How To Plan 100 Years Ahead
It’s pretty much unheard of in the business world today, but in setting your business up to win you should cast your eyes forward one hundred years.
Active Knowledge Questions:
When you undertake strategic planning for your business, how far ahead do you look? How would your leadership team respond if you asked them to plan ahead for the next 100 years?
How Far Can You See?
As a business leader, knowing how to plan 100 years ahead is a skill you should master.
At a recent strategic planning session, the question of ‘what opportunities and markets can we see in the future?’ was raised. The response was one of almost silence.
The leadership team was in the middle of a major project and all considered themselves 110% committed to that activity and could not even think what may come next. Then came a response that it was ‘almost impossible to see even five years ahead as who really knows where technology would be at that point’.
The event raised two questions for me:
- Can a leadership team, one responsible for setting strategy, ever allow themselves to be so ‘busy’ that they do not have time to look into the future?
- Can you afford to wait until everything is known before you plan your future?
The obvious answer is no, if you want to lead and win in your chosen markets and not just be a follower.
So how far should one be looking into the future in planning ahead? And how do you make allowances for the unknown?
Again, there seemed to be a nice theoretical answer — look as far forward as possible, 100 years is a nice number, and don’t wait for the future to form, create it yourself.
All nice in theory but how would you practically even get a handle on such a task? Well, actually, I believe it is possible and this is how.
An entirely new level of performance.
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All the best in the success of your business,
Richard Shrapnel
