Wild Card Strategy Blog

Most strategic plans (including – probably – yours) are actually not “strategic” because they do not fully prepare the organization to successfully realize their vision for the future. So, what’s missing? What actually makes a plan “strategic?”

The Essential Strategic Ingredient:

Strategic plans fail to be genuinely strategic when they neglect to harness the power of The One Thing all businesses and non-profits have in common: Uncertainty. Although Uncertainty manifests itself differently for everyone, it still impacts all businesses and non-profits.

To successfully navigate the future, every organization must proactively confront and tame Uncertainty now. They do that with a strategic plan that anticipates the unforeseen opportunities and threats that lurk in that inevitable Uncertainty and includes strategies to leverage and mitigate them.

SWOT Doesn’t Reveal What is Most Important:

In traditional strategic planning, a Strengths/Weaknesses/Opportunities/Threats analysis should confront future Uncertainty, but virtually never does. Planning teams don’t discuss the true Uncertainty lurking in their organization’s future because their brainstorming is focused on the opportunities and threats they already know about.

Planning and preparing for what you don’t know about is the most important part of a strategic plan because it pre-emptively enables your organization to leverage unknown opportunities and mitigate unknown threats. This requires the planning team to brainstorm “surprises.” In other words, brainstorm what they don’t know . . . that they don’t know.

So, how can SWOT be improved to reveal those surprises when the planning team has no idea what they might be?