AI Broke McKinsey's Time Horizon Growth Model. Corporate Reputation Management Is Next

Vijoy Pandey published an article in Harvard Business Review declaring the end of McKinsey’s Three Horizons of Growth model.

Introduced in 1999, the McKinsey model categorised innovation bets into three horizons: Horizon 3 (three to five years) for the long-range bets, Horizon 2 (medium-term) for adjacencies, and Horizon 1 (short-term) for the core business.

Technology has effectively destroyed time as the organising variable. With AI now, development cycles have been compressed so drastically that a Horizon 3 idea could become a Horizon 1 business within a single quarter.

Pandey asserted in the article "risk was always the point." But risk had been mitigated by time as technology was advancing at a slower pace back then. Replacing time with a risk lens changes every governance decision that follows.

Risk horizons are about what you don’t know yet, not about when you expect to know it. The human's mental discipline and ability to judge where the possible risks lie, how to anticipate them, and how to manage them, is key in this era.

Many communications leaders today are missing the exact same risk considerations that Pandey pointed out.

The Traditional Corporate Comms Model Is Breaking Too

For years, corporate communications was organised around production friction. Thought leadership briefs, research, and drafting could take weeks. Approval loops could be agonisingly slow. Even so, this friction didn't guarantee brilliant content (honestly, we’ve all seen corporate blogs that suffered from fluff content).

But the time lapse did impose an implicit quality check. Weeks of discussions and several thousand dollars spent to produce a piece forced someone to ask: Is this actually worth publishing?

You could see this quality check at work in the approval dynamics of any communications team. Content that survived multiple rounds of reviews was content that had enough meat to be defended. Content that nobody could defend quietly died. It’s not a structured or sophisticated editorial risk management system. But it worked.

Then came AI. Within a single year, content production shifted to prompt engineering, pipeline automation, and agentic workflows. A thought leadership article that used to take days or weeks could be produced in minutes.

By fixing the friction, we also eliminated the implicit quality check layer that mitigated reputation risk. And in doing so, we created the Marvel Cinematic Universe of corporate comms.

What A Broken Shark Revealed About Thinking Quality

In 1975, Steven Spielberg was losing his mind on the set of Jaws. The mechanical shark (nicknamed "Bruce") kept breaking down. The budget was blown. The tech was a disaster. Backed into a corner, Spielberg was forced to rely on floating yellow barrels, ominous music, and acting tension to build the fear that the broken movie prop couldn't. In the end, Bruce only appeared in about 4 minutes of the entire movie.

The result: Jaws earned USD 470 million on a USD 9 million budget. The movie remains a classic that still still holds up fifty years later.

To a lesser mind, the result could have been very different. But then again, production or technical constraints don’t make or break a movie.

Marvel, on the other hand, has no broken sharks. Instead it has god-tier budgets for CGI and a creative ecosystem that could put anything on screen. With every production constraint for creating visual spectacle removed, what is the result?

Audience fatigue. Loud, expensive movies with increasingly little substance. Popcorn fluff that you watch once and forget immediately.

The lesson is clear: Human thinking quality is the key differentiator, not technical superiority.

Spielberg made a better film because the broken shark forced Spielberg to ramp up his creativity to strengthen the narrative enough to carry what the special effects couldn't. When Marvel removed every creative constraint, we got the other end of the spectrum: they depended on spectacle to carry what the thinking lacked–with increasingly diminishing results.

Is Corporate Comms in MCU territory?

In the past, time was a risk mitigator in corporate content creation because production constraints allowed time for thinking to catch up.

Today, the brief-to-draft time window has collapsed, along with the implicit quality check that came with it. Every content team has blockbuster capability and near-zero constraints in content creation. AI and automation tools are available at a fraction of what it once cost just a few years ago. When production capacity expands beyond the thinking capability, you don't get better content. You get louder emptiness.

This pushes corporations away from an audience desperately scrolling past AI-polished noise and exposes corporations to the exact same risk of audience backlash and reputation damage that the MCU is facing today.

Now that AI has removed every broken shark in the corporate comms department, it falls back to human thinking to carry the load in corporate reputation management.

Bruce forced Spielberg to apply better thinking to make the film work. What is forcing that question in your communications teams now?

That's a question that needs to be answered with clarity very quickly before unexpected consequences arise from unforeseen risks.