Why Your Company's Offerings Need to Be Seen On a Decaying Horizon. Now.

Okay, so I have a great, great question in the chat, or comment in the chat, from the tech execs who say their business changes too fast for long-term planning. Great question. I'm going to introduce to you a model that we've been using, and I'd like you to consider this because I'll use it as an example of what you can learn from hanging around a conference where we're talking about this issue and this issue of game-changing long-term strategic planning only. So kind of an obscure article from 2008 from Andrew Curry and Anthony Hodgson, Journal of Future Studies, seeing in— it's really three horizons. But let me give you an idea of what this talk is talking about, their paper is talking about. So this idea is based on the fact that initially, what they call the first horizon, there's a pretty decent fit between what companies do and their external environment, their markets, their customers, the technology, the regulation, government regulations, what investors are willing to pay for, and so forth. It's a pretty good fit. And over time, that fit sort of naturally decays. So Jeff Bezos says there are some things that don't change. And his thinking is brilliant with respect to figuring out the things that don't change. Here we're looking at the things that do change, things like products being offered, services, and so forth. So there's a natural decay. So let's jump to the third horizon these authors came up with. And what they said is that as you consider the future, there are actually pockets of the future available today. So I've seen this because in a strategic planning retreat, and I've been lucky to have— fortunate to have been part of more than 50 long-term strategic planning retreats where we have came out with long-term, meaning 15 to 30 years, and short-term strategic plans, all bundled together, interwoven. But these ideas about the future actually come from— start from the very beginning of the retreat. In other words, they're available. So the retreat starts, and mostly what the conversation is about are these things in the first horizon. But then we start to explore what's happening now that tells you what's going to happen in the future. And we start to build a future, a vision based on these, you might call them weak signals that are available today. So I skipped over a horizon. There's a second horizon, these authors say. So what's the second horizon? So the second horizon is kind of an in-between. It's when you realize that the products and services that you're offering are no longer— they're going through a decline, you kind of come up with something to fill the gap. But what you come up with to fill the gap isn't based on the future. It's based more on the past. In other words, it's kind of a stopgap measure, the kind of the short-term thinking that we talked about earlier, kind of thing that you do to make sure you don't go out of business right now. You may realize at the time that it has no long-term future, but this is what's going to pay the bill, so let's do it. So there's 3 horizons in every strategic planning retreat, and they all coexist. Now, here's the sort of the difficult thing that I've seen, is that there is a messy middle. According to— that's a phrase that I came up with, but I borrowed it from these authors. The messy middle is what strategic planning retreats are all about. It's coming together as a group to decide what's in the first horizon, what's in the third, and what should be in the second. And if you see the slopes of these graphs, or in other words, how fast these things are changing, You can imagine if you've never been in a retreat that's looking at 15 to 30 years old, there's a considerable amount of conversation and discussion and sometimes argument over what's the nature of this messy middle and how to navigate it. So this is just a, let's call it a preview to some of the ideas that we'll be talking about at the conference. But I wanted to introduce it to you because I wanted to contrast it with the short-term school of thought. So the short-term school of thought says we don't need to look past— you see where that blue, that blue block starts? We don't need to look past that point. We just need to look at that little piece that is at the front of the window. Look at that window. Everything else we can ignore. Now, it may sound crazy to you, but this is human nature, and I've I know I've seen it, and I'm sure you have. But let me ask you, why is the short-term school of thought so tempting? Why do companies, organizations— you know, many that have failed, there's the Kodaks of the world, the Blockbusters, the BlackBerrys, and so forth— why is this school of thought so tempting? And why do they— you know, obviously they didn't see a diagram like this one with 3 horizons, which is like, oh my God, they do exist.