By Dr Eric Perez
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 its relevance.
