3 Enduring Strategic Planning Trends You Need to Review
This article published by WSJ and written by Deloitte CMO Jason Girzadas last May 2019, is even more relevant in March 2020. If you're wanting Strategic Planning insights and future trends, this is a must-read.
May 14, 2019
3 Enduring Trends Inform Strategic Planning Efforts
Can leaders effectively formulate strategies in a world defined by disruption? It may not be easy, but it is possible. The key is identifying and internalizing the underlying patterns of change.
If there’s a single theme informing the C-suite’s most pressing challenges today, it’s the unrelenting pace and scale of change. Disruption continues unabated in virtually every sector and industry, making it difficult for organizations to feel confident in their long-term plans.
Yet plan they must, or risk being disrupted themselves. So, how to make the task less daunting? As Confucius once said: “Study the past if you would define the future.”
Fundamental Shifts
Many of today’s companies craft their multiyear strategic plans much as they always have — establishing assumptions, defining objectives, and allocating resources over a time horizon of three to five years. Yet, increasingly, they’re realizing such traditional approaches aren’t up to the challenge. In addition to grappling with a constantly shifting business, technology, and social landscape, today’s strategists must confront more complex planning variables than ever before, while the diversity and scope of their decisions has also grown. The effort can feel paralyzing to leaders.
The good news is that we’ve been here before. Consider three ongoing business trends, each of which builds upon historical precedents:
New tools to augment and automate human activities. Humans have been developing new tools to work faster and make activities less labor-intensive ever since cave dwellers used sticks and stones to subdue dinner. Originally, the focus of innovation was manual work, and during the past half century we’ve created more advanced tools to undertake bigger and bigger portions of routine cognitive work. Today, however, we’re beginning to apply technology to nonroutine cognitive tasks. The tools may feel dramatically different, but the fundamental challenge still lies in understanding their application in a business context and envisioning how they can be used to deliver different outcomes.
The decomposition and virtualization of the enterprise. It used to be common for manufacturers to own every element of the supply chain—for example, Henry Ford owned sandpits as a source for the glass in his cars’ windows. Over time, that approach has been replaced by virtualization, specialization, and co-creation enabled by sophisticated supply chains. Today we’ve arrived at the next stage: ecosystems encompassing an increasingly complex web of actors competing, collaborating, and co-evolving over time.
An increasing focus on customer-centricity.
Back when Ford was mining his own sand, he famously uttered the words that have come to epitomize the “before” state of customer-centricity: “Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants, so long as it is black.” It was several decades before the mantra of business became “the customer is king.
”Companies have spent the intervening years sharpening their focus on customers, and today that’s come to include developing and communicating a larger social purpose. Whether it’s sustainability, diversity, fair trade, transparency, or another cause, consumers increasingly expect brands to pursue values beyond mere profitability.:
‘No one can predict the future, but today’s leaders can help shape it by understanding the long trajectories that connect it to the past—trajectories we continue to ride.’
Building a Better Future
The fundamental trends aren’t new, but—as with every major juncture in the history of commerce—they still require leaders to adapt. The organizations that will lead in the future are likely those that use the new tools to find ways to reinvent work, combining the capabilities of machines and people and tapping the best of both. They will be unafraid to embrace and make the most of ecosystems and be comfortable with the notion of losing some autonomy and direct control in the marketplace. At the same time, they will successfully convey and act consistently with a broader purpose and set of values.
Marketing leaders have a particularly critical part to play.
As the organization’s customer champion, growth driver, innovation catalyst, capability builder, and chief storyteller, the CMO can help define key business strategies and translate them into reality.
No one can predict the future, but today’s leaders can help shape it by understanding the long trajectories that connect it to the past—trajectories we continue to ride. Rather than be indecisive in the face of uncertainty, leaders can consider multiple possible future scenarios and plan their next steps accordingly. By doing so, they can help to build more enduring businesses that better serve their shareholders, talent, customers, communities, and humanity itself.
—by Jason Girzadas, Deloitte Global managing principal and member of the Deloitte Global Executive team, Deloitte Consulting LLP