No Strategy Without Vision ft Brian Evergreen | Invisible Machines
Invisible Machines podcast by UX MagazineShow Notes
Most AI strategies are just a buying plan: literacy workshop → vendor shortlist → adoption scoreboard. Brian Evergreen (Founder of The Future Solving Company, author of Autonomous Transformation) argues that this sequence explains a lot of failure, and it isn’t strategy at all.
In this episode, Brian reframes the job: set the technology aside long enough to name the new value you want to exist, in language vivid enough that people can feel the outcome. From there, no strategy without vision: you work backward through “what would have to be true,” turning invisible opinions into a visible map of bets before agents, data estates, or org charts get to pretend they’re the point. According to Brian, “10% more profitable” isn’t a vision, and a moonshot can still be concrete.
Josh and Robb press him on the pressure to remove friction and flatten the middle of the org. Brian doesn’t dismiss friction work, he warns that friction can quickly pile up if you go hunting without a north star. Vision is the force with enough momentum to overcome inertia: enroll people in a future they want, and they’ll clear obstacles in its service.
Along the way: why future-solving beats endless problem-solving; the Blockbuster pilot that could have led streaming years early (and what killed it); Bell Labs in 1952 and the “telephone system is destroyed — rebuild from scratch” exercise; why adoption can be a dangerously false proxy; and the closing provocation neither vendors nor influencers can do for you. Someone somewhere will author the “no pizza app” interface to reality. If it isn’t you, it’ll be whoever else future-solves hardest.
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