The Little Prince approach to the future.(Alternative strategies)

Publication: Journal of Business Strategy

Publication Date: 01-MAR-06

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Most planning efforts amount to a single stab in the dark. They consist of a host of assumptions, most unexamined, many unconscious. The majority of these unexamined or implicit assumptions fall under the heading "conventional wisdom."

Conventional wisdom is often right, of course. But it is also often wrong. Unless planners bring their implicit assumptions to the surface and test them, their plans will be obsolete very quickly. In an idyllic past of moderate change and limited competition, it might have sufficed to be "only as wrong as the next guy." Ask Ford or General Motors if being only as wrong as the next guy about the price of oil, say, or the public's appetite for large gas-guzzling vehicles, is a recipe for success.

In an era of accelerating, disruptive change and extreme competition, dependence on "conventional wisdom" can be fatal to organizations, careers, and even nations. Strategies developed on the basis of such unexamined assumptions, in turn, are brittle; they will not survive changes in the strategic context.

A rigorous and realistic appraisal of its assumptions about the future, on the other hand, can lend an organization foresight denied to other participants in its environment. And strategies developed with that foresight are more likely to help the organization to achieve strategic dominance. But even in industries like the auto industry, where massive change is entirely foreseeable, and is even predicted, and beyond that, has actually occurred within the career spans of senior executives, reliance on extrapolative forecasting and conventional wisdom can prove too seductive for even superbly educated and intelligent executives to resist.

The (perhaps sad) fact is that there is a rather straightforward way to anticipate an arbitrary variety of future contingencies. Unfortunately, it does not easily fit into accepted and sanctified modes of management thought. Perhaps a metaphor will help to show that anticipation (as opposed to prediction) of a broad range of future working environments is...

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