Almost every department in an organization is responsible for achieving certainty. Finance, operations, even marketing are all exercises in pinning down details and creating stable forecasts. These departments work to mitigate risk, assure your business’s future success, and support your team (and individual) bonus and incentive structures.

But some parts of a business are stifled by certainty. Sometimes, predictability suffocates. When your bias to certainty bleeds into your strategic thinking, you kill your potential for growth.

If you’re analyzing data that is reflective of past transactions and trends, and making decisions that mirror what the rest of your industry is doing, then you’re paving the pathway to commoditization. No one wants to look back on their fiscal year and say, “Congrats team! We worked very hard to be marginally different from the competition!”

Growth dies when strategy becomes an exercise in predictive planning and historical data analytics.

Take a generative approach to strategy and strategic planning. Since many of you are deep in planning now, here’s a reminder of the minefields to avoid — and the three questions to keep in mind — to keep your strategy fresh and to create category-redefining targets.

💣💣💣 Three Strategic Planning Danger Zones

1. Living in the Past – Some teams adopt initiatives that have worked in the past, and tweak them slightly for the year ahead (e.g., “we opened 3 stores last year; this year, we will open 4”). When you iterate on and tweak last year’s plan, your business gets stuck in rinse-and-repeat mode, and you risk losing relevance beyond the given fiscal year. If your plan for next year looks a lot like your plan for this year, you may find your customers have left you behind.

2. Discounting the Future – It’s dangerous to pretend that long-term thinking is next year’s planning problem. Doing so creates short-sightedness, making your strategy rigid and ill-equipped to handle change. Don’t put off long-term planning; instead, approach future thinking with a ‘what if’ mentality. Encourage your teams to think through and strategize for unforeseen challenges or distant shifts that may arise and that require a pivot in the current operating environment. Even if you aren’t planning 5+ years out, thinking about the medium- to long-term future enables you to remain nimble in the face of change and the opportunities that they bring.

3. Striving for Perfection over Progress – Working in an environment that is striving for accuracy and certainty forces everyone on the team to strive to be right. This encourages small thinking instead of big, exploratory, and opportunity-driven thinking. When an organizational culture prioritizes — even requires — accuracy and predictability, it restricts the level of analysis, collaboration and psychological safety needed to unlock the potential for growth.

As we head into the strategic planning season for the next fiscal year, we encourage you to ask yourself the following questions:

1. 😒 Do all our big initiatives look the same as last year’s? Are we incorporating both long- and short-term planning in our strategic reset this fiscal year?

2. 🚀 Do we spend enough time thinking about the future, three to five years out? Will our business be in a position to make sound decisions on what opportunities to go after, where to target them, and how to pivot in the event of unforeseen challenges and opportunities?

3. 🏆 Are we rewarding certainty over expansive thinking? How can we incentivize and encourage our teams to think big?

–

If you’re heading into a strategy review or planning season and you’re struggling to find a fresh perspective, get in touch and let’s chat.