Reflections on Strategic Planning

Not all of us truly understand that creating futures ready strategy starts inside us, in our minds, in our worldviews, in our biases, in our tacit beliefs.

I was a strategic planning practitioner and director for a long time in universities. I have been a futures practitioner and published researcher since 2007, focused until recently on helping people develop futures ready strategy. I am reading a lot of articles about how to develop future (singular) oriented strategies today. How to focus on what matters, to seek out uncertainties and address them. Sometimes articles are about changing your mindset but often just pay lip service to this particular aspect of how strategy is developed. Most stay in the present and don't really move into the somewhat murky space that our many futures generate.

What I have come to realise since I first started using my foresight and futures approaches in 1999 is that not all of us truly understand that creating futures ready strategy starts inside us, in our minds, in our worldviews, in our biases, in our tacit beliefs about what is true and false and in our willingness to open our minds to the preposterou…