The world in which our organizations operate is constantly disrupted by the sweeping winds of change and on a moment’s time. Even industries that are considered to be bulwarks of industry, immune to change, anchor points among the economic landscape confidently thought to be able to defiantly stand against the buffeting of change have had to make concessions to the new normal and shift their strategic direction.
Venkat Atluri and Miklós Dietz of McKinsey & Company recently found that business environments the world over are no longer bound by the barriers that used to separate traditional industries from one another and are now organizing the world economy around key customer needs.1
This is just one of a long list of changes that we as leaders must face but regardless of the cause of the change itself senior managers need to architect a strong sense of flexibility into the strategic framework. The usefulness of a three-to-five-year strategic plan, even if executed flawlessly, can lead to disaster if the landscape around which the plan was formulated shifts once, or likely multiple, times during its multiyear tenure.
The fact that, statistically, 90% of small businesses fail within a short few years of their genesis2 goes a long way to emphasize the dire need for strategic planning to be amended on a planned, or even unplanned basis if fostered by a sudden tectonic shock to the macro environment, systemic manner that accounts for the dynamics of our world today.
Unwavering Flexibility
During my years as an officer in the Air Force and later, as an Air Force civilian, we often cited a term that had been coined by the Air Force to emphasize the need for being flexible while at the same time being mission focused. That Air Force adage is, “Flexibility is the key to Air Power”3, a term that was canonized by the renowned air power theorist and advocate for the need of militaries to establish dominance of the skies, Gen Giulio Douhet.
This phrase highlights the need for any mission focused organization to maintain a relentless sight of the goal, but to do so with the agility to pivot and replan at any moment as the situation requires it.
As a case in point, the Air Force of today is trying to meet its strategic needs while enduring funding challenges by restructuring into an organization that will take mission needs and create new systems and capabilities in a more integrated manner.4
Simple, but Not Easy
Having asserted the dire need for flexibility in our organizations, what should the approach be to practicing it? While baking in flexibility is not difficult or complicated, like most things in life, it does require discipline.
The steps themselves are, again simple:
- Set multiple, planned potential pivot points throughout the tenure of the strategic plan in a way that aligns with the company’s already planned annual decision points
- Examples include annual fiscal reviews, quarterly company reviews, monthly townhall or All Hands meetings, etc.
- Plan in frequent touch points with external facing inputs to get a constant pulse of changes that are developing in the macro environment and review them to coincide with the pace of other company annual decision points annotated in the above bullet
- Examples here include industry/trade events, and other macroeconomic discussions
- The point here is resources must be assigned to digest this information as thoroughly as possible and filtered into decision points for discussion at planned reviews
- Create stage gates to allow the following quarters’ (or annual) implementation plan to be approved/disapproved and/or revised
- This is where the organization would pivot or discard a potential subset of its strategic pursuits based on the inputs from the organization and research on the external environment
The new normal of our strategic compels the firm of today to continuously pivot our strategic goals in order to keep pace or keep ahead of the competition. Not doing so comes at the expense of falling behind, year after year, until the company’s advantage is all but eroded away.
Questions to Consider
Are you outpacing the competition, year after year or do you find yourself in the exhausting position of trying to run at full speed while simultaneously having to chase multiple targets just to yield lackluster results?
Are there ways you can improve that track record to help elevate the organization to new heights?
What change in the business landscape was missed and not capitalized upon that could have led the company to a position of leadership in your market, geographic area or industry?
Let’s Roadmap Your Path to Even Greater Accomplishment!
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