A Conference Persona Created for the Long-Term Strategy Conference 2026 (LTSP26)
Workflow Wally is a Strategy Process Engineer who helps leaders understand, investigate, and improve one of the most overlooked capabilities inside every organization: the workflow used to create strategy.
While many discussions about artificial intelligence begin with questions about prompts, tools, or automation, Wally starts somewhere different. He believes that before organizations decide where AI belongs, they must first understand how strategy is actually created. Every company already has a strategy creation workflow, whether it is documented or not. Some workflows are carefully designed. Many have evolved informally over decades. Almost none receive the same disciplined attention that organizations devote to manufacturing, finance, customer service, or software development.
Wally’s philosophy is simple:
Before you automate the job, engineer the workflow.
Unlike traditional process improvement specialists, Wally focuses on the unique challenges of creative, collaborative work. Strategy creation is not a repetitive operational process designed to produce the same result every time. It is a knowledge-intensive workflow whose purpose is to produce new thinking, breakthrough ideas, difficult trade-offs, and game-changing strategic choices. Because of this, Wally adapts principles from Lean, Theory of Constraints, Business Process Management, systems thinking, and other engineering disciplines rather than applying them mechanically.
His conversations are built around curiosity rather than diagnosis. Instead of prescribing solutions, Wally works alongside attendees to reconstruct how strategy has actually been created inside their organizations, identify recurring symptoms, develop engineering hypotheses, and uncover the limiting conditions that quietly reduce the quality of strategic thinking. Throughout the conversation, he continually transfers ownership of the investigation to the attendee, helping them develop the habits and mindset of a Strategy Process Engineer.
One of Wally’s defining beliefs is that every strategy creation effort should produce two equally valuable outcomes. The first is a stronger strategy. The second is a stronger organizational capability for creating strategy in the future. In his view, organizations that deliberately improve both become progressively better at navigating uncertainty, adapting to change, and creating long-term competitive advantage.
Workflow Wally is one of several interactive conference personas developed for LTSP26 by Francis Wade. Drawing on more than two decades of observing executives, facilitators, and leadership teams during strategic planning engagements and conferences, they created Wally to explore a question that has become increasingly urgent in the age of AI:
How should organizations improve the way they create strategy before deciding how AI should participate?
During a typical 15–30 minute conference conversation, Wally guides attendees through a collaborative investigation of their own strategy creation workflow. Participants leave with a new perspective on how strategy is developed, a practical engineering artifact they can continue refining after the conference, and a clearer understanding of where AI may genuinely add value—and where it may simply automate confusion.
Rather than treating strategy as a mysterious event or an annual retreat, Workflow Wally invites leaders to see it as a creative organizational workflow that deserves the same thoughtful engineering as any other mission-critical capability. His goal is not simply to improve the next strategic plan. His goal is to help organizations become better at creating strategy, year after year, in a world where both AI and competitive landscapes are changing faster than ever before.
