Ep 13.5 Lengthen Your Strategic Plan by 24 Years in 4 More Hours

Hello and welcome to Mini Book Number 9. This is Francis Wade, and this mini book is entitled How to Add 25 Years to Your Strategic Planning Horizon in 4 Extra Hours. Beware, there are some fundamental misunderstandings being passed around about long-term strategic planning. Which make it seem impractical. The impact on the C-suite? Disagreements, misalignment, and executives who forgo long-term planning because it takes too much time. Recently overheard: I can't argue with the importance of long-term planning, but a 15 to 30 year game-changing plan? Is too time-consuming to create. It can take months to complete. At first glance, the logic appears to be sound. If it took your team 4 days to craft your organization's current 3-year plan, then it makes sense that a 30-year plan would require meetings lasting 40 days. In other words, you may conclude we shouldn't even talk about spending the time, effort, and budget required. But what if this common calculation is just plain wrong? Keep reading to hear some actual firsthand evidence which contradicts the conventional wisdom. You could learn how time can be warped in strategic offsets to accomplish the seemingly impossible. Introduction. Let's assume that your company has agreed to undertake a strategic planning effort. But the question of which planning horizon to use—3, 5, 10, 30, 100 years—has been bouncing back and forth without any resolution. While it's obvious that it must address the next 3 to 5 years at a minimum, your C-suiteers can't agree on how far ahead they should plan beyond the short term. A few want to think in terms of decades. Others believe adding an extra year or two to the normal planning cycle should suffice. You decide to do some digging and soon realize that the primary objection has to do with the overall time required to complete the plan. There are other issues, but this one is foremost. During your conversations, a colleague recalls a prior effort to plan a 10-year strategy requiring 10 months of added time. Even worse, it involved a famous high-priced consulting firm which charged $1 million. Nothing was ever implemented. Hope you're enjoying this free excerpt from the Jump Leap Long Term Strategy Podcast. Interested in finding out more about getting a subscription to full episodes? Visit www.longtermstrategy.com. Not info. In each case, by the time the plan was done, all concerned were exhausted, sick of the process, and eager to set it aside for good. However, you remain committed to long-term thinking. The problem is that you have never actually been part of such an activity. Can it be done in a way that defies the simple logic? Conventional responses from a survey. In a recent poll I conducted on LinkedIn, some 77% of respondents voted for 5 consecutive 3-year strategic plans over its counterpart, a single 15-year plan. One major reason given by some in the majority had to do with the length of time required for each project. They decided that the time would be better spent elsewhere. Following this reasoning, it may never make sense to do a long-term strategic plan. Why? No C-suite has the extra 40 days needed, nor should they reduce that number to 30 days using an outside consultant. However, a deeper dive into LinkedIn discussions shows a different picture. The truth is, few commentators have ever attended more than one or two long-term strategic planning retreats. And those who have aren't talking, writing, or podcasting about their experiences. So most of what I see is conjecture. The 40 Days conclusion is dramatically uninformed. Perhaps there is reason to question the conventional wisdom and look for actual evidence. Let's start by examining long-term national plans. International and national plans—worthwhile time investments. The United Nations has seriously taken on the task of long-term planning for the planet. I explain the journey in my article on the Sustainable Development Goals, but here's a summary. It began in earnest with the creation of the Millennium Development Goals in 2000. 8 targets were established to tackle global commitments to combat scourges such as poverty, hunger, and disease. They were modeled in part after successful global efforts to eradicate smallpox and polio, which took decades to complete. The Sustainable Development Goals were launched in 2015 to replace the MDGs. Covering 17 areas, they also span a 15-year horizon. These two major planning efforts included almost 200 countries and took 5 years to complete. While some criticize these two projects, it's hard to argue that they are not meant to be valuable. Overall, the investments are deemed worthwhile. However, a different calculus seems to apply to for-profit companies and the impatient world their executives live in. While it's hard to argue against prolonged efforts to solve global problems, it's easier to oppose long-term planning in a for-profit. After all, the logic goes, profit-making does not require long planning horizons. Saving the world does. But is this true? Certainly there is tremendous pressure on publicly traded companies by hedge funds and some investors to meet or exceed quarterly targets. In response, executives often become distracted. However, few would argue about the importance of creating long-term value. In like manner, they support the argument that long-term value comes about as a result of long-term thinking and strategic planning. Unfortunately, this logic is rarely translated into practice. Instead, C-suites become convinced that they can't follow the examples of the SDGs or Net Zero 2050. They would like to, but they don't have time, they complain. Once again, they could be wrong. Perhaps they do, but they just lack firsthand experience. A direct comparison. In the past year, I had an opportunity to draw a direct comparison between two strategic planning projects. One short-term and one long-term. But first, some background. My company focuses on 15- to 30-year game-changing strategic planning. Consequently, we have completed over 50 2- to 3-day offsites between 2002 and 2024. Our commitment to long-term thinking has led us to decline requests to engage in short-term planning projects. However, under duress, a client, which we'll dub Immediate Solve Inc., with a fiscal emergency, no longer wanted to complete the long-term strategic plan we had agreed to craft. Now, given a rude external shock, its leaders felt as if a mere 3-year plan would be a stretch. But to be honest, I tried to convince them otherwise and failed. With a matter of weeks remaining to a key deadline, my small company made a break with normal practice. When the dust had settled after the project, we realized that there was at least one big positive. We could now draw a direct comparison between two interventions: a 3- to 5-year strategic plan and ones which span 15 to 30 years. Our conclusion? It takes about an additional 4 hours to complete the latter. To be frank, this isn't what we expected. Note: I can't quite cover our entire process in a single minibook, and you may require some background reading on the endpoint method used with our clients. What I am about to describe is a variation on this method. See other newsletters, other minibooks for more details. But let's assume you have not read the article. Why does the 40-day conclusion, which seems to be so reasonable, turn out to be incorrect. Here are 5 reasons why. Number 1: Two mindsets required. There's a remarkable mindset shift your team must undertake in a retreat when it changes gears from short to long-term thinking. This temporary transition is best described in the book Lead from the Future by Mark Johnson and Josh Suskowitz. I laid out the article in my website of blog posts related to publications in the Jamaica Gleaner. In their book, the authors start by defining an everyday mindset: past-forward. In this frame of mind, your managers see the future as an extension of the past. They practice solving problems based on existing information and logic. Therefore, this is a foundational approach all managers must master. In my Endpoint retreats of all kinds, participants start the workshop in this frame of mind and actually use it to create a snapshot of their current situation. It covers both the inside of the company and outside. Once they're done, the team must undertake a shift to a future-back Mindset. In this particular way of being, participants must use their collective imagination to create a future, hold it in place, and use it to backcast to the present day to forge a strategic plan. These are unfamiliar activities to the vast majority and a new way to think. As such, many attendees in your company will probably find the process disconcerting and uncomfortable, Even those who have done it before find the experience jarring as it's so different from their usual meeting formula and so distinct from what they were taught. Furthermore, there is another wrinkle. While they're visiting this unfamiliar territory, they must use some unique tools they haven't used before. This is a big challenge as they usually must be taught how to use a tool minutes before being exposed to it for the first time. Never thrown a javelin or shot put or discus? Imagine doing them all in sequence in competition after a few minutes of explanation. But it's the best approach. Without this new mindset and tools, your retreat can turn into an extended version of a weekly C-suite update session. How can you know if this is happening? In real time. Usually the heads of your divisions give dull reports which others don't engage in. Occasionally a cross-organizational problem pops up which does spark a discussion, but these occasions are rare. Most problem solving is immediate and ownership of the solution is assigned before the meeting moves on to the next point. Discussions are restricted to problems which can actually be solved in a 1 to 3 year timeframe. The rest are punted. As effective as this approach may be for weekly C-suite updates, it doesn't work for long-term strategic planning. Why can't a team just use this approach and merely add on a few more years? One reason this business as usual approach fails is that the team never accomplishes a future-back mindset. As such, they are highly unlikely to define a game-changing strategic plan based on big hairy audacious goals . Consequently, I go to great lengths to cause this shift in mindset. In fact, I may mention to your team that the rest of the retreat requires a different way of being. I present an overview of the activities and tools they are about to use in a temporary visit to future backthinking. What I know from experience is that once they make the switch, it destroys the 40-day calculations. Why? They are all based on the present forward mindset, which is unsuitable for game-changing thinking and planning. But there's more. They don't know the plan they're about to create has two related outputs which are intended to perform different jobs. Number 2: Short versus long-term jobs. Any single 15 to 30-year strategic plan is made up of two parts which perform distinct jobs: one short-term job and another long-term job. Our typical client develops both during the retreat. However, executives usually have never seen a strategic plan with both parts. The long-term job. The Endpoint Method involves creating a preferred future and working back to the present. This future is actually a vivid description of outcomes, i.e., BHAGs, to be accomplished or reached by a chosen target year, usually some 15 to 30 years away. For example, a vivid future for 2040 in a for-profit could include quantitative and qualitative descriptors such as revenue, market share, corporate culture, country locations, and more. Such a 2040 vision is not meant to be precise. Instead, the descriptors work together to paint a compelling picture. While most companies have short vision statements, this kind of vivid vision is very different. It represents the first draft of a future business model. Later in this article, I will offer more details about the process used to create it, but if you need to delve into the specifics, they are laid out in Podcast Episode 10.5 featuring the fictional credit union case study. When the vision and the strategic plan are completed, they offer a single picture of the final destination and a credible pathway to get there. The combination of the two is a potent tool for your organization. Now you can speak to stakeholders about the game-changing plans you have made comprising BHAGs, Vivid Vision, and a credible strategic plan. For many, this provides a sense of meaning and purpose. It offers others insight into the organization's direction. For example, it could stop some of your staff from job hunting as they discover a future for themselves. Now it makes sense for them to invest in your organization and even make worthy sacrifices. According to philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, "He who has a why can endure any how." Following the ideas of Viktor Frankl, author of Man's Search for Meaning, your stakeholders can step out of the comfort-seeking which predominates the culture in many companies. Now they have a choice—an invented future which they can be inspired by. As such, part of the job of the long-term outputs of the retreat is to inspire and uplift stakeholders with the possibility of the extraordinary. Because the horizon is long, it forces all stakeholders to consider their role in laying a new path for the next generation. In fact, the leaders in your C-suite are unlikely to be part of the organization in the chosen target year. If this sounds like the original intent of an ordinary vision statement, it might. The difference is that ChatGPT can turn out such an infinite number of such statements, all of which sound alike. Your company's traditional statement may be too vague or interchangeable with that of competitors to perform any useful function. As such, it fails to do the job. Your stakeholders need more. But don't mistake this for a delayed effect. CEOs tell me that their staff get excited when an organization's future is shared for the first time. Typically, executives share their new vivid vision, BHAGs, and long-term strategic plans. In other words, this long-term element has an immediate effect. The kind you simply can't create using any other method. The good news is that if you have a long-term strategic plan, you have done most of the work for its short-term counterpart. The Short-Term Job. In the context of a 15- to 30-year strategic plan, what job does the short-term plan perform? The short-term elements of the plan act in part to coordinate Immediate actions. Here are some of its contents: a description of projects to be completed within a 3 to 5 year window and their individual sponsors or champions; the timing of their starting and ending milestones; how progress towards the strategic goals is measured; how the ideas behind the overall strategy will be tested for their continued validity, and how changing assumptions and trends will be monitored. How individual performance will be measured as it pertains to the new strategic plan. These are all practical activities. At the same time, they also provide your stakeholders with a further confidence that, unlike prior plans, this one will be implemented. Therefore, like its long-term counterpart, this element has an immediate effect. Unfortunately, most companies who conduct strategic planning projects only focus on the job of a short-term strategy. They accept its role but miss out on the fact that they are making their task more difficult. Let's see why it's much harder to get the short-term job done in isolation, even though it typically takes less time. Number 3: A new context for immediate effects. At this point, it's tempting to think that the short-term plan crafted by Immediate Solve Inc. is almost the same as its competitor, which has a 15 to 30-year strategic plan. In other words, how different is their plan from one which includes a long-term element? By the way, this was the essence of the dilemma underlying the LinkedIn poll mentioned earlier. It effectively asked, "Is there any value to having a long-term element to your company's strategic plan?" As I mentioned, more than 75% of the respondents said no. You've reached the end of a complimentary clip from the Jump Leap Long Term Strategy Podcast. To hear the full episode, go over to www.longtermstrategy.info and grab a subscription or a free trial. See you there.