Suppose the strategic planning task at hand is imagining what your organization will look like at some future point.
What are strategic planning exercises you can use with a team?
7 Ideas to Envision What Your Future Organization Might Look Like
Here are seven possibilities to consider:
- Describe a future time where the organization has already achieved incredible success. Also, describe a comparable future time scenario the organization failed on all important objectives. For each of future state, look back and ask what led to incredible success or failure.
- Employ extreme creativity and disruptive innovation-oriented questions to push your strategic planning vision exercise in bold, future directions.
- Identify the most important elements of the business that hold great potential to materially change the organization's future prospects. Once you settle on these attributes, use them as the basis to describe the future (i.e., What does that specific attribute look like in the future by itself and in conjunction with all the other attributes?).
- Interview lead users and future-looking experts to understand how they'd describe an aggressive future vision.
- Identify all the elements of the brand. Have a group respond individually on which of the attributes needs to change dramatically, which can change marginally, and which need to be eliminated in the future. After securing individual responses, use a group strategic conversation to settle on the future strategic planning vision.
- Develop an analysis of future trends. Extend the trends 5x and 10x to create dramatically bold future visions.
- Select other brands and imagine what your organization would look like if they were running your organization.
Ensure you have all the strategic thinking perspective and voices we always recommend. Additionally, for these strategic planning vision exercises, make sure you include external participants with expertise and perspectives not burdened by the organization's current, status quo vision.
Want to talk more about taking this approach to a future vision as part of your strategic planning?
Contact us, and let's chat about how this strategic planning exercise approach applies to your organization. - Mike Brown
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