The recent issue of the McKinsey update had a couple of articles that weighed in on strategic planning in uncertain times.  A couple of these were worth sharing:

Remember that the most important decisions for most companies will truly be […the ones where there is little level of certainty.]  Our standard strategic-planning tool kits—the ones that we are most comfortable with and that we learn in MBA programs—don’t do a really good job for that.

So we ought to pay attention to this wake-up call. Embrace uncertainty. Get to know it. In uncertainty lies great opportunity. If you don’t try to understand what’s separating the known from the unknown from the unknowable, you’re really missing out.

(from an interview with Hugh Courtney, author of 20/20 Foresight: Crafting Strategy in an Uncertain World)

The second article starts with this:

There is nothing like a crisis to clarify the mind. In suddenly volatile and different times, you must have a strategy. I don’t mean most of the things people call strategy—mission statements, audacious goals, three- to five-year budget plans. I mean a real strategy.

For many managers, the word has become a verbal tic. Business lingo has transformed marketing into marketing strategy, data processing into IT strategy, acquisitions into growth strategy. Cut prices and you have a low-price strategy. Equating strategy with success, audacity, or ambition creates still more confusion. A lot of people label anything that bears the CEO’s signature as strategic—a definition based on the decider’s pay grade, not the decision.

By strategy, I mean a cohesive response to a challenge. A real strategy is neither a document nor a forecast but rather an overall approach based on a diagnosis of a challenge. The most important element of a strategy is a coherent viewpoint about the forces at work, not a plan.

(From the article “Strategy in a Structural Break“)

Both extracts provide good food for thought with regards to the strategy process – whether in a crisis or not.

(Note – just finished an intensive three day workshop that involved weeks of planning, so apologies for the break regular transmission.  Service will now return to normal…)