The organization determines the need for a strategic plan that is as dynamic as its external environment.  Like a cast, a team of strategic thinkers is carefully assembled consisting of employees from all levels and parts of the organization, customers, suppliers and others who care deeply about the organization’s health and success.  Diversity of all sorts -- especially knowledge, views and opinion -- sparks the process, stretches thinking and strengthens the outcomes.  The team's first task is to consider what brought them together.  They frame a strategic decision issue that will keep the process focused on fundamental concerns. 

Here the Structural Dynamics team gathers to consider the decision issue. 

What the team does in the Staging space:
1.    Events:  Drawing upon their own knowledge, that of their constituents
and recognized reliable sources, the team identifies the many external factors,
trends and actions, which, if they occurred, would have a significant impact
on the issue under consideration.  What's going on and what might happen
within the planning horizon?  Which of these events are inevitable?  Which are highly uncertain?  Which are critical to the issue at hand?

2.   Trends and Patterns:  The team determines how the most critical and the most uncertain events and factors have been trending over time.  They recognize patterns by determining what is causing these trends and what these trends are impacting.
 
3.    Structure:  They sketch the cause and effect relationships between these factors - what each impacts and what it is impacted by.  This system of causal connections reveals the underlining structure driving events and patterns.  They also look at the myths and metaphors beneath these causal relationships.

The team has discovered the facts driving the system.  The relationship of the forces in the system are durable, they existed in the past, persist in the present and are likely to endure in the future.  At this point the team reviews its findings with its superiors [the funders and advocates of the process] and communicates with their constituents. The Stage is now set.  They are ready to move into the rehearsal space to put this Stage to use.

Okay - here we are.  The team realizes that there are an infinite number of plausible future conditions.  They will develop a set of manageable size - usually four - that encompass a very broad range of possibilities.  

What happens in the Rehearsal space:
4.    Scenarios – The team articulates a set of distinct, plausible images of the future based on the Stage setting.  These scenarios include social, economic, technical, political, aesthetic and environmental conditions. 

5.    Strategies – For each scenario, the team "lives" in that future state long enough to determine the most effective action for the organization to take in that set of conditions. The strategies devised for each of the scenarios are stress-tested to see how they work in the others.  Strategies that which work well [often for very different reasons] in a wide range of future conditions are “robust” – others are contingent.

Based on this learning, the team prepares an organizational strategy using the most robust strategies and includes contingency plans to be enacted if particular conditions occur.  Again, they formally report back into the organization -- up, down and sideways – seeking both feedback and support.  Through rehearsal, communication and skill development, the organization is prepared to move forward with confidence.  It’s options have been determined and the choice is clear.  So let’s go!

Lights, camera, action!   We're live on the world stage.  It’s time to articulate the organization's strategic plan and align operational plans, financial plans and the annual budget to it.  

What goes on in the Performance space:
7.    Action Plans - To ensure that they are aligned and moving in the same direction, the subcomponents of the organization adapt the organizational strategies to their own domains.  They do not develop plans that simply optimize their own performance: they must act in concert with the whole.  This is not a vaudville show – it is a Broadway production.

8.    Implementation – Here, the team prepares to track events and the impact of the organization’s strategic actions.  They determine what to measure to encourage and assess results; and which signposts, warnings and indicators to monitor to keep tabs on the external environment.  They assign responsibilities and set milestones.

It’s important to keep a close eye on the impact of the organization’s strategic actions both internally and externally.   By continually measuring results internally, monitoring external events, and checking assumptions, the organization is ready to respond rapidly as the future unfolds.  Those who have not anticipated these possibilities are likely to be left in the dust, as your organization accelerates into the future.

Art of the Future offers a one day open-enrollment workshop as an introduction to Structural Dynamics >  Seeing and Using the Big Picture.