Quick or Long Term Planning

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Question – How do I plan for anticipated changes in my business environment?

Answer - This is the sequence we propose:

1. map out the key elements of your current strategy
2. identify the core elements of the future scenario you are anticipating. Note also the weak signals that warn you a change is taking place
3. map out the new strategy you will adopt to address the future scenario. This is the classic "from" => "to" chart
4. comparing your new strategy with your current one, what needs to change?
5. recognising what needs to change, what actions will you need to take to make that change?
6. what is your action plan?

Key action points

The Quick or Long-Term Planning Process can be used to achieve two separate goals:

1. Quick Planning – if you have not been through a detailed strategic planning process, it can provide you with some critical strategic insights in a very short space of time
2. Long-Term Planning – the same process can be used to document the areas you need to address in order to react to anticipated changes in your business environment

In more detail…….

If you have been using a scenario/future planning process to develop several major scenarios to try to anticipate changes in your market / industry / environment, and to challenge your strategic thinking in relation to your current situation, it is important to build your conclusions into a quick plan.

This is a critical step in the scenario planning process, and without it scenario planning tends to be viewed simply as a fun day out. At this stage, because any one scenario that you have envisaged may not necessarily happen, you do not plan in great detail. This is simply to lay down a contingency plan should the scenario unfold as you have anticipated.

Because it is only an outline plan, you can use the same format to develop a quick plan, even if you have not conducted a scenario development exercise.

The purpose is therefore to start to think in at least some depth about the consequences for you of your environment changing, without planning everything down to the final detail. Nonetheless, it is worth laying out at least a rough action plan.

The Mud Valley™ Quick or Long-Term Planning tool contains the following sequence of activities:

1. map out the key elements of your current strategy
2. identify the core elements of the future scenario you are anticipating. Note also the weak signals that warn you a change is taking place
3. map out the new strategy you will adopt to address the future scenario. This is the classic "from" => "to" chart
4. comparing your new strategy with your current one, what needs to change?
5. recognising what needs to change, what actions will you need to take to make that change?
6. what is your action plan?

© 2006, Mud Valley ™ brand marketing community.

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