Time has come to flush away those strategic plans

NOWADAYS, it’s little short of a miracle we are allowed to do anything without somebody first asking us to draw up a strategic plan.

Objective: “You want to go to the toilet? Where are your Mission and Vision statements; what are your long-term goals?”

Plan: “Pull up your socks. Pull down your jocks”.

The modern fad for excessive strategic planning hangs like a grey cloud over almost any useful initiative. Government bureaucrats and pen pushers are desperate to find something to criticise in the awkward time between starting and finishing work.

I blame university business schools in particular for the obsession with writing plans for almost everything. They create the delusion that we actually can define the future with sufficient clarity to make accurate long-term planning a viable proposition.

I think I believe in strategic planning; if it helps.

It’s a useful device when trying to win a research grant, trying to get the government on side or simply trying to show competitors how organised and far-sighted

They create the delusion that we actually can define the future with sufficient clarity to make accurate long-term planning a viable proposition.

you are. Let’s not get carried away about its value.

Most of the time it’s difficult enough for many of us to work out what to do next Saturday, let alone 20 years down the track. One of the few merits of growing old (generally without any pre-planned strategy) is that you find yourself concentrating much more on next week’s events than the next decade ...

The most important strategic planning document, be it for an individual, a community group or a business, is your current budget. Get that wrong and you are in strife. Get your guesses about what might happen in 2030 wrong and at least you may have time to make some adjustments.

I think General Eisenhower had it spot on when he said, “In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable”.

“You’ve got to think about big things while you are doing small things,” said Alvin Toffler, “so that the small things go in the right direction.”

There’s an English fantasy fiction writer, Jonathan Stroud, who writes for young people. One of his books, The Ring of Solomon, which I have never read, says of a “plan”: “Can you define ‘plan’ as a loose sequence of manifestly inadequate observations and conjectures, held together by panic, indecision and ignorance? If so it was a very good plan.”

That sounds like your typical Pommy cynicism but there’s probably some truth in it!

Much more constructively, world authority on competitive strategy Michael E. Porter, a professor at the Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness at the Harvard Business School (where else), tells us: “The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do”.

I like that. You might not know what you should be doing but you probably have a fairly clear idea of what you shouldn’t be doing. That’s not so very different from a characteristic of engineering; you often can be quite unclear what the right solution to an engineering problem is, but you are damned sure what the wrong solution is.

There’s another Pom, Max McKeown, associated with the Warwick Business School at the University of Warwick. The school is very highly regarded around the world for the quality of its MBA programs by distance learning, so you have to proceed with caution. McKeown is a renowned researcher in the areas of innovation and culture.

One of his books, The Strategy Book, tells us that “strategy and culture should have breakfast together”.

That’s a helpful piece of advice, particularly for arts and community groups.

Any strategic plan which ignores the passions and culture of those who are expected to stick to it will fail.

Time to get back to some strategic planning before I lose the plot completely.