You addressed the symptom and left the system that produces the problem intact. Art Serna is author of The Unknowns Rising and a systems change strategist who has worked across government, nonprofits, healthcare, education, and enterprise growth. He asks one question before he’ll accept the premise that a problem has been fixed: “If you were to solve this problem perfectly, like today, will it come back in six months?” If the honest answer is yes, the work isn’t done and the meeting that declared it done was theater.
Serna has an advantage over traditional industry experts when he works in industries he wasn’t raised in. His read on why that matters: “When you don’t inherit the assumptions of an industry, then you have incredible freedom to question them.”
Twenty years in a sector buys pattern recognition. It also buys rules nobody remembers adopting: why the margin has to be that number, why the sales cycle takes that long, why the product ships in that configuration. Those answers were treated as facts long before most people in the room joined their teams.
What Does an Outsider See That the Room Can’t?
Serna’s example is the one everybody quotes and almost nobody applies. Blockbuster took stores as given and optimized inside that assumption. “Netflix just had a different set of questions. What if you didn’t need stores?” Serna heard the founder of Netflix describe pitching that idea to Blockbuster’s board and being shown the door.
Most companies kill these questions with a phrase rather than an argument: “We tried that. We discussed that already.” The person asking may well be raising something that was wrong three years ago and is right this year. The organization has no mechanism for telling those two situations apart. Nobody checks, because the old answer got filed without a date on it. It just says no.
Companies also routinely mistake volume for judgment. The loudest and most confident voice in the room is not reliably the most competent one. If that’s the voice steering, the quiet person with the better question learns to stop offering it.
How Far Ahead Should You Be Looking?
Serna’s answer runs past the range most strategy decks cover. The underdeveloped executive muscle is the capacity to lead from the future, meaning 10, 20, and 30 years out, then work backward into what the team does now. A three-year plan mostly extrapolates the present, so the leaders writing it never see the disruption coming. They’re forecasting more of what they already have.
For example, he watched this play out in Oklahoma City, where he worked with the school system through Teach for America. At the time, 51% of students came from families outside the demographic around which the system had originally been designed, many of them Spanish-speaking. The system wasn’t serving them well because it was never built to. Demographic change that was visible in the enrollment data was visible a decade earlier in the birth data. Nothing in how they recruited or trained talent had moved to meet it.
He borrows from Chris McGoff’s The Primes and the Three-Horizons framework. The question at the far horizon is the one worth writing on a whiteboard: “What world deserves to exist?” At Spine Hope, the global healthcare nonprofit he works with, that world is one where a child who needs spine surgery can get it. From there, the horizon collapses to something operational, which is what has to happen in the next 90 days to make one decision that moves you toward it.
What frequently gets skipped is interrogating assumptions underneath the strategy already on the page. Serna’s image for this is the group of blind people describing an elephant, each accurate about the piece in front of them and each certain that piece is the animal. A leader committed to one version of the truth gets answers that are less useful, not because the people around them are wrong, but because nobody assembled the whole animal.
Looking Ahead: Decisions About People and AI
Serna’s warning for CEOs pushing AI adoption for efficiency right now is that this could become death by a thousand cuts, and the cuts won’t announce themselves. For example, if you eliminate entry-level positions in favor of AI, then you’ve eliminated the mechanism that trained everyone above them. The savings land this year and the missing bench shows up three years later, when there’s nobody to promote and no cheap way to fix it.
Executives also tend to assume that a Gen Z hire arrives fluent in whatever technology matters. Serna brought data from America’s Promise Alliance, covering 1,500 young people, to a room of manufacturing CEOs. Only 30% of them found AI helpful in their lives. The other 70% didn’t yet see the benefit, and very few used it daily in any meaningful way.
Schools are part of why. High schools across the country are telling students not to use these tools, sometimes for defensible reasons. Almost nobody is teaching them to create value with the tools against a real business or community problem.
Resistance to Change and the Status Quo
Serna’s sharpest observation is about how both corporate and social systems defend themselves. “We only do enough good or allow enough change to make ourselves sleep better, but not enough change to fundamentally disrupt the assumptions underneath the current system.” His example is an education system graduating students who can’t read while everyone involved tolerates it.
My version of the same idea: the pain is never too great for the people who don’t have to feel it, the price is never too high for the people who don’t have to pay it, and the risk is never too great for the people whose necks aren’t on the line. Ask who in your company is insulated from the consequences of the problems, or worse, benefiting from the problems that repeatedly go unsolved, and you’ll usually find the reasons the problems persist.
What Should You Audit Before the Next Strategy Session?
Asked for one piece of advice for owners and executives, Serna goes somewhere most strategists don’t. “What is your definition of what human flourishing should look like in your lifetime?” He built his own answer by reading back through decades of his leadership and personal journals looking for patterns. What surfaced was family, hard work, and a permanent commitment to learning, which now determines what challenges he takes on and which ones he turns down.
Flourishing, for example, can sound abstract until you connect it to something like hiring, which is where it earns its place. Serna’s read on the young leaders he mentors is that “They’re not just going to stay for salary.” They’re weighing whether a job puts them near the decisions that shape what comes next. A company that can only offer money is competing on the one dimension where somebody bigger always wins.
Purpose has become a slide in most companies, which is precisely why the exercise still works when someone does it seriously. Strategy answers how you get from A to B. It has nothing to say about why B is worth reaching.
“What is your definition of what human flourishing should look like in your lifetime?”