Innovation Tips

…a monthly internet letter addressing key aspects of

collaborative innovation

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Strategic Planning . . . Is Now Less Strategic

In the days of command-and-control business structures, when the world was changing more slowly, when you could more accurately predict growth, and when you could look to the past to guide the future . . . strategic planning was the classic approach to guiding an organization’s development.

But few of us live in that world anymore. We now live in a world of constant change, where the past can no longer be used to anticipate the future, where we sometimes don’t know where the next change is coming from. In our new and unpredictable world, organizations that want to thrive must be nimble, proactive, inventive, inquisitive and inclusive.

In his usual blunt language, Tom Peters has said of this new world, “If you think you know what is going on, if you feel like you have a pretty good understanding of what is happening around you, then you are desperately out of touch.”

In an environment of rapid, ongoing change, the process of strategic planning has inherent flaws. First, planning assumes that the future is predictable, that current or past circumstances can be relied upon to anticipate future circumstances. This is simply no longer the case. In an environment of rapid change, where organizations need to quickly adapt to changing circumstances, there is a need for approaches that resemble a living network more than a rigid hierarchy, approaches that engage that entire living network as a source of information and response.

Second, the planning process usually engages only a small group of top managers. The rest of the organization, the people who are in the trenches feeling the pulse of incongruity and change, are too often omitted from the process. They may be asked later to align themselves with the results of planning, but usually make no effective contribution the plan’s creation. So the opportunity to engage the creative and responsive potential of the entire organization is lost. Further, omitting their involvement often engenders a feeling of disenfranchisement.

Few strategic planning processes produce real strategic innovation, a means of capitalizing on new opportunities in formation. The mindset that generates strategic planning tends to produce programming rather than innovation, the predictable and conventional rather than the bold and creative. What is needed to generate innovative strategies is an inclusive and attentive approach, an ongoing process that capitalizes on opportunities as they begin to take shape, that challenges current conventional thinking and that engages the inquisitive and creative contributions of the whole organization.

In today’s rapidly changing world, organizations must constantly innovate, must change and adapt to emerging circumstances and opportunities. Strategic planning may be an excellent planning process, but most organizations can no longer afford to just plan; they must also strategically innovate.

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