Knowing What Matters

Originally published in the

Why the organizations that outperform are the ones that distinguish strategic priorities from strategic distractions.

For much of my career, I believed the greatest competitive advantage an organization could possess was access to better information.

While working at Nortel, I subscribed to countless newsletters, analyst research, technology publications, and every new business or technology book I could find. Like many leaders at the time, I believed that the more information I could absorb, the better decisions I would make. Better market research, stronger customer insights, deeper industry knowledge, and more data all seemed to point toward better outcomes.

That assumption made sense when information was scarce, expensive to acquire, and difficult to share.

Today, that assumption no longer holds.

Business leaders have access to more information than at any other point in history. Research, market analysis, economic forecasts, cybersecurity alerts, regulatory updates, industry reports, and now an endless stream of AI generated content are available almost instantly. Information has become abundant, and artificial intelligence is rapidly reducing the cost of producing even more of it.

Yet despite this unprecedented access to knowledge, executives are not finding decision making any easier. If anything, they are finding it harder to determine where to focus. Every week presents another technology promising transformation, another report warning of disruption, another regulatory development demanding attention, and another strategic priority competing for finite resources.

More than fifty years ago, Herbert Simon warned that “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” As information has become abundant, attention has become one of the scarcest and most valuable resources inside every organization.

The Cost of Strategic Distraction

Every organization operates with limits. Capital is finite. Leadership attention is finite. Skilled talent is finite. Organizational capacity for change is finite. Every decision to pursue one initiative inevitably means another receives fewer resources, less executive attention, or is postponed altogether.

Artificial intelligence will make this challenge even more pronounced. As Mary Carmichael, Field CISO, Western Canada at Bell Cyber, observes:

"Organizations risk creating a shortcut culture where speed, volume, and polished outputs begin to matter more than critical thinking and judgment. AI can produce answers that appear authoritative long before they have been validated. The organizations that succeed will be those that use AI to strengthen decision making, not replace critical thinking, remaining disciplined about validating evidence and asking better questions."

Her observation reinforces an important reality. Artificial intelligence may accelerate decisions, but it cannot replace the judgment required to make the right ones.

Vanessa Henri, Managing Partner at Ceiba Law, believes the underlying challenge extends well beyond technology itself.

“The organizations that will consistently outperform are not the ones with access to more information. They are the ones that have retained the discipline to make better decisions with it. That discipline has not changed. What has changed is how easy it is to abandon it.”

Henri notes that leaders once made decisions under conditions of incomplete information, relying on governance, experience, and sound judgement. Today they face the opposite challenge: an abundance of information that cannot always be verified, traced, or fully interrogated.

“We have not eliminated the leap of faith,” she explains. “We have simply redirected it.”

Competitive advantage is shifting from access to information toward the quality of judgement applied to it.

A Different Way of Thinking

Throughout business history, organizations have developed new capabilities in response to changing competitive environments. Financial management, operational excellence, governance, cybersecurity, and digital transformation all evolved into board level priorities because they became essential to long term success.

I believe we are approaching another such moment.

Organizational intelligence is the discipline of distinguishing strategic priorities from strategic distractions.

Organizations rarely fail because they lack ideas. More often, they struggle because they attempt to pursue too many of them at once.

Henri argues this is fundamentally a governance challenge rather than a technology challenge.

“The competitive advantage was never information itself. It was always the quality of the decision made with it. What we are witnessing today, the rushed commitments, the fear of missing out, and AI investments without clearly defined outcomes or return expectations, is not a technology problem. It is a governance problem dressed in a technology story.”

Artificial intelligence will continue answering questions. Leadership will increasingly depend on asking better ones.

Competing in an Era of Complexity

Business challenges no longer exist in isolation. Artificial intelligence influences workforce strategy, governance, customer trust, cybersecurity, and competitive positioning. Cybersecurity affects insurance, supply chains, mergers and acquisitions, enterprise value, and corporate reputation. Geopolitical developments increasingly shape technology investment, critical infrastructure, economic resilience, and market access.

Viewed together, these issues reveal something much larger. Leadership today is less about responding to isolated events than understanding how multiple forces interact and determining which deserve immediate action.

Canada's Opportunity

Canada does not lack expertise, innovation, or entrepreneurial talent. Our opportunity lies in building organizations that consistently make better strategic decisions than their competitors.

Henri believes this represents the emergence of what she describes as a trust economy.

“Customers, employees, investors, and partners are no longer evaluating organizations solely on capability. Increasingly, they are evaluating them on judgement, whether leadership can be trusted to make decisions that are principled, accountable, and consistent over time.”

She argues this extends beyond artificial intelligence to broader questions of technological sovereignty and governance.

“The question is not whether to adopt every new technology. It is whether boards and executive teams retain meaningful control over the decisions that define an organization's direction, resilience, and values.”

Canada does not need more information.

It needs better judgement.

Because in an economy where information is becoming a commodity, the organizations that outperform will not be those that know the most.

They will be the ones that consistently know what matters.

The author thanks Mary Carmichael, Field CISO, Western Canada at Bell Cyber and Vanessa Henri, Managing Partner at Ceiba Law, for their perspectives on governance, decision making, and organizational trust, which informed portions of this article.