Is it still worth making a strategic plan?

The strategic plan describes the company’s ambitions over a period of 3 years or more, and allocates resources to the projects that will make the greatest contribution to achieving them. It is a dense, difficult and tedious exercise.

In view of the rapid changes taking place in the company’s environment, we may well wonder whether it is not the remnant of 1960s management, driven by a technostructure that wants to pull the ropes from head office. At a time when our world is commonly described as VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous), or even BANI (brittle, anxious, non-linear, incomprehensible), what is the point of drawing up a strategic plan?

On the one hand, it allows us to take a step back and look at the development of the company’s strengths and economic performance, to talk to investors, and to share a collective ambition with employees.

On the other hand, the exercise is fraught with irritants: it is weighed down by the tedious processing of masses of figures, plagued by poor quality data, obscured by the heterogeneity of contributions across entities, and skewed by posturing and role-playing games.

The temptation is great to stop, to reduce the exercise to its simplest form, or to dash for automation.

I propose a third way that has been field-tested. It starts with managers in contact with the market. It is characterised by a hybrid approach, based on both data and a structured conversation between people. It brings out a strong, energising ambition, and a coherent set of high-consensus projects.

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