getting to agreement during a one-time 'big moment' of strategy setting and then relying on a cascade to execute. Just as important as designing and committing to the strategy itself, is the work of designing and committing to team rituals of continual check-in and recalibration, as the context changes.
Nikki says that increasingly, the goal is to generate "sustained coherence: alignment as a practice, not just an outcome."
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The CTO identity crisis
Speaking of coherence: CTOs find themselves at the sharp end of every high-stakes question, while simultaneously being told (to poach a headline), that the IT Department is where AI goes to die.
A visionary CTO's main character energy can be an asset in this moment, but these CTOs must feel like they're in three movies at once: Grail quest, Wild West, and agentic Frankenstein's monster. In the race to deliver ROI on unprecedented CapEx, some are amping the hype and dropping the guardrails. Too much of this can lead to at best, misdirected innovation—one client told us about thirty different vibe-coded apps that have sprung up for a problem that's actually more affordable to solve with a human—and at worst, chaos. As Managing Partner Sabrina Clark heard a tech leader lament at the Aspen Ideas Festival last month, "When everyone's a developer, what's your backlog process?!"
It's tempting to double down on formal control. But Partner Kendra Cooke notes, "in the absence of knowing where the edges of risk are, people tend to set them too narrow". Trying to fit old processes and protocols to a new reality bogs leaders down in police work, and risks chilling needed experimentation. One alternative, Kendra says, is for tech teams to partner with BUs to hold and equip a "sandbox" space for entrepreneurial uses of AI—then, as business-relevant innovation emerges, shift their role to making it "stable, safe, and scalable."
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"Can we?" becomes "should we?"
Tokenmaxxing fever has broken. At the high end of the adoption curve, the bill is falling due and companies are asking what it has bought them. Kendra Cooke again: "We are in a lot of conversations about the enterprise value of AI, and until recently most revolved around upskilling, workforce optimization, efficiency. But generative quality has improved so rapidly, many companies have already outgrown those benefits."
This isn't just a refutation of Sam Altman's infamous energy comparison that reduced humans to inefficient answer-getters—though certainly many big workforce reduction programs are looking hasty. There's a deeper reckoning, says Jason Baer, about the value of applied human cognition to the company, the employee, and the world. "The most urgent questions now are more ethical, behavioral, and philosophical than technical—not 'can we?' but 'should we?'" he says.
The companies that thrive will be those with technology systems and ethical decision systems that are interoperable by design. One HR leader told Managing Partner Sabrina Clark, "the question that keeps me up at night is not what work AI could do instead of humans, but what work must be done by humans, for reasons that go beyond speed or even quality?" These questions resist easy answers and are tempting to avoid amid the pressure of the day to day, but they are becoming more central than ever.
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The friction that's worth keeping
In social media and behind closed doors, there's a growing conversation about friction: in trying to eliminate every bit of it, have we lost more than we gained?
In a recent project, one client in our own industry (yes, we're often brought in to help professional services firms reinvent themselves) identified that speed bumps, or 'engineered collisions', were a net positive driver of performance.
To figure out what your own version of this might be, Principal Ellie Jabbour has a tip: Pay attention to the things you and your people are actively choosing to keep inefficient—they may contain valuable information about what is important to your culture. Take writing. Ellie points out that while AI has taken the struggle out of writing, we are increasingly dissatisfied with the results. "We write in order to think, not the other way round. It's the self-reflective element that produces the breakthrough".
Going round in circles is part of how you figure out what you're trying to say (for designers, too, as captured perfectly in this New York Magazine timelapse). Likewise, experience designers deploy intentional friction—or what Senior Advisor Sue Walsh calls "strategic discomfort"—during offsites and convenings. It's a powerful way to surface unspoken, but potentially transformational, beliefs, assumptions and intuitions.
