Francis Wade explains why long-term strategic planning remains poorly understood: the field is fragmented across disciplines, universities teach only short-term methods, and few institutions have real experience with long-term challenges. His work at McKinsey and AT&T exposed him to complexities most academics never encounter.
It's a longer conversation to get into that. But why, why, why, why is there this sort of confusion and lack of information around long-term strategic planning? Well, the truth is that the theory and practice haven't really come together. In academia, the topic of long-term strategic planning is interdisciplinary, which makes it difficult. Anything that crosses over a number of departments or a number of fields of study is difficult to maintain, and people who try to focus on these areas end up seeing their careers falling through the cracks. Very unfortunate, but that's what happens. As such, the, the field of long-term strategic planning is still emerging, and, um, The usual approaches that people just use off top of their head doesn't work for the reasons that I've laid out. But the failures of applying that approach to the long term have not been documented. So that's not something that people talk about. Instead, you know, in most departments, in most universities, they have short-term plans themselves, and most don't question why. So they don't even have firsthand experience. I'm saying that academics don't have firsthand experience, and I'm saying that firsthand experience can make a very big difference when it comes to mastering an emerging discipline, or even talking about the things I'm, I'm talking about here today. So, you know, some of the things that— some of the other disciplines that people don't have that I am lucky— I mentioned that I have a few lucky kind of backgrounds. One is that I did some work with McKinsey. That's one. I also did work with AT&T in process improvement. I was lucky enough to see what it was like to work with a group, a live group of 20 people to pull together a document from a blank sheet of paper.
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