flak affecting: Have You Developed a 'Plan B' Lately?

Monday, August 20, 2012

Have You Developed a 'Plan B' Lately? | West Interactive

Submitted by Bruce Pollock

If there?s one certainty in the world today, it?s that change continues to happen at a brisk pace whether it?s politics, business, the economy, technology or other areas.

Change is exciting; it allows both individuals and companies to turn over a new leaf, and it can bring new opportunities. At the same time, it can be disruptive and cause hardship for companies that don?t prepare for change.

Sometimes change appears to happen overnight. Like when the Internet took traditional retailing by storm or when social media disrupted the traditional marketing and advertising businesses. People often say, ?Wow, that happened quickly!? without giving thought to the pattern that was developing prior to the tipping point of change.

Can companies plan for change effectively? Yes, but few do.

Some companies do little long-term planning and instead rely (either deliberately or by circumstance) on a plan-as-you-go scenario where they continually change strategies and products.

Others rely heavily on long-term strategic planning, creating a process that looks over several years at key trends and other factors, as well as maps out the products and solutions the company plans to sell in this context and how they plan to go about doing that.

Strategic planning is a valuable exercise in trying to understand the market, competitors and other factors at a specific point in time?? especially when this planning is used to develop solutions to address market needs. The fact is that traditional strategic planning doesn?t guarantee success and increasingly is considered by some to be a flawed or dated process.

Why You Should Reconsider Strategic Planning
So, why have some people and organizations turned their backs on strategic planning?

The problem with traditional strategic plans is that most of them assume only one static external environment or scenario over the duration of the plan. They are built on the assumption that the environment that exists today (business, competitive, political, economic, technological) is generally the same environment that will exist five years from now.

Although those assumptions about static external environments may have been valid in the past when the pace of change was much slower, they?re certainly not valid in today?s fast-paced business environment when change?literally?can happen overnight on all fronts, including political, economic, technological and competitive.

Moreover, traditional plans usually prescribe only?one specific strategic path over the time period, instead of having Plan B or Plan C that can be invoked dynamically based on other environmental circumstances and assumptions. Thus, these static plans often become outdated quickly and can cause companies to suffer ??and in some cases, they fail completely.

Successful Strategic Planning
One way that companies can carve out multiple strategic pathways to future success is to incorporate scenario planning into their strategies. Scenario planning is a way of building strategies to adapt to a wide range of different environmental circumstances. It assumes that environments will change over time, tests various future strategic alternatives and assumptions, and helps companies to shape and change strategies by taking this dynamic change into account. One byproduct of scenario planning is that companies emerge with not only a Plan A but also a Plan B, Plan C, etc., that can be executed in accordance with environmental circumstances.

The road is littered with companies that have failed partly because their strategic plans (and execution of those plans) contemplated only a single path in the context of a static external environment. Scenario planning won?t guarantee success, but it can raise the probability of success and reduce the chances of drastic failure by helping companies to have dynamic, multifaceted strategies that can adapt to an unpredictable, constantly changing external environment.

Have you developed a Plan B for your company or product for when events take a different turn than you anticipated? If not, get to it. There are a lot of great books and resources to help you in your journey. Search the Web for ?scenario planning? and you will be well on your way to learning about how military strategists and companies across the globe use this tool to help them plan for success in the future.