Why politics is your most important strategy tool
Here's what no one tells you about driving change in organizations: your biggest obstacle isn't technology, budget, or even users. It's the meeting where marketing, product, and operations can't agree on what "success" even means.
The problem isn't your strategic skills. It's your political skills.
As a recovering political journalist now working across leadership, product, AI, and education strategy, I've learned that breakthrough insights and successful political movements come from the same toolkit. Both require organizing people around human truth, building coalitions across competing interests, and driving change through complex power structures.
Whether you're launching an AI initiative, redesigning a product experience, or transforming how teams make decisions, the challenge is the same: turning human insight into business value requires political skill.
Why Strategic Leaders Are Actually Politicians (And Should Embrace It)
Think about what you do when driving change: You advocate for insights that challenge assumptions. You build coalitions between teams that speak different languages. You challenge entrenched processes that ignore human reality. You sell a vision of a better future.
Sound familiar? That's exactly what politicians do.
Pioneering designer Herb Simon said it best: "Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones." That describes every strategic leader – and every politician.
Your research insights, strategy frameworks, and AI roadmaps aren't just analytical artifacts. They're political artifacts. They organize teams around human truth and help vast networks of colleagues move in unison toward better outcomes.
The 7 Political Principles Every Strategic Leader Needs
1. Fiercely Advocate for Human Truth
Politicians call it retail politics. Researchers call it human-centered inquiry. Either way, if you're good at it, you're grounding strategy in real human experience.
The principle: Get close to the humans affected by your decisions – customers, employees, users, stakeholders. Whether you're designing AI systems or product features, human insight reveals the path forward.
Why it works: Nothing kills internal assumptions faster than watching real people interact with your "obvious" solution. This applies whether you're testing a user interface, an AI recommendation engine, or a new business process.
2. Build Coalitions (Internal Experience = External Impact)
You cannot create great external outcomes with dysfunctional internal dynamics. Whether you're shipping products or implementing AI, team alignment determines customer impact.
The principle: Start with stakeholder listening tours. Get to know every team that touches your initiative. Understand what excites them and what makes them cynical about change.
The key: Bring teams together to synthesize insights through collaborative sensemaking. This isn't just about buy-in – it's about reconnecting them with the mission that drives better outcomes.
3. Challenge the Status Quo (Create a Burning Platform)
Every organization has people paid to make sure nothing changes. Your job is to make the case for why change serves human needs better than staying put.
The principle: Just. Start. Doing. Stuff. Rack up quick wins and use "How might we" thinking to bring people around a compelling view of what's possible.
The reality: You will encounter resistance. Create space for people to envision ambitious futures – then use your wins to attract former skeptics to your vision.
4. Embrace Being Unpopular (At the Right Moment)
When human insights conflict with business assumptions, someone has to take a stand. If you have rock-solid research that challenges a strategic priority, lean into the debate.
The strategy: Know your audience. Use qualitative insights to move people through story and human truth. Use quantitative data to convince them with hard evidence.
The protection: A foundation of mixed research methods protects you when your recommendations are inevitably challenged.
5. Commit to the Process (Show Your Work)
Strategic thinking, like politics, is about the competition of ideas. It's contentious by design, but that's how the best solutions emerge.
The approach: Democratize insight. Bring people into your research process, show your thinking, and conduct training on human-centered decision-making.
Why it matters: Like the workings of strategy, research methods are hard to understand from the outside. Make your process visible and teachable.
6. Drive Change from Grassroots AND Grasstops
Executive buy-in is crucial, but so is galvanizing practitioners across your organization. You need both your "small dollar donors" and your big-time backers.
The solution: Create insight ambassador programs. The most influential people aren't sitting at the top of your org chart. Train practitioners to champion human-centered approaches in their daily work.
The insight: Change that improves human outcomes can't come from the top alone. It has to be felt from the bottom up and middle out.
7. Paint a Vision – And Sell Your Ideas
There's a reason "moonshot" became common language for ambitious goals. Strategic leadership, like politics, is ultimately about selling ideas that connect human insight to business value.
The commitment: Live your methodology. Do what you say you will do. Make sure teams feel the transformation and stay inspired to make better decisions.
The resource: Never waste your most precious asset – momentum from early wins.
Why This Actually Works Across Domains
Here's what makes this different from other "stakeholder management" advice: it acknowledges that organizations are inherently political systems, whether you're implementing AI, designing products, or transforming decision-making processes.
When I've helped teams drive strategic change – from AI strategy to product development to organizational transformation – the biggest breakthroughs never came from better frameworks alone. They came from better political strategy: understanding power dynamics, building the right coalitions, and timing interventions for maximum impact.
The pattern holds whether you're:
Launching AI initiatives that require cross-functional adoption
Redesigning products that challenge existing workflows
Transforming how teams use insights to make decisions
Building educational programs that change how people think
The Bottom Line
Whether you're driving customer insights, UX design, AI strategy, or product development, politics shape your ability to turn human understanding into business value. The question isn't whether you'll engage with organizational politics – you already are. The question is whether you'll get strategic about it.
Get practical. Be shrewd. Embrace politics as one of your most important tools for connecting human insight to better outcomes.
Because the best strategic insight in the world means nothing if you can't get it implemented.