Flex Your Strategic Acumen
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Unprecedented Opportunities to Flex Your Strategic Acumen
The Bottom Line Upfront: As your executives are grappling with an unprecedented convergence of external disruptions—from AI transformation to geopolitical instability—it’s also an opportunity for you to develop your strategic capabilities. Here are exercises to help!
The External Reality: What's Actually Keeping Your Leaders Awake
Let me share data that tells a stark story. According to The Conference Board's 2025 C-Suite Outlook survey of over 1,700 executives, your business leaders aren't just facing isolated challenges—they're confronting a perfect storm of interconnected external forces that are fundamentally reshaping the competitive landscape.
The Dominant External Disruptors
Technology Shifts: The Relentless Leader Technology shifts, particularly AI and digital disruption, consistently rank as the top external factor across multiple years, showing no signs of slowing. CEOs worldwide recognize that generative AI has fundamentally changed how work gets done, yet 45% globally cite lack of expertise as the top challenge to implementing AI effectively.
Geopolitical and Trade Tensions: The Wild Card CEOs globally rank intensified trade wars as the top geopolitical risk, with US-EU-China tensions having the greatest geopolitical impact. while 71% plan to alter their supply chains over the next 3-5 years—up dramatically from 54% in 2024.
Economic Volatility: The Persistent Threat Recession fears remain entrenched. Globally, 46% of CEOs identify economic downturn as a high-impact issue for 2025, down only slightly from 53% in 2024. Among US CEOs, 51% are concerned about the national debt and deficits. Such persistent economic anxiety is driving fundamental changes in how companies approach growth and investment.
Political Disruption: The Rising Concern Data reveals a dramatic surge in political disruption concerns from 2022 to 2024, reflecting global elections, policy uncertainty, and shifting regulatory landscapes that require constant strategic recalibration.
EXERCISES:
How much time do you spend tracking and studying external factors such as these?
What evidence do you see that your organization is concerned about factors such as these?
Do you see your organization new initiatives that are in response to factors such as these?
The Internal Capability Gap: Where Your Organizations Fall Short
While external pressures mount, the Forbes survey of leadership challenges reveals something troubling: the internal capabilities most of your organizations possess aren't matched to the external realities they face.
The Conference Board research shows that amid this geopolitical and geoeconomic tumult, executives are taking defensive action—strengthening supply chains, diversifying vendor relationships, and building operational resilience. The Conference Board data shows that innovation leads your executives' priorities for growing profits (37% globally), followed by introducing new products/services (29%) and investing in technology (26%). Meanwhile, 45% of CEOs globally say lack of expertise is the top challenge to implementing AI. This demonstrates the dual pressure your organization faces to both defend and innovate simultaneously.
The AI Readiness Challenge
The Expertise Gap: With technology shifts dominating external concerns, the internal challenge is stark for your teams. Your executives identify several critical AI-related capability gaps:
Ethical Implementation: Your leaders must establish ethical AI guidelines while addressing data privacy and workforce impact concerns
Strategic Assessment: Your executives need frameworks for asking the right questions about adoption curves, cybersecurity risks, and data availability
Human-AI Integration: The challenge for your organizations isn't replacing humans with AI, but creating collective intelligence that unlocks value creation
The Speed Problem: AI-driven marketing shifts require your organizations to update at unprecedented speed, yet many of your leaders lack the change management capabilities to keep pace.
The Change Management Crisis
Change Fatigue: With external volatility demanding constant adaptation, your employees are saturated with continual change. Your executives must develop capabilities to distinguish between critical changes and change for change's sake.
Communication Strategy: Your leaders need new competencies for explaining the compelling value of strategic decisions, whether about workspace strategies, AI adoption, or operational changes.
The Workforce Strategy Disconnect
Hybrid Leadership: As external pressures reshape how and where work gets done, your executives face internal challenges in maintaining engagement across distributed teams. The capability gap centers on building strong relationships and alignment regardless of physical location.
Talent Acquisition and Retention: External economic uncertainty creates internal pressure for your organizations to find and keep quality employees, requiring your leaders to rethink traditional talent strategies.
The Strategic Decision-Making Bottleneck
Prioritization Paralysis: With external forces multiplying the number of critical issues your executives must address, the internal capability to apply strategic mindset and involve key stakeholders in decision-making becomes paramount.
Agility vs. Stability: External economic uncertainty demands that your organizations develop internal capabilities for flexible strategic planning and cross-functional collaboration while maintaining organizational coherence.
The Stakeholder Alignment Challenge
Managing Diverse Perspectives: Growing social and economic divides create internal challenges as your stakeholders hold increasingly diverse views on sustainability, equity, and business priorities.
Regulatory Navigation: Rapid regulatory changes require your organizations to build internal capabilities for interpretation, implementation, and value alignment.
EXERCISES:
Do you see your organization launching initiatives to build internal capabilities such as these?
If so, is your function being impacted?
If not, can you see a future impact on your function…and/or do you see the need for your function to get proactive in taking action?
Your Strategic Acumen Challenge
The data paints a clear picture for all of us: external disruption is the new normal, and your internal capabilities must evolve to match. But this evolution doesn't happen automatically—it requires deliberate investment in strategic thinking and capability development.
EXERCISES:
Consider these critical questions:
External Awareness: How much time do you spend systematically scanning and analyzing the external forces—technology shifts, geopolitical tensions, economic volatility, political disruption—that will most impact your industry and organization?
Internal Capability Assessment: Which of the internal challenges I've outlined—AI implementation, change management, workforce strategy, strategic decision-making, or stakeholder alignment—represents your organization's biggest vulnerability?
Connection Capability: How effectively can you translate external intelligence into internal personal and/or organizational capability development? Do you have frameworks for connecting what's happening "out there" to what needs to change "in here"?
Time Allocation: What percentage of your leadership focus is dedicated to building the strategic acumen needed to navigate external forces versus simply responding to immediate operational demands?
The organizations that will thrive in 2025 and beyond won't be those with the best crisis response plans—they'll be those whose leaders @ EVERY level - INCLUDING YOU! - have invested the time to develop strategic acumen that turns external volatility into competitive advantage.
So here's a final challenge for you: What further actions will you take to develop the strategic thinking capabilities that will determine your and your organization's ability to not just survive, but thrive amid external disruption?
I'd love to hear your thoughts. How do you balance time spent monitoring external forces with developing the internal capabilities needed to address them?
#StrategicAcumen #Exercise #Toolkit
Sources:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/christianstadler/2024/11/07/the-biggest-challenges-companies-face-in-2025-exclusive-c-suite-and-middle-manager-survey/
https://www.conference-board.org/topics/c-suite-outlook/press/c-suite-outlook-2025
https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbescoachescouncil/2025/02/26/20-big-challenges-ceos-face-in-2025-and-how-to-tackle-them/