Our goal in this key note is to strengthen the practice of real-world evaluation of strategy, programs, projects, and practices within organizations, as well as improve the success rates of organizations in achieving real impact. Our audience is strategy professionals who work with organizational leaders, managers, and evaluators charged with creating measures, gathering and analyzing data, interpreting results, and making recommendations for improving outcomes that could range from simple tweaks to significant changes in approach and delivery. This interactive session (using the Mentimeter platform access and leverage the experience of other strategy professionals in the room) will be based on an article submitted to IASP Strategy Magazine in 2023 and expected to be published in early 2024 with the the support of the Editor. We will be using this keynote presentation to expand on the concepts introduced in the article. Given that the theme of the conference is "unlocking the future" we will focus our interactions with the audience on the integration of evaluative thinking about causality into the strategic management process. We will then highlight the significant value that CSOs and executives can add to agile strategy formulation, implementation and execution by elevating their thinking to the highest level of the hierarchy of causation (Pearl, 2000). We will then contrast the value-added by evaluative thinking to the anticipated benefits of emerging AI & ML tools in their application to strategic management. The limitations of AI & ML will be framed by the lower levels of the hierarchy of causation at which these tools have been designed to operate thus far in their evolution. Today’s machine learning is at its core a correlative tool, identifying subtle patterns (trends) and associations (insights) in data – architected to understand associations rather than causes so they can’t do the evaluative thinking for you.