Across most markets, categories and disciplines, that is simply the condition of business now. It creates extraordinary opportunity and real, sometimes existential, risk.

I have worked in strategy for more than thirty years and studied and taught it at Oxford for much of the past decade. The contexts have changed beyond recognition. One pattern has remained remarkably constant:

The businesses that succeed, and keep succeeding, are those that see better than others.

They notice what others miss. They challenge assumptions others have accepted as fixed, including their own. They recognise where value is moving before it becomes obvious. They keep revising their understanding of the world as it changes. In a small number of cases, they change that world themselves.

This capacity has become increasingly important with the mass adoption of generative AI.

Information, analysis and the ability to test, model and prototype ideas are becoming dramatically more accessible. These technologies are also destabilising assumptions on which long-established industries have been built.

As access to the same tools becomes widespread, advantage moves towards the quality of the questions people ask, the assumptions they are willing to expose and the possibilities they are able to recognise before others do.

The businesses that thrive will be those able to keep seeing what others cannot, then turn that insight into value others have not yet created.

My talks and workshops help leaders and organisations develop this capability: seeing technological change more clearly, testing the assumptions shaping their decisions and developing strategies that remain useful as the world around them moves.