Listen to this article:
Abstract: This article proposes an alternative, future-focused approach to strategic planning inspired by practices in futures studies and strategic foresight. Traditional strategic planning tends to rely on analyzing past trends and current conditions, limiting creativity and adaptive capacity. In contrast, a futurist approach frames strategy around exploring preferable futures and identifying discontinuities, uncertainties, and low-probability events that could significantly impact the organization. Key concepts from futures research like scenario planning, environmental monitoring, expert interviews and wild card tracking are presented as ways to conduct more expansive and long-term environmental scanning. The stages of developing strategic options, plans, and ongoing adjustments are also discussed through a futurist lens. Examples from Bell Canada and Meyer Turku demonstrate how these concepts have been successfully applied in practice. By cultivating foresight skills and habits of continual exploration, adaptation and stakeholder collaboration, organizations can develop strategic plans more resilient to an unpredictable future.
As a long-time strategy consultant and academic researcher, I've had the opportunity to work with organizations across many industries on developing strategic plans to chart their course for the future. However, the traditional approaches to strategic planning often focus too much on analyzing past performance and current industry trends instead of truly grappling with what might change in the external environment and how the organization can shape that change.
Today we will explore an alternative perspective on strategic planning inspired by practices in futures studies and strategic foresight. Doing strategic planning like a futurist means adopting a mindset of exploring possible and preferred futures, rather than just extrapolating from the present or past. It means using tools from futures research to envision disruptive changes and help strategize around uncertainty. While an unconventional approach, taking a more future-focused perspective can lead to strategic plans that are more innovative, adaptive, and resilient over the long run.
Framing the Strategic Conversation
To start any strategic planning effort with a futurist bent, it is important to first establish the proper framing and mindset. Instead of diving right into an analysis of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT), leaders must shape the strategic conversation around forward-looking questions. As Hines and Bishop (2013)_ point out in their introduction to strategic foresight, questions should focus on possibilities rather than probabilities. Some example framing questions include:
What kind of future do we want to help create? What is our preferred future vision?
What driving forces of change might significantly impact our industry or organization over the long run?
What wild cards or low-probability, high-impact events could potentially disrupt standard assumptions?
What new business models or innovative strategies might emerge that could transform competition?
How might our core purpose or value proposition need to evolve to remain relevant?
By starting with open-ended, thought-provoking questions, leaders set the stage for exploration rather than extrapolation (Schwartz, 1996)_. Participants are encouraged to think expansively about potential developments rather than narrowly focusing on incremental changes. This helps open minds to disruptive possibilities that may at first seem implausible but could become reality.
Environmental Scanning with a Futures Lens
Once the strategic conversation is properly framed, leaders must cast a wide scanning net to identify potential drivers of change, discontinuities, and weak signals on the horizon. Traditional environmental scanning looks inward at industry trends and outward at macroeconomic, political, social, technological and ecological factors. Scanning with a futures lens adds several techniques drawn from strategic foresight practice:
Scenario Planning: Perhaps the most powerful foresight tool, scenario planning involves crafting narratives around different potential futures and strategizing around the implications (Schwartz, 1996; Bishop et al., 2007). Well-crafted scenarios consider alternative perspectives on uncertainties like geopolitical stability, pace of technological change, macroeconomic conditions, regulatory shifts, demographic transitions and more. Developing 2-4 plausible yet thought-provoking scenarios helps stimulate new ideas by stretching teams’ mental models.
Environmental Monitoring: Futurists pay close attention to signals of potential change by monitoring academic, business and futurist literature, think tanks, technology foresight reports and emerging issues tracking websites. Useful sources include the World Economic Forum’s top future risks, OECD technology forecasts, PEST analyses on megatrends, and industry disruption radar from analysts like Gartner.
Expert Interviews: Consulting with external experts, such as industry analysts, technology academics, think tank researchers, helps identify hard-to-detect phenomena, validate assumptions and refine weak signals. Futurists ask probing questions on the future of work, lifespans, AI, materials innovation and other transformational developments.
Wild Card Tracking: Low-probability developments with massive ramifications require watchfulness. Emerging risks like geoengineering mishaps, pandemics, cyber warfare or artificial general intelligence may seem unlikely but require contingency planning. Monitoring wild cards can stimulate "what if" discussions.
With these foresight techniques, environmental scanning becomes greatly expanded in scope and time horizon. The goal shifts from monitoring trends to identifying potentially game-changing uncertainties and discontinuities.
Developing Strategic Options
Once environmental factors, scenarios and weak signals are identified, the focus shifts to devising strategic options the organization may pursue. Futurist Don A. Norman (1983) emphasized exploring a wide range of radical, discontinuity-based strategic options rather than maintaining the status quo. Some techniques include:
Preference Mapping: Assessing organizational values and stakeholders’ needs/wants helps define the desirability of different strategic directions. Leaders clarify the preferred and plausible futures to potentially create. Cross-impact analysis on scenarios can also refine strategic choice preferences.
Morphological Analysis: This technique systematically explores the strategic design space by breaking down an organization's activities/offerings, capabilities, external forces, and piecing them together in novel combinations(Glenn and Gordon, 2009). It stimulates creative, paradigm-shifting ideas leaders may not have considered otherwise.
Portfolio Planning: Strategic options with varying risk/reward profiles can populate a portfolio. Options aim to hedge against different scenarios by pursuing flexible, scalable initiatives that can radically change or abandon existing programs.
Options Thinking: Like financial options, strategic options create optionality while not requiring large upfront commitments(Schwartz, 1996). Pursuing low-cost experiments, pilots and prototyping tests concepts without full resourcing until viability is proven. Abandoning or adjusting options remains easy.
Taking a systemic, combinatorial perspective on environmental factors and the organization’s mutability broadens the range of possibilities explored. This stimulates more innovative, disruptive and paradigm-shifting strategic directions worth pursuing.
Developing the Strategic Plan
The resulting strategic plan contains not just strategies but also resources devoted to ongoing adjustments through learning and hedging. Key features of a futurist-inspired strategic plan include:
Multiple Time Horizons: Most plans focus 1-3 years but anticipating tipping points requires looking 5-10+ years out. Rolling forecasts and agenda-setting look farther ahead while annual planning cycles operate at 1-3 year horizons.
Continuous Scanning and Adjusting: Rather than set-and-forget plans, foresight practices continually refine weak signals, test assumptions against new data, update scenarios and adjust the portfolio accordingly through agile processes. Plans evolve through ongoing learning.
Hedging Uncertainties: Allocating resources to probes, experiments and options hedges against uncertainties by diversifying strategic bets. Abandoning strategies remains an on-table discussion topic as situations change.
Organizational Adaptability: Building strategic resilience means cultivating an learning culture fluid enough to alter strategies and redeploy resources when needed yet stable enough for continuity. Agile structures suit dynamic, unstable environments better than rigid hierarchies.
Metrics beyond Financials: Foresight extends performance indicators from short-term profits alone. Success metrics also track awareness of weak signals, adaptive actions taken, experiments run, new capabilities built and progress across multiple time horizons.
Continuous Stakeholder Engagement: Keeping customer and community values central requires ongoing engagement to jointly envision the future, surface concerns early, refine strategies collaboratively and energize support.
With these features, strategic plans focus less on specifics that may prove outdated and more on shaping flexible mindsets, processes and capabilities for ongoing learning and adaption to surprise. Properly implemented, they become living documents stimulating vibrant foresight cultures.
Putting Foresight into Practice
To bring these concepts to life, let me share how two organizations employed strategic foresight principles in their planning. Canadian telecom Bell developed multiple tech-focused scenarios to 2035 considering how societal values might shape emerging technologies’ development and adoption, such as shifting views on privacy or inequality(Bishop et al., 2007) Their planning cultivated new R&D options, helped anticipate and shape policy debates, and stirred fresh thinking across divisions.
Finnish shipbuilder Meyer Turku developed three scenarios projecting global shipping patterns to 2050 considering energy transition trajectories, climate policy regimes, and economic systems (Hines and Bishop, 2013). Partnering with customers and regulators, they tested strategies robust to uncertainties like new fuel mandates. This led them to broaden into renewable energy project logistics and services, hedging against scenarios where shipping demand declines.
Ultimately, the strategic planning process becomes a continuous forum for exploring disruptive possibilities, reinventing business models, and adapting nimbly to surprise. Done well, a futurist approach cultivates an innovative mindset and helps organizations thrive amid uncertainty rather than just survive the near term. While unconventional, it can yield strategies more resilient and enduring than traditional myopic or equilibrium-based analysis. In an unpredictable world, futuring your strategy presents a wise path forward.
Conclusion
Infusing strategic planning with foresight principles borrowed from futures studies can lead to more innovative, resilient and future-fit strategies. By framing conversations around exploring preferable futures rather than extrapolating probabilities, scanning broadly with futurist techniques, developing a portfolio of disruptive strategic options through options and scenarios thinking, and establishing processes focused on continuous learning, adjustment and stakeholder collaboration - strategic planning becomes a forum for reinvention and adapting to surprise. Examples from Bell Canada and Meyer Turku illustrate how these concepts translate to practice. While demanding different skills and mindsets, a futurist approach helps organizations proactively shape change rather than just react to it. For any leaders seeking strategies that can navigate looming uncertainties, doing strategic planning like a futurist presents a wise approach deserving serious consideration. The future remains unwritten, so let us get to work futuring our strategies.
References
Bishop, P., Hines, A., & Collins, T. (2007). The current state of scenario development: an overview of techniques. Foresight, 9(1), 5–25. https://doi.org/10.1108/14636680710727516
Glenn, J. C., & Gordon, T. J. (Eds.). (2009). 2009 State of the future. American Council for the United Nations University. https://millennium-project.org/millennium/sof.html
Hines, A., & Bishop, P. (2013). Thinking about the future: Guidelines for strategic foresight. Social Technologies. https://www.socialtechnologies.org.uk/resources/publications/thinking-about-the-future
Norman, D. A. (1983). Some observations on mental models. In Mental models, 7(4), 7-14.
Schwartz, P. (1996). The art of the long view: Paths to strategic insight for yourself and your company. Crown Business.
Additional Reading
Westover, J. H. (2024). Optimizing Organizations: Reinvention through People, Adapted Mindsets, and the Dynamics of Change. HCI Academic Press. doi.org/10.70175/hclpress.2024.3
Westover, J. H. (2024). Reinventing Leadership: People-Centered Strategies for Empowering Organizational Change. HCI Academic Press. doi.org/10.70175/hclpress.2024.4
Westover, J. H. (2024). Cultivating Engagement: Mastering Inclusive Leadership, Culture Change, and Data-Informed Decision Making. HCI Academic Press. doi.org/10.70175/hclpress.2024.5
Westover, J. H. (2024). Energizing Innovation: Inspiring Peak Performance through Talent, Culture, and Growth. HCI Academic Press. doi.org/10.70175/hclpress.2024.6
Westover, J. H. (2024). Championing Performance: Aligning Organizational and Employee Trust, Purpose, and Well-Being. HCI Academic Press. doi.org/10.70175/hclpress.2024.7
Citation: Westover, J. H. (2024). Workforce Evolution: Strategies for Adapting to Changing Human Capital Needs. HCI Academic Press. doi.org/10.70175/hclpress.2024.8
Westover, J. H. (2024). Navigating Change: Keys to Organizational Agility, Innovation, and Impact. HCI Academic Press. doi.org/10.70175/hclpress.2024.11
Westover, J. H. (2024). Inspiring Purpose: Leading People and Unlocking Human Capacity in the Workplace. HCI Academic Press. doi.org/10.70175/hclpress.2024.12
Jonathan H. Westover, PhD is Chief Academic & Learning Officer (HCI Academy); Chair/Professor, Organizational Leadership (UVU); OD Consultant (Human Capital Innovations). Read Jonathan Westover's executive profile here.
Suggested Citation: Westover, J. H. (2024). Futuring Your Strategy: An Unconventional Approach to Strategic Planning. Human Capital Leadership Review, 14(3). doi.org/10.70175/hclreview.2020.14.3.8
