Tearing Down ChatGPT’s Plan to Develop a Long-Term Strategic Plan
Why the Conventional Wisdom is Just Plain Wrong
This week, ChatGPT has been taking over the internet. Inspired by others, I thought I would run my own experiment. “What are the steps needed to create a long-term strategic plan?” In a few seconds, I had my answer. But was the robot correct?
Here are the answers it provided along with my comments. In general, I consider the approach it offered to be innocently dangerous.
*Developing a long-term strategic plan involves several steps. Here is a general outline of the process:
*Identify the organization’s mission and values: The first step in developing a long-term strategic plan is to define the organization’s purpose and its core values. This will help guide the decision-making process and ensure that the plan aligns with the organization’s overall goals and principles.
This innocuous recommendation appears to be helpful, and happens to be the popular answer offered in some circles. This actually masks its danger. Keep reading to find out why this advice will set back a strategy retreat or offsite by months or even years.
ChatGPT, the villain of our tale, recommends that we start by “identifying” founding documents…mission, values, purpose, overall goals, principles.
Where these are to be found isn’t clear. Should they be retrieved from prior projects? Or it is suggesting that these documents be crafted during the first activity in a retreat? It’s not clear.
But in both cases, it does recommend that the strategy team anchor its thinking in the past. In other words, the new long-term strategy is merely a continuation of prior commitments. As such, there will be alignment between the new plan and all those prior statements.
This seemingly innocuous suggestion is actually dangerous. Why? The robot suggests that these prior documents are the primary and best source of wisdom and guidance. But where are they coming from?
Given their origin, they are being driven by the past. As such, they are being granted a key role when they could be stale, outdated and irrelevant. Even if they are drafted for the first time on the spot, no attempt has been made to carve out a future of any kind. So the documents will end up preserving and defending the status quo…the way things are.
Given the fact that this is a long-term planning exercise, this is a mistaken first step. The purpose of a long-term strategy is to inform current day activity by future outcomes or visions. In this case, the first exercise is a failure.
How will it play out? Given its origins, the company is only projecting past experience into the future. If it’s lucky, it might be able to avoid all the fresh disruptive forces emerging from competitors, new technology, government regulations, etc.
However, it’s more likely to be caught unawares. Being driven by the status quo is a recipe for disaster in our fast-changing world.
Unfortunately, most strategy teams and facilitators don’t know the difference between a long-term strategy inspired from the past, versus one developed from the future. While they are as different as chalk is from cheese, some argue that it’s just a matter of semantics. They couldn’t be more incorrect.
This ineffective first step conjured by ChatGPT sets a course for failure that a strategy workshop is unlikely to recover from.
*Conduct a SWOT analysis: A SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis is a tool that helps organizations identify their internal strengths and weaknesses, as well as external opportunities and threats. This analysis can help organizations understand their current situation and identify areas for improvement or growth.
I don’t conduct SWOT activities in retreats, offsites or workshops. From my experience, they are little more than opinion surveys. As I describe in this article, I only conduct them as online assessments which ensures they don’t take up valuable time in the event itself. At most, we may discuss a few interesting results.
In my opinion, ChatGPT is taking the lazy way out by giving a SWOT Analysis an important role. These “analyses” are easy to do, and require no solid commitments from participants. As an open brainstorm, all inputs are welcome.
Those who go the next step and attempt to draw conclusions from the exercise compound the problem. As I explain in the article, classifying an item as a strength, weakness, opportunity or threat is a personal perspective - a judgement. And aggregating these opinions only produces more opinions.
But opinions don’t exist in a vacuum. They only make sense in a particular context. Given the design of a ChatGPT retreat, the past is being used as the backdrop. In other words, participants are using prior experience to answer SWOT questions.
Perhaps it’s not hard to see that if the organization were inspired by a vision of the future instead of the past, it could find strengths become weaknesses and vice versa. The same applies for opportunities and threats.
Therefore, anchoring SWOT questions in the past is likely to make the exercise a hindrance. Staff is unlikely to be innovative, or create new categories, or move the needle away from business-as-usual.
If you conduct the exercise, expect to entrench the entire workshop in the status quo offered by the current environment. You have now fixed participant’s attention on the way things are, where they won’t be able to do much more than see incremental changes. Certainly there is no room to create Big Hairy Audacious Goals from a clean-sheet.
*Set long-term goals: Based on the results of the SWOT analysis and the organization’s mission and values, the next step is to set long-term goals. These goals should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART).
At this point, participants are being led to believe that the way to address issues uncovered in the SWOT exercise is to define long-term goals.
Based on the fact that the SWOT is just a group of opinions, this third step doesn’t make sense.
To say that this requires a leap in logic, puts it mildly.
Now, the session has devolved into a problem-solving exercise based on random opinions. As such, the long-term goals generated are likely to be a disparate set of objectives, thrown together in a disordered list. All you have is a fancy to-do list.
With no real cause-and-effect connection between tasks, the collective plans fail to describe a single line of thinking. Or any priorities. All you have is a grab bag of disparate tasks.
Another reason to be alarmed is that there is no mention of an overall, unifying timeline. Therefore, these goals might include a mix of one-year and one-hundred-year targets. All appear to be welcome.
While a ChatGPT consultant may group these goals in some way to make the list more bearable, this exercise is still random. It’s a bit like going shopping without having a clue who will be eating or what you plan to serve.
Consequently, the long-term goals lack any coherence. They are likely to take attention and resources and send them in disconnected directions.
The remaining three steps in the ChatGPT plan are non-controversial. They must be done in conjunction every retreat, so I merely list them here without comment.
*Develop a plan to achieve the goals: Once the long-term goals have been set, the next step is to develop a plan to achieve them. This may involve identifying specific actions that need to be taken, allocating resources, and establishing timelines.
*Implement the plan: Once the plan has been developed, the next step is to put it into action. This may involve coordinating with different teams and departments, and tracking progress towards the goals.
*Review and adjust the plan: It’s important to regularly review and assess the progress of the plan and make any necessary adjustments. This can help ensure that the organization stays on track and remains responsive to changes in the external environment.
So in summary, the first three steps in ChatGPT’s process do all the damage. The resulting strategic plan is likely to produce little more than a continuation of the status quo.
Furthermore, the collection of projects defined are merely a random list. Together, they have little strategic value because there is no overall single coherent plan they are designed to fulfill.
In other words, according to Drs. Kaplan and Norton (creators of the balanced scorecard) there is no strategic hypothesis to follow. As a result, even if the company succeeds, the strategy cannot be said to be the cause of it.
Essentially, the organization’s ship is rudderless and adrift.