Copilot Catalyst Lesson 6: Copilot Is the First Step, Not the Destination
There’s a story about six blind men and an elephant. One touches the trunk and says it’s a snake. Another feels the leg and says it’s a tree. A third finds the tail and calls it a rope. Each man is confident. Each man is working from real evidence and none of them can figure out why the others keep getting it wrong.
I think about this story every time I hear about an AI strategy meeting gone wrong.
The problem is not that leaders disagree. The problem is they are touching different parts of the elephant and don’t yet have the mental model to extrapolate across the whole animal. One executive is thinking about personal productivity. Another is thinking about workflow redesign. A third is worried about governance at scale. All valid, but the room still goes around in circles.
What we have here is not just an alignment problem. This is a sensemaking problem.
Same Words, Different Pictures
Sensemaking is not a workshop. It is the work of turning something new and ambiguous into something leadership can describe using the same words, the same categories, and enough shared clarity to actually make decisions.
When sensemaking is missing, leaders keep having the same conversation because they are not debating the same thing. They are debating different interpretations of what the work is, what “good” looks like, and what the risks actually are.
We’ve watched this play out before. When leaders talk about AI strategy, they often mix three categories without realizing it: personal productivity, team workflows, and enterprise capability.
Personal productivity is the simplest to grasp. Can I draft emails faster? Summarize documents? Prep for meetings more quickly? This is where most people start, and it feels useful and low risk.
Team workflows are harder. This is where AI changes how groups coordinate. When a team starts using Copilot to draft analysis, it affects review cycles, handoffs, and quality expectations. The individual benefit is easy to see. The workflow implications take longer to surface and cross team coordination gets messy.
Enterprise capability is the furthest out. This is where you standardize what works, integrate across the organization, establish governance at scale, and harness those efficiency gains and better workflows to push the company vision forward.
Mix these categories in the same meeting and the room feels busy but still ends with “let’s keep exploring.”
Shared Experience Creates Coherence
In earlier lessons, I wrote about adoption: what blocks it, what accelerates it, and how leaders set the tone. This edition looks at the same Copilot Catalyst program from a different angle. Yes, it is an adoption program, but adoption is the effect. The mechanism is sensemaking and the purpose goes further still: helping leaders build a cohesive, company-first AI strategy they can actually act on together.
This is why our catchline holds up: the secret of our Copilot Catalyst program? It’s not really about Copilot.
Here’s what actually happens. We put leaders through a shared experience. Same bootcamp. Same workshops. Same office hours where they can talk to each other. We give them a common framework for thinking about AI work: personal productivity, team workflows, enterprise capability. We show them what scales and what breaks when you move between levels.
But the framework alone isn’t enough. Leaders need to get their hands dirty. They test Copilot on their actual emails, their actual spreadsheets, their actual decks. They experience AI for all its benefits and all its flaws. They see where it’s brilliant and where it falls apart. They learn what needs verification and what they can trust.
That structured experience creates sensemaking. Leaders develop shared language, shared reference points, and a shared mental model for how AI actually works in their environment. Leaders are no longer touching different parts of the elephant. They’ve walked around it together and built a map based on their shared experiences.
Once it happens, the organization stops re-litigating the basics every time AI comes up. Leaders have shared vocabulary. Shared reference points. They can finally have the same conversation at the same time.
From Sensemaking to Strategy
Copilot is the first step, not the destination. It’s the lens that helps enable sensemaking. It gives leaders a structured way to build a shared mental model using their own work as the test case. But once that sensemaking is established, the real AI strategy conversation can finally begin.
That is a conversation that goes far beyond Copilot.
Which workflows should we redesign, and what does better look like for each one?
Is Copilot the right tool for this workflow, or do we need something else entirely?
Where does an agentic approach make sense, and where is it too risky?
Are there third-party solutions that solve this problem better than anything we could build internally?
What governance needs to exist before we scale any of this?
These are not just Copilot questions. These are business-first AI strategy questions. Business problems driving tool choices, not the other way around.
Most leadership teams cannot have this conversation productively until sensemaking is done. Without shared experience, every discussion gets pulled back to first principles. Someone asks, “But can AI really handle our complexity?” and the meeting resets.
With a shared mental model established through sensemaking, leaders have something they didn’t have before: a unified starting point. Same baseline. Same language. Same reality. The strategy conversation still takes work, but now they're building on the same foundation instead of arguing about what the foundation should be.
That’s the real destination. It’s not just about adoption. The destination is a leadership team that can begin to build and execute a cohesive AI strategy because they finally see the same elephant.
The Takeaway
Copilot Catalyst is an adoption program on the surface. But adoption is the effect, not the point.
The mechanism is sensemaking. We give leaders a shared bootcamp experience with a common framework and hands-on practice. Once that happens, they develop shared language, shared reference points, and a shared mental model. They stop having circular conversations about whether AI is ready.
The purpose is what comes after. Leaders operating from this shared mental model can begin to build a company-first AI strategy and actually act on it. Sometimes the answer is Copilot. Sometimes it is an agentic solution. Sometimes it is a third-party platform. The point is that they can finally make those decisions together, without resetting the conversation every time.
Copilot is the first step. Sensemaking is the mechanism. A cohesive AI strategy you can execute is the destination.
Up Next
We’ll be back in January to wrap the series up. Lesson 7: Fertilizer Helps Growth. Crops Justify Funding is up next. We’ll look at why efficiency gains alone won’t sustain investment and what tangible outcomes you need to keep budgets from evaporating.
If your leadership team is still going in circles on AI strategy, maybe this gives you a place to start. Take what fits your situation. And if you’ve found a different path to sensemaking, drop it in the comments. We’re all still learning how to do this well. Our team at FlexPoint Consulting is always happy to compare notes.