strategic planning

Management, strategy, and foresight compared

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This post distinguishes management, strategic planning and foresight. It suggests how the “long view” and global perspective of futurists, which is at the core of foresight, also benefits management and strategic planning.

Here are some definitions:

  • Management—design and orchestration of processes to maintain an organization’s operations and achieve its defined objectives. Near-term, generally focused on the present, and centered on the organization and its current operating environment.
  • Strategic planning—identifying and prioritizing goals and objectives for an organization’s near-term future, generally 3 to 5 years. Focused on the existing organization, it considers, or should consider, external environment impacts and change.
  • Foresight—long-range exploration of change, generally 10 years plus, and interpretation of possible futures for their organizational implications. It takes a broad, often global/contextual view of external forces shaping the future, and looks deep into the future to identify unmet challenges and emerging opportunities.

Managers are understandably focused on the present and on day-to-day management. The best are fine-tuning their processes and systems as they run. Others are playing catch up, implementing changes to put things right and catch up to existing demands. In either case, the work they are doing is management. 

Managers have an instinctive action mindset. Their framing is on the organization and its sector and marketplace. That close-focus holds thinking in organizations in the present and the near at hand. It constrains exploration of more impactful change. The risk is an organization with blinders on, one that engages in a steady pattern of fire, ready, aim. 

Strategic planning arises from this close-focus and near-term context. It works inside the habits of business managers, and usually falls short of engaging long-term thinking about new challenges and possibilities.

The solution is to separate execution from exploration. True leadership means pressing for a long view to discover more potential change and opportunity even as they maintain operations. With that stretch thinking comes a promise to “bring it home to today” which reassures stakeholders that the exploration is relevant and valuable.

 

7 Deadly sins of foresight

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1. Ignoring the future (You let today's concerns give you an excuse to not focus on the future) [See: Keep an eye on the future while righting the ship].

2. Shortsightedness (You only think a few years into the future) [See: The foresight gap: what too many organizations get wrong]

3. Mistaking the present for the future (You mistake fixing things and catching up with today for being future-focused) [See: If you're only keeping up you're probably going backwards]

4. Narrowness (You fail to realize your future will be shaped by a much larger one which you need to understand) [See: Foresight illustrated: choosing how broad a view to take while exploring the future]

5. All else held equal (You let your attention focus on just one change, and assume everything else stays the same) [A solution is to use scenarios– fleshed out views of the future — to make sure you explore how multiple changes will unfold. See: Why we need scenarios to be ready for the future] 

6. Lack of vision (You have not thought through nor communicated the future you want or expect) [See: You can't be what you can't see]

7. Deafness (You don't listen to others, or pay attention to signals of change) [See: Talk to the frog]

For more on pitfalls and "deadly sins" for foresight see: 13 mistakes you make when exploring the future

For good habits in foresight that can fight these sins, see:  27 habits of highly effective futurists

Image: detail from Hieronymus Bosch, The seven deadly sins and the four last things, circa 1500. Museo del Prado, Madrid. Public domain.

Noun = bad, verb = good

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Consider the difference between a plan and planning. A plan is a thing—most often a document in some form. It’s a fixed set of ideas about what you are going to do next.

Just at the moment a plan is completed, it begins to age into irrelevance or incorrectness, possibly very quickly. Conditions and context are always changing. And because of the decisions and narrowing necessary to concoct a plan, the thing may never have been particular right in the first place.

Now consider planning. Planning is an ongoing process. It’s a process you work on, improve, and continue. Instead of a limited stepwise effort resulting in a literal or figurative 3-ring binder, you have an organizational process that has a life, sees growth and development, and can change as needed.

Among my clients are many who engage in a periodic strategic planning process. That’s the old-school thing you do—it’s text book management. But that doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do.

Organizations put their heart and soul into periodic strategic planning. They spend time and money. Usually, a special team or department takes the lead. Too often, the work is a task for experts, and doesn’t connect to the wider organization. The effort suffers because it is set up as a special activity.

So don’t put your energy into completing that three-ring binder, celebrating or breathing a sigh when you have punched and inserted the last pages. Put your energy into getting good at the verb*–planning, not the noun–plan. Focus on learning to be agile, strategic, and to plan, plan some more, and plan yet more. The payoff is in your ability to move and shift with changing conditions.

Don’t make planning only an episode or periodic activity. Make it continuous, and build it to be ready to move and shift as conditions do. Your plans will be relevant, workable, and easier to adjust when they are not.

Note: I’ve shared a closely similar view here: The Power of Words — but this is a topic worth revisiting!

*Please also note: I am aware that “planning” is a gerund, noun form of the verb to plan, but for a succinct title, I settled on noun vs. verb

Planning, scanning, forecasting: It’s the verb, not the noun

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In exploring the future, it’s the journey that counts most, not the plan, report, or briefing you produce. Remembering that is essential. You need to make sure your colleagues, clients, bosses understand that the value and power of the journey is foremost. You don’t want your key stakeholders to wait for the “answers” they think you should produce for them, you want them in on the process.

The process is about rehearsing flexible thinking, alternate views, what ifs, and contingencies. You can’t explore all the possible what ifs, and should not try.

Instead, learn from the thinking you do in exploring a range of possibilities. By that you can get better at facing uncertainty with assurance that you and your colleagues build into your thinking resilience against the unexpected. Chances are, your plans will be robust in a range of different outcomes–you can hope so.

Dwight Eisenhower understood this:

“Plans are worthless, but planning is everything. There is a very great distinction because when you are planning for an emergency you must start with this one thing: the very definition of “emergency” is that it is unexpected, therefore it is not going to happen the way you are planning”

–Speech to the National Defense Executive Reserve Conference in Washington, D.C. (14 November 1957) [Link]

A great tool for this journey is scenario planning. A set of scenarios is a sampling of a range of what ifs against which you can build some plans and strategies. But your set is never a complete view of the possible future. And most of all, it’s the process of exploring alternative futures with scenarios that matters most. You can find a lot more about scenarios here.

(My colleague Jennifer Jarratt reminded me of this quote, and I am grateful in this, as in so much of her work, for her ideas and inspiration.)

Eisenhower’s little bit of wisdom, like so many quotes, has taken up residence on the Internet in a paraphrase, cut loose from its true moorings in Ike’s speeches and writing. It turns up most often as “Plans are worthless. Planning is essential”.

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