Start with People, Not Parameters: What a Catch Up About AI Taught Me About Strategy (Again)

AI confusion to AI Strategy

July 21, 2025 Matthew Lee

It started, as these things often do, with a message out of the blue.

A former colleague, brilliant, thoughtful, now at something of a crossroads, reached out. They were looking to catch up, chew over some thoughts, and “pick my brain” about AI. I’ll be honest, I love these conversations. Not just for the nostalgia, or the flattering sense that someone still finds my thoughts worth picking over, but because AI is one of those subjects that never stays in one place. It wriggles. It expands. It pushes.

And yet, this time, I paused.

What were we going to talk about, really? The week had seen the release of GROK 4, another entry in a fast growing list of AI marvels that seem to land faster than software updates. Every week now seems to bring a new wrapper, plug in, eval suite, safety patch, GPU form factor, airflow hack, or model that redefines the state of the art for all of six hours. Was that where we were going? Should I brush up on transformer architectures, or prep my thoughts on the flurry of benchmarks that, frankly, now feel as saturated and semantic as late 1990s processor marketing?

Back then, as a younger version of myself working at the edges of the first internet wave, I lived for that stuff. The latest clock speeds, memory specs, chipset tweaks, I soaked it all up. And yet, somehow, the machines I built back then rarely worked the way I hoped. They rebooted themselves with the kind of frequency that made me question my choices in life.  I laughed when the iMac was released, the handle installed to help you throw it out of the window. True the iMac did not have bleeding edge internals. No specs to wow the geeks. But it did look fantastic on a desk, booted when you asked, and actually did what people needed it to do intuitively.

A room full of iMacs.

It was a moment that stuck with me, even if I didn’t realise its importance at the time, technology, on its own, doesn’t win. The combination of focusing on problems that people have, on the user, the customer, the mission, developing a strategy based on this understanding and bringing together robust cohesive technologies does.

These days, that moment has grown into something much bigger. I co-founded Birch Tree Associates with @Dr Nicky Shaw not to tell organisations what their strategy should be, but to work with them, alongside leaders, customers, communities, and stakeholders, to create strategy that make change happen. Not paperwork to gather dust. Not lofty, ungrounded aspirations. But strategy that makes a difference, rooted in lived experience, reflexively developed, using open source principles and deliberately designed to be acted on.

That means something quite different from conventional thinking. In a world characterised by complexity, strategy isn’t about predicting the future or engineering control. It’s about enabling a system to evolve with purpose. It means helping people make sense of the present, situated in context, so they can act in ways that are safe to fail, rather than attempting to fail-safe. It means developing leaders who understand that direction often emerges from the interactions within a system, not from above it. And it means treating strategy not as a static plan but as an ongoing, participatory practice, responsive to changing conditions, shaped by multiple perspectives, and rooted in the lived reality of the people and ecosystems it seeks to serve.

So, when my colleague asked if we could talk about AI, whilst old habits die hard and my initial reaction was to reach for the benchmarks, I quickly put them back down. Instead, it was to ask: What are you trying to do? And perhaps more provocatively: Why are you trying to do it?

Because, as I’ve found time and again, organisations are now scrambling to bolt on AI, sometimes because of pressure, sometimes curiosity, sometimes just because it’s fashionable. But too often, these efforts float disconnected from strategy. Like my super powerful PC, they aren’t anchored. They aren’t aligned. They’re clever, but not cohesive.

A while back, I sat around a table with friends, many of them technologists, innovators, early adopters like me, and we talked about how we were using AI. It was all very exciting, large language models, automated workflows, copilots, custom plug-ins, agents. And yet, when I asked the simplest of questions, What is AI helping you achieve? the room went quiet.

Some were using AI to make things more efficient. Others to prototype or summarise. But most admitted, eventually, that they weren’t quite sure what it was for, strategically speaking. It had become a kind of performative adoption, using AI because everyone else was, not because it connected to a coherent strategy.

And that word, strategy, is where we usually get stuck. Many organisations have strategies. At least on paper. But when I asked these same friends what their strategy was, I got a lot of vague but inspiring language. “We want to innovate.” “We want to be the leader in …”. “We want to serve better.” “We want to grow responsibly.” All good aims. None of them strategy.

To me, a real strategy isn’t an aspiration, it’s a commitment to what you will and what you will not do. It names the critical challenge you and your customers are facing. It identifies the few moves that matter. It defines where and how you will compete. It commits resources, people, systems, culture, into a set of mutually reinforcing actions. It sequences those moves over time. And it remains agile enough to adapt when the world shifts underneath you, as it always does.

You don’t plug AI into that kind of strategy as an afterthought. You purposefully design it in. AI can enable you to achieve things you thought impossible, but only as part of a cohesive whole.

Which brings me back to that chat with my colleague, and the Steve Jobs clip it unearthed from my memory.

Jobs was being challenged, politely, but pointedly, by someone in the audience. The question was about product decisions, and Jobs, with characteristic calm, responded by laying out his core philosophy, start with the customers problem and work backward to the technology. Understand their needs. Build around those needs. Then bring in the best technology you can to solve the problems that actually matter.

It was simple. Obvious, even. But as with so many obvious truths, it's easy to forget in the noise.

Apple’s success, then and now, wasn’t about having the fastest processors or the largest RAM. It was about creating products that fit elegantly into people’s lives. Technology in service of experience. Strategy in service of impact. That clip, when I revisited it, reminded me why we started Birch Tree Associates in the first place.

Too often, strategy becomes ornamental. A PDF. A collection of artifacts sitting on a shelf. A slide deck full of words no one uses in meetings. But strategy, when done properly, isn’t a plan, it’s a way of seeing, deciding, and doing. It establishes conditions under which insight and coherent action can continually emerge. It builds systems that turn intention into action. And when it’s truly embedded, it allows leaders, not just those with “Chief” in their title, but across every layer of an organisation, to show up boldly, confidently, and consistently in pursuit of a shared purpose.

That’s when AI becomes a force multiplier.

When you know who you are, where you're going, and what you're trying to achieve, AI isn't noise. It's signal. It’s the tool that helps you scale impact, reimagine service delivery, uncover patterns, test ideas, extend your reach. It’s the infrastructure of innovation, across products, processes, positions, even paradigm changes.

And for organisations in the third sector, where resources are often stretched and missions are deeply human, AI has the potential to be transformative. But only if it’s built on a foundation of strategy that’s real, lived, and aligned with the needs of those you serve.

That’s why, at Birch Tree Associates, we work the way we do. We don’t start with tech. We start with questions. With dialogue. With stakeholders. With story. Because when you develop a strategy openly and reflexively, with the people who will be affected by it, you don’t need a separate communications plan. The strategy speaks for itself, because it was built with voices that matter.

This doesn’t mean every idea is adopted. It doesn’t mean there’s perfect consensus. But it does mean that strategy is something people understand, believe in, and want to bring to life. That’s how we make strategy real. That’s how we make great leaders. And that’s how, ultimately, we make a difference.

And maybe that’s the final lesson the iMac taught me. Back then, I had a computer that was technically superior in every spec, and yet utterly unreliable. Apple had something slower, but more cohesive. It worked. It didn’t crash. It felt like someone had actually thought about the person who’d be using it.

In that sense, not much has changed.

In a world that is increasing Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous (VUCA), Brittle, Anxious, None-linear, and Incomprehensible (BANI), the question remains the same. Are you building something that works for the people it is meant to serve?

If the answer is yes, then AI can take you further than you ever imagined. If the answer is no, then no amount of processing power will save you.

So when my colleague and I finally sat down to talk, we didn’t open with benchmarks or eval scores. We talked about their organisation. Their customers. Their mission. We talked about leadership, ecosystems, choices. And somewhere in there, yes, we talked about AI. But only as one tool among many. A game changer, but still just part of the story.

And maybe that’s what I’ve learned most over the years, it’s not the smartest tech that wins. It’s the smartest strategy.

If any of this resonates with you, if you are wrestling with how to align strategy, technology, and impact, I would love to continue the conversation. Let’s talk.

Matt@BirchTreeAssocaites.co.uk