Preferred Futures & Strategic Planning
Peter considers that successful strategic planning should :
1. Examine long term possibilities and opportunities as part of the
process of strategic planning , for 70% of the products services and
technologies of the year 2020 have yet to be invented. Successful
organisations will be those who first and best innovate these
products and services, thereby getting to the future first.
2. Avoid being too problem-centred, focussing primarily on the
removal of undesirable elements from the future, and not being
mission-directed enough, seeking the realisation of desirable
elements; that most organisations and nations are over-managed and
under-led: leadership spends too much time in the engine room and not
enough on the bridge, too much time on the urgent and not enough on
the important.
3 Be informed by heart knowledge as well as head knowledge.
4. Accompany an investment in foresight in the planning process with
equal investments in insight ,what is one's destiny, and in
hindsight, learning from the past.
5. Plan for future and emerging value systems and ethical
environments, so that organisations are not surprised and
traumatised by value shifts which could be foreseen and planned for
.The values of 2020 define what will become valuable in 2020, and
therefore inform the innovation of products and services, to supply
the markets of 2020 .
5. Encourage organisations to market their becoming instead of their
being: what they want to become rather than what they currently are,
so that they can nurture long term loyal and mutually beneficial
relationships with potential customers , suppliers and shareholders
who share their aspirations.
6. Avoid planning which is too influenced by trend analysis and not
sufficiently by scenarios of the future, and particularly preferred
future scenarios which directed towards the creation of sustainable
prosperity for future generations.
7. Assess performance by the quadruple bottom line. Prosperity exists
in four forms : economic, ecological, social and cultural, and the
creation of sustainable prosperity involves simultaneous
maximisation of prosperity in all these four forms.
