MB #9 How to Add 25 Years to Your Strategic Plan in 4 Extra Hours

It all depends on the context you create

Beware: there are some fundamental misunderstandings being passed around about long-term strategic planning which make it seem impractical.

The impact on the C-Suite? Disagreements. Misalignment. And executives who forego long-term planning because “it takes too much time.”

Recently overheard: “I can’t argue with the importance of long-term planning. But a 15-30-year game-changing plan is too time-consuming to create. It can take months to complete.”

At first glance, the logic appears to be sound. If it took your team 4 days to craft your organization’s current 3-year plan, then it makes sense that a 30-year plan would require meetings lasting…40 days! In other words, you may conclude, “We shouldn’t even talk about spending the time, effort and budget required.”

But what if this common calculation is just plain wrong? Keep reading to hear some actual first-hand evidence which contradicts the conventional wisdom. You could learn how time can be warped in strategy offsites to accomplish the seemingly impossible.

Introduction

Let’s assume that your company has agreed to undertake a strategic planning effort. But the question of which planning horizon to use (3, 5, 10, 30, 100-years?) has been bouncing back and forth, without any resolution.

While it’s obvious that it must address the next three to five years at a minimum, your C-Suiters can’t agree on how far ahead they should plan beyond the short-term. A few want to think in terms of decades. Others believe adding an extra year or two to the normal planning cycle should suffice.

You decide to do some digging and soon realize that the primary objection has to do with the overall time required to complete the plan. There are other issues, but this one is foremost.

During your conversations, a colleague recalls a prior effort to plan a 10-year strategy requiring 12 months of added time. Even worse, it involved a famous, high-priced consulting firm which charged a million dollars. Nothing was ever implemented.

In each case, by the time the plan was done, all concerned were exhausted, sick of the process, and eager to set it aside for good.

However, you remain committed to long-term thinking. The problem is that you have never actually been part of such an activity. Can it be done in a way that defies the simple logic?

Conventional Responses from a Survey

In a recent poll I conducted on Linkedin, some 77% of respondents voted for “5 consecutive 3-year strategic plans” over its counterpart, “a single 15-year plan.”

One major reason given by some in the majority had to do with the length of time required for each project. They decided that the time would be better spent elsewhere.

Following this reasoning, it may never make sense to do a long-term strategic plan. Why? No C-Suite has the extra “40 days” needed. Nor should they reduce that number to 30 days using outside consultants.

However, a deeper dive into Linkedin discussions shows a different picture. The truth is few commentators have ever attended more than one or two long-term strategic planning retreats. And those who have, aren’t talking, writing or podcasting about their experiences.

So, most of what I see is conjecture…the “40 days” conclusion is dramatically uninformed.

Perhaps there is reason to question the conventional wisdom and look for actual evidence. Let’s start by examining long-term national plans.

International and National Plans - Worthwhile Time Investments?

The United Nations has seriously taken on the task of long-term planning for the planet. I explain the journey in my article on the Sustainable Development Goals, but here’s a summary.

It began in earnest with the creation of the Millenium Development Goals (MDGs) in 2000. Eight targets were established to tackle global commitments to combat scourges such as poverty, hunger and disease. They were modeled, in part, after successful global efforts to eradicate smallpox and polio, which took decades to complete.

The Sustainable Development Goals were launched in 2015 to replace the MDGs. Covering 17 areas, they also span a 15-year horizon.

These two major planning efforts included almost 200 countries and took five years to complete. While some criticize these two projects, it’s hard to argue that they are not meant to be valuable. Overall, the investments are deemed worthwhile.

However, a different calculus seems to apply to for-profit companies, and the impatient world their executives live in. While it’s hard to argue against prolonged efforts to solve global problems, it’s easier to oppose long-term planning in a for-profit.

After all, the logic goes: profit-making does not require long planning horizons. Saving the world does.

But is this true? Certainly, there is tremendous pressure on publicly traded companies by hedge funds and some investors to meet or exceed quarterly targets. In response, executives often become distracted.

However, few would argue about the importance of creating long-term value. In like manner, they support the argument that long-term value comes about as a result of long-term thinking and strategic planning.

Unfortunately, this logic is rarely translated into practice. Instead, C-Suites become convinced that they can’t follow the examples of the SDGs or NetZero 2050.

They would like to. But they don’t have time, they complain. Once again, they could be wrong. Perhaps they do, but they just lack first-hand experience.

A Direct Comparison

In the past year, I had an opportunity to draw a direct comparison between two strategic planning projects: one short-term, and one long-term. But first, some background.

My company focuses on 15-30-year game-changing strategic planning. Consequently, we have completed over 50 two-to-three-day offsites between 2002 and 2024. Our commitment to long-term thinking has led us to decline requests to engage in short-term planning projects.

However, under duress, a client (which we’ll dub ImmediateSolve Inc.) with a fiscal emergency no longer wanted to complete the long-term strategic plan we had agreed to craft. Now, given a rude external shock, its leaders felt as if a mere 3-year-plan would be a stretch.

But to be honest, I tried to convince them otherwise, and failed. With a matter of weeks remaining to a key deadline, my small company made a break with normal practice.

When the dust had settled after the project, we realized that there was at least one big positive. We could now draw a direct comparison between two interventions: a 3-5-year strategic plan and ones which span 15-30-years.

Our conclusion? It takes about an additional 4 hours to complete the latter.

To be frank, this isn’t what we expected.

Note: I can’t quite cover our entire process in a single Mini-Book and you may require some background information on the EndPoint Method used with our clients. What I am about to describe is a variation on this method.

But let’s assume you have not read the article. Why does the “40-day” conclusion, which seems to be so reasonable, turn out to be incorrect? Here are five reasons why.