Why Strategic Re-Think Is Today’s Prerequisite Strategy

Flex, Iteration and Informed Urgency

Issue 158, May 2, 2024

Although it seems counterintuitive in today’s dynamically changing marketplace, many organizations still live, breathe, and sometimes die by their static three- or five-year strategic plans. It takes so much work and time to develop these long-term plans, often structured more as a laundry list of aspirations, that they are hard to let go of. This multi-year term model is often disconnected from the actual capability or capacity of an organization at any given time. It is also a routine hodge-podge list, built by consensus, and often out of touch with evolving marketplace dynamics. Most often it is written without a roadmap for how any of the plan can be achieved or what activities relate to the expected outcome. A sense of entropy can result, leaving fixed plans in place that may no longer be relevant, triggering an organizational decline. Informed urgency is often missing as the dynamism of the market brings the future to the present.

The Future Is No Longer in …