A recent article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review succinctly makes the case for adaptive strategic planning—that is, a planning process that doesn’t attempt to predict the future, but rather encourages a culture of experimentation, learning, and adaptation.

Since at least World War II, the prevailing approach to strategic planning in the business, governmental and nonprofit world has been rooted in traditional military thinking and culture. Based on centuries of hard-won experience, this approach assumes:

  • The past is always the best predictor of the future.
  • Good data is hard to come by, so new information should be greeted with skepticism.
  • Lines of communication are generally unreliable. Therefore a small number of clear directives, not often changed, are essential in order to coordinate the far-flung elements of our operation.

Those assumptions may have been appropriate at one time, but they are increasingly left in the dust of today’s rapidly changing world. But with adaptive strategic planning, predictions give way to experiments, data collection for its own sake becomes less important than pattern recognition, and execution becomes more of a collaborative operation of the whole than a top-down exercise.

A planning process that results in a “static plan” purporting to capture exhaustively the future direction of an organization is likely to find itself gathering dust on a shelf. On the other hand, to think of planning not as a product, but rather as a way of thinking is to engage your entire organization in a culture of experimentation and learning that adapts to changing circumstances.

Our new series, Evidence-Based Decision Making On the Fly, focuses on a key ingredient of what we refer to as small wins strategic planning—evidence-based decision making (EBDM). EBDM entails the systematic collection and use of key data on which to build key decisions. EBDM is all about being agile and learning from data—hence the term “on the fly.” EBDM is the engine that drives any culture of truly strategic thinking, and a leader should be skeptical of any strategic planning process doesn’t thoroughly address questions like:

  • On what information do we base our beliefs about what we do and why we do it?
  • What role does objective evidence play in our decision making process?
  • What is success, and how will we measure it?

In the words of one of our country’s most brilliant generals:

“Plans are useless–but planning is everything.” Dwight D. Eisenhower