A pattern worth sharing from advising on internal AI strategy documents: a strategy forced down from a sprawling forty-page version to a tightly constrained four pages consistently comes out clearer and more actionable, not despite the cut, but because of it. The length constraint forces decisions the longer version had been avoiding.
Why longer documents hide unclear thinking
A forty-page strategy document has room to describe multiple possible directions, hedge on priorities, and include enough qualifying language that almost any subsequent decision can be justified as consistent with the document. This isn't necessarily deliberate obfuscation - it's simply what happens when there's enough space to avoid making a hard call explicit.
What a hard length constraint forces
Cutting to four pages requires choosing an actual priority order, rather than presenting several initiatives as equally important. It requires stating what the strategy explicitly won't pursue, not just what it will. Both of these are harder and more valuable decisions than most longer strategy documents actually make.
Why this matters more for AI Strategy specifically
AI strategy documents are particularly prone to the padding problem, because the space of plausible AI initiatives is large enough that a comprehensive-sounding document can list many of them without ever forcing a real prioritization decision among them.
A practical suggestion
Before finalizing an AI strategy document, try cutting it to a quarter of its current length and see what survives. What gets cut usually reveals which parts were genuine priorities and which were padding that let the document avoid a harder decision - and the shorter version is almost always the more honest one.