I was recently asked to write an article about strategic planning. Since there is quite a lot of content already on the subject, and I’d already written extensively on the process in my book The Inside Advantage, I felt it was important to bring something new to the discussion.

Prior to this moment in our world, “looking ahead” was the time-tested protocol, perhaps essential and potentially valuable when the world told time in seconds, not nanoseconds. Today, it is almost useless, because when you “look ahead,” you will see and learn little or nothing.

Prove it for yourself—grab your most powerful binoculars and if the weather permits, you may see the horizon. What did you learn? Eratosthenes, the Greek mathematician who first calculated the circumference of the earth, saw the same horizon. The horizon has not changed since c.276 BC.

From the perspective of my corner office and experience in boardrooms, I observed that we business leaders planned our future by using previous years’ financial results as our base line. In the limited time remaining, we “looked ahead” at the very predictable changes that would influence our company, industry, economy, and nation and discussed their implications for the financial projections that we had already set in concrete.

Little time, if any, was spent on “looking ahead” to discover the few changes that might influence our customers’ purchasing behavior because, at that time, we business leaders were transfixed on our company’s “numbers,” not our customers. Moreover, customer purchase behavior did not change year-to-year, so it never occurred to us that we might want to focus on customers’ very predictable wants, needs, aspirations or concerns, apprehensions, fears. Moreover, little time was spent on the vital challenging issues of today, such as globalization, environment, and social responsibility. They were not on Eratosthenes’ horizon, nor on any business leaders’ horizon.

When the time allocated for this annual exercise evaporated, there were silent sighs of relief all around and our rigorous activity concluded with high-fives. This seemingly spontaneous, enthusiastic, and artificially synchronized response gave those of us in the corner office absolute confidence that internal consensus had been achieved. Soon after, we would produce a weighty document and lofty “mission statement.” Then, everyone but the top gun surreptitiously locked the weighty document in a drawer and snickered at the mission statement, a superfluous requisite of that period, posted in the reception area to prove that our firm had “looked ahead.”

This fixation on an obsolete planning process guarantees that firms that use it will not keep pace with the rapid, substantive changes in our business world.

Historically, we business leaders assembled our management team in a locked-down environment for the dreaded annual strategic planning meeting. Some of us arranged the session offsite so our team could “bond” while constructing our plan forward. Others combined the planning session with a mountain climbing adventure, as a metaphor for “teamwork.” All-too-many hired the “consulting firm of the moment” or the “guru of the day” to provide external perspective and help us “look ahead.”

The sequence of this dated planning process dictated that we spend the first grueling hours going over the minute details of our past financial performance. After this restrictive look backward, we spent even more time developing and manipulating our financial projections.

“Looking around the corner” requires you to inject some innovation into your strategic planning process. You can do that by following a series of logical steps:

Step 1: Define and comprehend the most significant external factors that will influence your business as you look “around the corner”: the world situation; your nation’s situation (no politics); the categories in which you now market and may want to enter; your direct rivals for customers; and most important, the purchasing behavior of your customers and prospects.

Put these factors on flip charts with as few, simple words as possible, place them on a wall for all to see. Then get consensus for a meaningful short list of external factors that will likely have the most impact on your business in the period of your planning cycle.

Step 2: Identify a few business leaders (5-10) who have proven successful at looking “around the corner”, not just those that turned out the best financial results. From their accomplishments in the marketplace, try to figure out what they discovered when they looked “around the corner” and what strategies they employed to capitalize on their findings.

Determine the commonalities in their discoveries and strategies, not their tactics, and place them on the wall. Analyze these discoveries and strategies, get consensus on those that are relevant to your business, and consider adopting, modifying, or enhancing their conceptual value in a manner that will benefit your business in its determined effort to look “around the corner”.

Step 3: Define and comprehend the most significant internal factors that will influence your business: your company’s strengths, weaknesses, and gaps; staffing strengths, weaknesses, and gaps; customer performance strengths and weaknesses; prospect-to-customer conversion and customer retention performance vs. competition; infrastructure and technology issues; growth barriers and opportunities.

Place them on the wall and get consensus for those that need to be changed, enhanced, or discontinued as well as those that will influence your effort to grow. -

Step 4: Break into two groups and task each group with “role-playing” one of your two most challenging competitors. The goal here is to identify the strategies they might employ to assault, damage, or destroy your company and to hypothesize the manner and style in which they might do so.

Reassemble, so each team can describe its strategies to “annihilate your company”. Abbreviate the competitive strategies, avoid duplication, and place them on the wall. Allow them to frighten the hell out of you! Take a deep breath and then determine what changes your company must introduce to prevail over its competitors, especially in your effort to grow by looking “around the corner”.

Step 5: Break into two new groups of different composition. Task each group with reexamining all of the charts on the wall before endeavoring to look “around the corner” to identify the highest potential, and greatest impact developments, trends, and occurrences that will likely affect your company.

Reassemble to review and gain consensus for the combined short list of influences the company must consider as it creates strategies to capitalize on its future vision.

This is the moment to have a brief celebration in honor of your job well done!

Step 6: Keeping all the flip charts, especially your view “around the corner), on the wall for everyone to see, begin to create a sturdy, imaginative, and ambitious “strategic framework” for your firm. At this important juncture in the process, all-too-many businesses make a huge mistake – they begin filling page and page with prose, data, assigned responsibilities, and timelines, rather than create a thoughtful, meaningful, carefully crafted “strategic framework”.

This is the moment for thinking, debating, and imagining and the moment that demands consensus. Your “strategic framework” must describe the solid foundation and innovative spirit of a thriving company that, in this challenging era of “new experts”, will be your customers’ 1st choice.

Step 7: Task a small group of C level executives to develop a first draft of a comprehensive strategic plan that mirrors and magnifies your strategic framework and includes a preliminary estimate of the financial investment required to realize your look “around the corner” strategy.
Simultaneously, task a second group – operating independently of the first – to develop an initial draft of a financial plan for the company that incorporates a range of investments in your look “around the corner” strategy.

Each group must complete its preliminary draft within two weeks of the conclusion of your off-site and both groups working together, must craft a preliminary merged document within another two weeks of the conclusion of the off-site.

Using the preliminary merged draft as a template, the company must create a final integrated plan and gain total internal consensus for it within two additional weeks. This final plan must incorporate the company’s ambitious look “around the corner” within the context of prudent fiscal governance.

Yes – this timetable is aggressive because, without its discipline, the meal you cooked at your offsite will get cold.

Once completed, it is time for another brief celebration to mark the conclusion of your company’s look “around the corner”, although the moment to celebrate big-time is when the company realizes its rewards and benefits.

You have now seen what Eratosthenes could not and what many of your competitors will not. In addition to creating a potential competitive advantage, your work will also produce significant internal value. Few people involved in this process will lock the final planning document in a drawer or snicker at it, because it wi