In times of disruption, your solution must evolve faster than the problem.

For decades, strategy has been about planning and precision. Analysis, alignment, and long-range plans once defined advantage. They gave organisations confidence and direction in a structured way to turn ambition into commercial outcome.

But in an era shaped by disruption, the pace of the problems we must address has changed. The world is learning, adapting, and scaling faster than traditional strategy cycles can handle. To stay relevant, solutions must now evolve at the same speed as the environment around it.

Across industries, leaders are recognising a new reality: it’s no longer enough to have a strategy. The new, additional test is whether the pace of that strategy can keep up with the velocity of change. Because even the strongest plan will struggle if it can’t move as quickly as the problem it’s built to solve.

The Great Acceleration

Artificial intelligence isn’t just another technology but a multiplier on many fronts. It compresses time, processes and decision-making from months to minutes.

In media, AI is reshaping workflows, content creation, and audience engagement at extraordinary speed. In finance, it’s improving risk and forecasting with real-time precision. In advertising, AI capabilities are producing high quality creative and campaigns in a day, not weeks. The latter point is exemplified by Googles recent release of Pomelli, which is only in its experimental phase apparently...

This acceleration brings opportunity along with pressure. While many organisations have robust strategies on paper, the problems they’re designed to address are now moving faster than their solutions can respond. A six-month planning cycle can’t keep pace with a six-week leap in capability.

Strategic Drift in the Age of Speed

Strategic drift occurs when an organisation keeps moving, but not fast enough. It’s not about inaction; it’s about misaligned momentum.

The work is happening, the initiatives are funded, but the rhythm of execution lags behind the rhythm of change. Committees meet monthly, data is reviewed quarterly, pilots wait for approval cycles that belong to another era.

Meanwhile, the frontier keeps moving. Consumer expectations continue to evolve and the gap between the speed of problem and the speed of solution becomes the new measure of competitiveness. This gap is where advantage is either lost or created.

From Plans to Adaptive Systems

The answer isn’t to abandon structure; it’s to rethink it. Strategy can no longer live in static documents and follow linear process - it needs to function as an evolving system.

The organisations keeping pace with change are those that treat strategy as a continuous process, not an annual (or quarterly) event. They combine clarity of purpose with flexibility of execution. Their systems allow them to sense change, respond quickly and learn faster.

This is the new discipline: measured speed. It’s the ability to move decisively without losing sight of direction. It’s keeping strategic intent stable while allowing tactics to evolve fluidly within organisational guardrails.

It also requires cultural change along with building environments where experimentation is encouraged, insight is acted on quickly, and progress is valued over perfection.

In short, strategy is no longer a presentation. It’s a daily rhythm.

Speed as a Competitive Advantage

When AI accelerates everything around us, the advantage no longer comes from simply accessing the technology but also the ability to keep pace with its speed.

The organisations that thrive will treat AI as a strategic accelerator, embedding it into how they think, plan, and operate. Their strategies will evolve at the same pace as the problems they solve.

Those that do will find themselves not reacting to disruption, but shaping it. Because in this new era, success isn’t about predicting the future perfectly, rather moving fast enough to meet it when it arrives.