What If the Five-Year Plan Was Never Meant to Predict the Future?

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There was a time when a five-year strategic plan felt exactly that.  It was a forecast of the future.

Not a perfect one, of course, there would always be the occasional surprise. A new competitor, a market downturn, a regulation nobody saw coming.  But by and large, the direction held. If you pulled that document out five years later, it probably bore a reasonable resemblance to where the organisation had ended up.

I'm don’t think that's the world we're living in anymore.

Think back over the last five or six years.  How much of today's world would your organisation have confidently predicted?

The pace and reach of artificial intelligence?  Hybrid work becoming the norm?  Psychosocial hazards becoming a board-level responsibility?  The geopolitical instability reshaping supply chains?  The rapid changes in customer expectations?  Or the sheer speed at which markets now move?

I can’t really say they were impossible to imagine, but nobody imagined them arriving together.

We haven't just become more uncertain; we’ve become more unpredictable.  And that’s the difference today because they are not the same thing.

Uncertainty is something we can usually reduce. We can overcome uncertainty with more information, better analysis, more scenarios. Eventually the picture becomes clearer.

Unpredictability is different. The conditions themselves keep changing faster than our forecasts can keep up.  They interact, and amplify each other so the sum is great than the parts.

As I’ve said before, planning for unpredictability is more like chasing a rugby ball across wet grass. The moment it hits the ground; it can take off in any direction. It is just simply unknowable.

So where does that leave strategic planning?

I don't think we abandon it.  In fact, I think good planning has become more important than ever.  But perhaps we've been asking the wrong thing of it.

Maybe the purpose of a five-year plan is no longer to predict the future.

Maybe its purpose is to give an organisation enough clarity to move forward in a direction, while building the capability to adapt when reality hits in whatever way it does.

In other words, the plan provides direction, but the people provide adaptability.

That feels like a subtle shift, but I suspect it's one of the defining leadership challenges of the next decade.

Because if every organisation has access to similar technology, similar data, similar consultants and similar forecasting tools, what becomes the competitive advantage?

I don't think it will be who wrote the smartest strategy.  I think it will be who built the people most capable of responding and pivoting quickly when the strategy needs rewriting.

The organisations that thrive won't necessarily be the ones that guessed the future most accurately.  They'll be the ones whose leaders remain calm when the future ignores the plan.

The next decade may belong to organisations that invest in better-prepared people.

That's the thinking behind Level Up.

It's designed to prepare the people your organisation will depend on when tomorrow looks nothing like today's strategy. Because while none of us can predict the next five years with confidence, we can absolutely prepare leaders who are ready to meet what we can’t see coming.

Has the role of the five-year plan changed, or are we simply expecting it to do something it was never designed to do?

I'd love to know what you think.  Let’s have a conversation.