Is Strategic Planning Dead?

by Eric Britten
I came across a post on the Harvard Business Review site that purposed, "Strategy's not dead. It's just adapting." I followed the link to a post by Walter Kiechel III, the former editorial director at HBR titled, "Strategy on the morph". The article's a fun read, so I posted it on our site. (Read "Is Strategic Planning Dead?" from our Article Index here.)

I appreciated Walter's hip rejection of the assertion made by many observers (probably not true practitioners) that strategic planning, "as we know it", is dead. Perhaps my age is showing, but do you remember when televisions were housed in a huge console and had black and white screens that were about a foot square? Well, guess what? Televison, as we knew it then, is dead, too. And thank heavens it is. If television never progressed from being that little screen in a huge box to what it is today, probably nobody would own one now. Similarly, if any of our business processes including strategic planning had not morphed over the years, they'd all be dead, too. But, like television and processes, strategic planning is just adapting and changing with the times. And, just as we still call televisions "televisions" despite the fact that they are unrecognizable from the TV's of yore, so shall we still call strategic planning by the same name even as it changes.

So, let's keep up with the times and embrace the newer, faster, nimbler iterative process that is still strategic planning. If our practitioners are not changing with the times, then they should park themselves in front of those little old boob tubes and be content with watching reruns of the Adams Family.