Thinking Strategically About Your Company’s Future
Posted October 1st, 2013
Strategic planning is important for every company. You need to plan to keep up with changes in your market, in the workforce, in technology, and many other areas.
To plan most effectively, you need to be able to navigate in a world where the pace of change is constantly increasing. You need to be able to handle unexpected events that unsettle the status quo, and you need to be able to continually challenge your own beliefs and assumptions about the world.
To best do these things, you first need to know what motivates people. And this is where the ability to question your own beliefs about things comes in. As our political discourse makes only too clear, we only see what we want to see. We only recognize those ideas and information that support our views, while pretty much ignoring what may cause cognitive dissonance.
So, you need to be able to question your own beliefs about your company as well, because if you don’t, you may well fall into a rut with your thinking. You need to create a corporate culture where this kind of questioning attitude is encouraged. Only by continually challenging accepted beliefs, even your company’s most basic assumptions, can you foster innovation and imagination within an organization.
To think in an innovative way about the future, you also need to be aware of activities that are affecting society at large – trends that are wide ranging and which have great influence. These trends could be social, political, economic, or environmental. You want to project and think about how these trends will affect the future, how they will play out. And then you want to think about how your company can position itself to take advantage of these trends in terms of business opportunities.
These trends might involve such things as alternative energy sources, economic growth in third-world countries, or global warming. Think about what influence these trends will have five to 10 years down the road, and what kind of responses your business should take.
You should compile a list of all trends that you can determine. Then whittle down the list to just those trends that you see your business will be able to take advantage of. Are there trends that really don’t seem that important now but could turn out to have a big impact in the future? Start to work out a game plan for how your company will deal with these trends.
Also, think about the trends that your company is least prepared for. You also should incorporate into your planning some strategies on how to deal with these trends.
All the while, you still want to maintain that critical attitude, the questioning of what you see, challenging what you see, so you can look at all this information in an unconventional way, in a way that allows you to navigate in an uncertain environment.
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