I'm currently bidding for two pieces of work that both involve facilitating aspects of strategic planning. This puts my brain into a very specific gear, where I contemplate what good strategic planning actually entails and, in particular, why strategies are so rarely implemented properly.
I suggest that a major reason for lack of implementation is not paying attention to moving targets.
I'm often fascinated by the way in which driving a car offers lots of analogies for thinking about how life works. This is particularly odd when you consider for how short a phase of civilisation people have been driving cars, and therefore how alien it ought to be to our psyche in evolutionary terms.
Today I was driving my car in the busy morning traffic. Some people of an environmentalist bent will immediately think me a fool for even contemplating such a time and energy-wasting endeavour but, like most other people, I have a complex and self-fulfilling justification for doing it. I should add that I don't do it very often.
Anyway, part of my journey was on a fairly busy stretch of motorway, and I entertained myself by observing patterns in the traffic around me. What I noticed was that when I concentrated on vehicles much further ahead - say 10 or so vehicles ahead, I actually drove a little more slowly. I think there may have been several reasons for this. Maybe I was responding more to the average speed of the traffic, rather than to the ebb and flow of roadspeed of the vehicles immediately around me. Maybe I was noticing when cars a long way in front began to slow down, and slowing down accordingly, rather than only reacting when the car directly in front slowed. Maybe I was setting my speed on the basis of seeing a couple of hundred metres in front, and then instinctively slowing if my view was impeded by nearer traffic.
You can see where I'm heading. It occurred to me that perhaps we instinctively anticipate hazards and adjust our behaviour accordingly, but if we shorten our time horizon we don't allow for hazards that are beyond it. In a car, if we are only staring at the back of the car in front, the only hazard we anticipate is that that particular car will do something we need to react to, whereas if we look in front of that car we can begin to assess what that driver is responding to.
When we do strategic planning, we tend to look to a point in the future and see it as a fixed point in time: we are trying to achieve a series of goals by the time we get there. But then we draw our timeline and identify obstacles and interim targets along the way, and tend - instinctively perhaps - to try and tackle each one in turn, as we get to it. While we concentrate on the nearest target, we're not watching what is happening to the subsequent ones.
Of course, what is happening is that those further away obstacles and targets are moving and morphing, being influenced by the decisions we're taking (or not taking) now, and the people who are monitoring what is happening further into the future are not the same people who are responding to immediate challenges.So by the time decision-makers have formulated what to do about the most immediate challenge, the nature of the subsequent challenges has altered, and the strategy is already on its way to redundancy.
Therefore, making sustainable strategies implementable means we need to bear three things in mind:
1) We are always working towards moving targets, not fixed ones, which means we need to be alert for movement;
2) Future targets move not only due to changes beyond our control, which we can't predict, but also because the decisions we're taking now are shaping the future all the time;
3) If we focus our gaze on the more distant, longer-term goals, the nearer ones are likely to be less challenging, whereas if we concentrate on the nearer, shorter-term goals, the distant ones may well be more challenging than they are now.
AW.
