Thinking Futures - Rethinking Strategic Planning

Rethinking Strategic Planning

Most people talk about strategic planning as if it was the whole game, encompassing everything from thinking about the future, decision making, documenting plans, and then monitoring and reporting on those plans. But, strategic planning is not about planning strategically, and as Henry Mintzberg suggested, is a term that is an oxymoron.

Because people think they understand the term, there is a reluctance to change it by introducing futures processes. When I was involved in implementing a futures approach to planning, I was often told that "I see no point in this" and "our plan is clear and documented", and "we consider the future in our thinking". When I asked whether or not staff were involved in the development of that plan, I usually received a response along the lines of "they were given an opportunity to comment". And, when I asked what informed their own thinking about the future, I realised that I had just committed a career-limiting faux pas!

Managers and CEOs are not paid to admit they are uncertain; the cynic in me suggest that they are paid to produce glossy strategic plans that look as though strategic direction is clear. Even when organisations think they are 'doing' environmental scanning and casting their net widely, unless that scanning is embedded in a futures framework, they are really only scanning what they know, and perhaps, what they know they don't know.

How do you integrate futures approaches into strategy processes?

The first step is to reconceptualise the way in which strategy is viewed. Strategy, after all, is about the future, while strategic planning is the way we go about developing a plan to implement that strategy. Strategic planning is not about planning strategically.

As suggested above, strategic planning is often defined as an all encompassing process that includes strategic thinking, strategic decision making about future options, documenting and implementing plans and then monitoring of outcomes. These stages overlap and blur, but there tends to be a focus on producing tangible plans rather than on the thinking processes that go into the plans. Even when organisations think they are consulting widely in their planning processes, and taking multiple viewpoints into account, they are often just reinforcing deeply held assumptions.

Traditional strategic planning processes cannot be viewed as taking the future into account - unless there is a defined stage in those processes that allows systematic exploration of the future, as well as surfacing and challenging of assumptions, beliefs and ideas held by staff about the future. Staff need to be given authentic opportunities to participate in the development of a shared view of the future, and this can be achieved by adding a step where they are asked what they think the future might hold for their university or organisation. Like all scanning information, staff input is subject to analysis and interpretation, but it's a step that needs to be overtly included in strategy development. And, the focus of strategic planning of "who, where, and how?" needs to be augmented by a futures focus on "what, when, and why?".

For strategy to be informed by futures approaches then, the current model of strategic planning needs to be reconceptualised into three separate, distinct but interdependent stages, each with its own approach and methods:

strategic thinking,

strategic decision making, and

strategic planning.

What is Strategic Thinking?

A 1999 discussion paper on Strategic Thinking produced by Eton Lawrence for the Research Directorate in the Policy, Research and Communications Branch of the Public Service Commission of Canada provides a useful overview of strategic thinking, and how it relates to strategic planning. Lawrence concludes that:

"strategic thinking ... is not only critical to the survival of the organization in these times of rapid and accelerating change, but more importantly, can be effectively accommodated within a progressive strategy-making regime to support strategic planning ... strategic planning and strategic thinking work in tandem, rather than [a model] in which strategic planning impedes the flourishing of strategic thinking" (page 13).

As Leidtka ("Linking strategic thinking with strategic planning", Strategy and Leadership, October 1998, (1), 120-129) suggests, strategic thinking is about disrupting alignment to create a view of a preferred future, while strategic planning is about creating alignment and dealing with current realities. She identifies five characteristics associated with strategic thinking:

systems perspective

intent focus

intelligent opportunism

thinking in time

hypothesis driven

Heracleous (1998, cited in Lawrence, 1999) suggests that the purpose of strategic thinking is to discover novel, imaginative strategies which can re-write the rules of the competitive game; and to envision potential futures, significantly different from the present. Thought processes here are synthetic, divergent and creative. The purpose of strategic planning is to operationalize the strategies developed through strategic thinking, and to support the strategic thinking process. Thought processes here are analytical, convergent and conventional.

The need to integrate divergent thinking into planning and strategy processes is also highlighted by John Ratcliffe from the Futures Academy at Dublin Institute of Technology. In a recent paper ("Challenges for Corporate Foresight: Towards Strategic Prospective through Scenario Thinking", Foresight, 2006, 8 (1): 39-54) he describes three distinct phases in futures work in organisations: divergence, emergence and convergence. The focus of most futures work is currently on emergence with little or no emphasis on the divergence and convergence stages, resulting in little difference between futures work and conventional strategic planning processes. His work has therefore been around developing a futures approach called "strategic prospective through scenarios thinking" which integrates scenario planning with the French prospective method. So, spending time dealing with divergence and actively encouraging it in the form of strategic thinking is a necessary precursor to the effective emergence of strategic options.

		Thinking is Work Too

When someone tells you that a planning workshop is going to be held, is your reaction that:

(i) it's a waste of time and money because the decisions are already made, or
(ii) that you'll pay for it afterwards trying to catch up on the work that piled up while you were planning, or
(iii) do you see it as an opportunity to have some time out to think?

How often do you hear someone say something like "if only I had time to stop and think for a while ..."? And yet, when we get the time to think, often all we think about is the work we are not doing back at our desks.

Planning workshops are frequently viewed as something we have to do, and which we have to endure - a compliance exercise. At a recent workshop I was told that when staff read the program, and saw the word 'planning', they decided to leave for that session because it would be boring.

We need to start viewing thinking - about plans, strategy and implementation - as work too. Attending workshops should not, however, be lumped together with the 'meetings, bloody meetings' syndrome that afflicts so many universities. Workshops are short, intensive thinking events, where the aim should be to tap into the strategic thinking capacities of the staff who are present.

Workshops are a waste of time if they do not use the opportunity to broaden out the thinking that is informing strategy development, by providing staff with an authentic voice. Planning workshops can be a way to ensure that strategy is not only the province of senior managers, even if those senior managers have the final say in deciding strategy. All staff have the capacity to think strategically and workshops provide a way to tap into that thinking. And, finding out what staff think about the future of their university can not only help to shape strategy, but can also help ensure successful implementation plans.

There's a lot of talk about 'ownership' and 'empowerment', but both require authentic processes for the staff voice to be heard. The process of sending out a draft strategy for comment by staff is the usual way of getting staff feedback, and it's the best way to be ignored by those staff. Staff need the opportunity to comment on strategy as it is being formed, not after it has been documented. And, senior managers need to pay attention to those comments as they develop strategy - or they shouldn't be surprised when the strategy doesn't get implemented in quite the way they had expected.