By Francis Wade

As a futurist, or foresight expert, you’re likely eager to make a more significant impact on strategic planning projects for your clients or the organizations for whom you work. Deep in your heart, you know you could add more value.
But how can you earn an expanded role that brings you into all phases of a strategic project, from start to finish?
You probably have some experience contributing to strategic planning projects in organizations. In fact, you cherish these opportunities because of their practical outcomes.
However, you just aren’t included in the entire process very often, or as often as you would like. Frequently, clients only bring you in for a limited scope. Why? Your futures work is construed as an input. Therefore, you are rarely invited to join the difficult, face-to-face deliberations, where the rubber hits the road.
In other words, you were a useful Warm-Up Act, but weren’t selected for a part in the “Main Event.”
To some degree, this confuses you. Why? In your mind’s eye, you see the possibility of a much greater contribution.
For example, there are choices to be made that involve intricate trade-offs. Your futures work took you deeper into these nuances than anyone else can imagine, but you aren’t engaged to clarify them in an actual offsite, where they count the most.
Can you turn this around? How do you assist executive teams of for-profits, NGOs, governments and other organizations to use your insights and skills at each phase of a long-term strategic planning project?
Here are some practical steps to becoming an essential, rather than optional, contributor.
AMATEUR FUTURISTS AND THEIR CHALLENGE
As you may agree, most strategic planning takes place without the input of futurists or foresight studies at all. In other words, executives have probably heard of techniques such as scenario planning, but they rarely contract the services of an expert.
But how do they cope? There are two common approaches.
1. In the case of short-term strategic planning (which I consider to be a misnomer), the matter of the faraway future is ignored, by definition. Instead, the team engages in a mere extension of its usual problem-solving sessions, perhaps adding a few more years. You may know to turn down invitations to such sessions.
2. By contrast, a long-term strategic planning session is more challenging. In my experience of facilitating more than 50 offsites, each spanning 15-30 year horizons, they have much in common.
However, in most companies, it becomes “amateur hour.” Without the expert help of a futurist, they make do with their own executives’ skills.
As such, purists would be dismayed to see teams asking and answering the same questions as experts, all in blissful ignorance. A futurist observing them would feel like a parent watching their kid walking on the top rung of a 10-foot-tall jungle gym shouting “Look at me, Mom!”
But are these amateurs being reckless?
Executives would say “No.” They have a business to run that requires them to make long-term decisions. They have no choice.
Author Maree Conway would also agree. She argues that foresight is a capacity we share as human beings. No special certifications are required.
So perhaps they are not being reckless…just in possession of low skills.
This matches my experience. Unfortunately, I have seen a host of ways in which long-term strategic planning processes falter. (Too many to cover in a single article.) But my simple observation is that executives don’t know when they are violating the rules of this emerging discipline.
However, there are elements of it in which futurists are traditionally strong. Here are two unusual moments when your skills can become vital. Perhaps if you are helpful at these critical junctures, you could increase the odds of being included in additional phases of the long-term planning process.
CRITICAL POINT #1: THE CHOICE OF A LONG HORIZON
Surveys have shown some 80% of companies report having a strategic plan.* However, Bain & Company estimates that only 30% are using an effective process.
Of that number, the fraction who develop long-term plans appears to be dwindling sharply, partly in response to the COVID pandemic. But even before then, the number of companies with long-term plans was falling.
Now, leaders are more convinced than ever — they live in a world which is more VUCA than before.
But is this true? According to some scholars, this conclusion is false. It’s a mere byproduct of cognitive biases such as the availability heuristic.
In other words, most companies could be making a big mistake. When they convince themselves of a reality which does not exist, they fall into the trap of small thinking. They constrain themselves by abandoning long-term strategy.
Enter the futurist. As a practitioner, you are used to thinking about the far future. Consider taking these steps ahead of your next corporate gig.
a. Start by updating your research on long-term strategic planning. Executives who are open to the idea want evidence they aren’t alone in their thinking.
b. Continue by finding success and failure stories your audience can connect with emotionally. Study YouTube channels describing the long-term orientation of Amazon and the short-termist bankruptcies of Nokia, Blackberry, and Kodak.
c. Develop a persuasive argument. This sales pitch needs to be practiced and ready to use at a moment’s notice.
But let’s assume you have succeeded against the odds and your client or organization has taken your advice to engage in long-term strategy. Now you’ll need to ensure the process to be followed isn’t just a stretched-out version of the one used for short-term planning.
CRITICAL POINT #2: OFFERING A CUSTOM OUTLINE FOR LONG-TERM PLANNING
Crafting a quality timeline isn’t solely an intellectual exercise. Instead, it helps teams follow the narrow discipline of a first-time, long-term strategic planning effort.
As such, you must have a detailed outline prepared to offer, and the reasons why each step is essential. And you must be able to explain why a long-term strategic plan has different requirements than its short-term counterpart.
For example, the pre-work for such an offsite meeting must address the faint signals of different impactful trends and their related futures. This may sound familiar to a futurist!
But in the context of a long-term strategic plan, these broad signals at a national level aren’t the only factors to consider. Instead, the team must go further to detect faint signals which are unique to the company, or even the category.
Imagine in the case of Nokia, if the inevitable rise of the smartphone category was clearly seen as a faint signal in 2003. It wouldn’t take a rocket scientist to conclude that feature phones would be replaced…by a particular target year.
The next question would be: “Which year?” Or, more accurately, which constellation of assumptions would predict a particular year? And why?
However, as a futurist, you can do more than ask the right questions.
In addition, you can anticipate the discussion which needs to take place in the company’s offsite. You may be absent, so the executives attending are forced to use their amateur foresight skills.
For example, in the process I recommend, they must define a vivid vision defined by a host of SMART metrics. This vivid vision is crafted from several alternate, imagined visions (i.e. futures.)
Furthermore, they must backcast from that vivid vision to forge a strategic plan for the long-term, which looks like a matrix of milestones and projects. In the end, they map short-term activities, and allocate upcoming projects to individual sponsors.
With this complete picture in mind, you may see that your current skills are a good fit; they just need to be applied in different ways. Once again, imagine if you were preparing the leaders of Nokia in 2003. How would you help them define a planning process which ultimately saves the company’s mobile phone business from destruction?
And how would you ensure that the smartphone’s faint signal is part of the context behind every step in the process?
Perhaps, if you were not physically present at the offsite, you would have to teach participants a new skill. They would need to weave faint signals into a decision. They probably need to be strong enough to do so in a heated group discussion.
Making sure they navigate this discussion effectively can be the deciding factor in leaving the offsite with a well-defined strategic plan instead of a hodgepodge of random ideas. Furthermore, the entire exercise must be executed in a way that leaves each attendee in a position to support the final plan in its entirety.
SUMMARY
In this article I have introduced a few opportunities futurists have to apply the discipline of long-term strategic planning. Using them, you can consider offering a leadership role in the entire process to your clients.
You’ll help them get what they really want and perhaps provide them more than they expect.
(*Association for Strategic Planning 2017).

Francis Wade is a strategy consultant who specializes in interwoven short/long-term thinking. He hosts the Jump Leap Podcast and Newsletter, and offered the Long-Term Strategic Planning Conference in June 2024.
Commentaires