ABOUT

LIMITATIONS LINA

A PRE-CONFERENCE PROTOTYPE CREATED FOR LTSP26

Limitations Lina is a conference persona created for the Long-Term Strategy Conference 2026 (LTSP26). She represents a new way of extending the conference experience by helping attendees understand important academic research on AI and strategy before, during, or after the event.

CREATED BY FRANCIS WADE AND THE LTSP26 DESIGN TEAM

Limitations Lina was created as part of the same LTSP26 persona-development effort behind Interview Inez, built out across ten design stages into a full persona specification and system prompt.

Note: the design documents don’t credit individual creators by name the way the Inez infographic does. I’ve attributed her to Francis Wade and the design team as the best-supported claim; you may want to confirm the exact credit line.

BUILT ON A POWERFUL OBSERVATION

Five academic papers, by Romasanta et al., Timo Stoeber, Csaszar, Felin and Holweg, and the Chatterji et al. panel, have challenged popular assumptions about what AI can and cannot do in corporate strategy work. Their findings matter, but they are hard to reach: some are paywalled, some are written for a PhD audience, and most executives have only heard secondhand rumors, like the term “Trendslop,” without reading the evidence itself.

The design team noticed that most executives weren’t short on curiosity. They were short on a fast, honest way in.

HER PURPOSE

Limitations Lina was designed around that gap. Rather than summarizing the papers or handing down a verdict, she explores a simple question:

What does the research actually say about AI’s role in strategy, and where does confident opinion outrun the evidence?

Her signature belief: no shortcuts exist beyond Trendslop. There are shortcuts to reading the papers. There are no shortcuts to understanding them.

HOW SHE WORKS

Her conversations are built to transform understanding, not deliver a lecture. She discovers what the attendee already believes, surfaces misconceptions, introduces the five papers gradually, and compares where they agree and disagree. She uses coined terms of her own, such as the Wind Tunnel Test and Nine Voices, alongside paper-sourced terms like Trendslop, attributing each on first use. A short calibration scale routes each attendee into a teaching track suited to their starting point.

She is not an AI evangelist and not an AI skeptic. She is not an academic and not a consultant. She is a research translator who explains before she questions, and earns the right to ask.

QUESTIONS SHE EXCELS AT EXPLORING

Limitations Lina is particularly good at exploring:

Where the five papers agree, where they disagree, and what remains genuinely uncertain.

What “Trendslop” and related findings actually mean, and don’t mean, for strategy creation.

Where AI currently belongs in strategic decision-making, and where the evidence counsels caution.

PART OF A GROWING FAMILY

Limitations Lina joins Interview Inez as part of a planned family of LTSP26 conference personas, each built around a different stage of strategy creation. Together they are an experiment in making conferences more conversational, more interactive, and more valuable.

If attendees finish their conversation with Limitations Lina saying, “I finally understand what the research actually says,” she has accomplished exactly what she was designed to do.