Most people talk about strategic planning as if it was the whole game, encompassing everything from thinking about the future, decision making, documenting plans, and then monitoring and reporting on those plans. But, strategic planning is not about planning strategically, and as Henry Mintzberg suggested, is a term that is an oxymoron.
Because people think they understand the term and what it involves, there is a reluctance to change it by introducing futures processes. When I was involved in integrating a futures approach to existing planning systems, I was often told that “I see no point in this” and “our plan is clear and documented”, and “we consider the future in our thinking”. When I asked whether or not staff were involved in the development of that plan, I usually received a response along the lines of “they were given an opportunity to comment”. And, when I asked what informed their own thinking about the future, I realised that I had just committed a career-limiting faux pas!
Managers and CEOs are not paid to admit they are uncertain, and they have a strong emotional investment in the status quo that they helped to build. The cynic in me suggests that they are paid to produce glossy strategic plans that look as though strategic direction is clear.
How do you integrate futures approaches into strategy processes?
The first step is to reconceptualise the way in which strategy is viewed.
Strategy, after all, is about the future, while strategic planning is the way we go about developing a plan to implement that strategy. Strategic planning is not about planning strategically.
As suggested above, strategic planning is often defined as an all encompassing process that includes strategic thinking, strategic decision making about future options, documenting and implementing plans and then monitoring of outcomes.
These stages overlap and blur, but there tends to be a focus on producing tangible plans rather than on the thinking processes that go into the plans. Even when organisations think they are consulting widely in their planning processes, and taking multiple viewpoints into account, they are often just reinforcing deeply held assumptions.
Traditional strategic planning processes cannot be viewed as taking the future into account – unless there is a defined stage in those processes that allows systematic exploration of the future, as well as surfacing and challenging of assumptions, beliefs and ideas held by staff about the future.
Staff need to be given authentic opportunities to participate in the development of a shared view of the future, and this can be achieved by adding a step where they are asked what they think the future might hold for their university or organisation. Like all scanning information, staff input is subject to analysis and interpretation, but it’s a step that needs to be overtly included in strategy development. And, the focus of strategic planning of “who, where, and how?” needs to be augmented by a futures focus on “what, when, and why?”.
For strategy to be informed by futures approaches then, the current model of strategic planning needs to be reconceptualised into three separate, distinct but interdependent stages, as shown in this graphic, each with its own approach and methods:
- strategic thinking,
- strategic decision making, and
- strategic planning.
And, how do you do that?
Strategic thinking requires time to be set aside on a regular basis to think about what is coming over the horizon, how it might affect your organisation, what your possible responses are, and when you might need to take action. This stage is about identifying the widest range of possible and plausible strategic options. It’s the divergent thinking stage of strategy development.
It’s the step that is often forgotten, because we are time poor, and because thinking happens in your heads. To share thinking you need structured processes to allow people to share their views, hopes and fears about the future. In a data driven, metric obsessed world, however, this type of activity can’t be quantified, and if you can’t measure it, it doesn’t get done.
Yet, if you don’t spend time thinking about what’s out there, and how it might change the way you do business in the future – and the way you do business will have to change – your strategy will be flawed from the beginning.
Scenario planning or thinking is a good tool for this stage since it moves you beyond the certainty of today’s business-as-usual approach to understanding the uncertainty and complexity of the future – so that you can move beyond business-as-usual in your strategy.
Your environmental scanning informs the strategic thinking phase of strategy development. Even when organisations think they are ‘doing’ environmental scanning and casting their net widely, unless that scanning is embedded in a futures framework, you are really only scanning what is known about the past and the present, and perhaps, what you know they don’t know.
The Board or CEO ultimately make the decision about strategic direction, and this is best done after a participative strategic thinking process.
Strategic planning is well understood, and is focused on taking action, and ensuring that action is completed.
This level of planning though, should never be set in stone, as the external environment is always changing, and changes to agreed actions will probably always be needed.
The focus at this level is on producing a document that is clear and which assigns accountabilities, timeframes and measures. It does not, and should not, be a glossy expensive publication. There is a theory that the usefulness of a strategic plan is connected directly with the degree of gloss given to that plan – the higher the gloss, the lower the usefulness of the plan.
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