An end to Strategic Planning so whats the alternative?

To argue that strategic planning has not been elevated to the status of a business essential

is understatement of the highest order. A search on the term ‘strategic planning’ between

1986 and 2024 yielded 9.21 million search results.

In 1986, Henry Mintzberg warned, ‘strategic planning is not strategic thinking. Indeed,

strategic planning often spoils strategic thinking, causing managers to confuse real vision

with the manipulation of numbers. And this confusion lies at the heart of the issue: the most

successful strategies are visions, not plans’. Mintzberg also warned that strategic planning

may impede how leaders use their greatest asset, their ability to think.

Writing for the World Economic Forum, Roger Spitz observed that foresight methodologies

such as scenario development allow for mapping possible organisational future states. Spitz

noted, ‘The purpose of scenario development is preparation, not prediction. This readying

benefits any eventualities, beyond the handful of future scenarios imagined. As we evaluate

the opportunities and risks from our scenarios, we scrutinize their potential consequences.

We can then build resilience to sustain even the most serious outcomes. Foresight does not

hold a crystal ball. It prepares you for the swerves. The future of prediction is imagination’.

A critical consideration in the development of a strategic plan is not the resources used to

develop the plan but how it will be implemented and amended. How many hours and

resources are dedicated to the strategic planning process that leads to a document that is

never fully implemented and becomes a final product that is an organisational artifact that

slowly loses it relevance.

References

1) Henry Mintzberg (1994), The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning:

https://hbr.org/1994/01/the-fall-and-rise-of-strategic-planning

2) Roger Spitz (2024), Why shifting from prediction to foresight can help us plan for future

disruption: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2024/05/prediction-foresight-planning-future-

disruption/