Strategic Planning is not a military discipline anymore: welcome Adaptive Planning

Consider these two words: strategic plan. Free your mind for a second, close your eyes and focus on the word strategic plan. Yes, you are not the only one who is thinking about a thick binder, gathering dust on an organized shelf full of other colorful binders.

In the past companies thought running business was similar to entering a battlefield supported by military-like strategy, basing themselves on a few constants:

The past was to teach the future
Good data was sparse and hard to collect dense.
Communication was generally unreliable, certainly discrete and private

Let’s time warp to present state: a completely different shine glows on us. High tech is ruling and the globalization effect has saturated our lives. It’s done. Now we are moving on.

We are starting new
Data is available everywhere and it’s much more real time than before
Communication is instant, public and diverse

The world has become a more turbulent place, where anyone with a new idea can put it into action before you can say “startup” and launch widespread movements with a single Tweet. This has left organizational leaders with a real problem, since the trusted, traditional approach to strategic planning is based on assumptions that no longer hold. The static strategic plan is dead!

We believe that a strategic plan adapts, directs, emphasizes learning and control. An adaptive strategy leading to an adaptive planning.

Realize there are so many options to reach the goal and that the goal may shift based on what we learn along the way.

A CFO is no longer projecting the past to the future but he’s experimenting, rapid prototyping, learning quickly what works or not. A CFO is not collecting data on the more-the-better basis but he’s recognizing patterns based on a small fraction of historical data and close to real time information. A CFO understands that a dashboard which triggers him/her to launch a corrective action is not useful, rather he understands having that information spread directly to the front lines and using the whole company as his team is the way to success.

A continuous and fluid loop across the activities of observing, orienting, deciding and acting: “plans are useless but planning is everything”.

At Top Dimension, specialized in the broader performance management discipline, we love it because we believe it to be so true. And we live by it in all our assignments: a perfect measure of our delivered quality is derived by how much we manage to increase the fluidness of our customer’s planning process.

We consider the following:

It’s not only about delivering a sustainable and solid solution, but also lowering the cost of ownership compared to the past.
It’s not only about the complexity of an automatic solution, but how quicker the results are visible across your organization.

Top Dimension has and keeps working hard to enable its customers to adopt the adaptive planning concept as a necessary mean to move into the future.

Feel how valued our contribution is by reading some of our customer successes here.