Beware the Sabretooth Tiger

Roger Martin, in a 2014 Harvard Business Review Article titled, The Big Lie of Strategic Planning, argued that executives find strategic planning scary because they are required to confront a future that they can only guess at. As a consequence, they rely on tried and tested tools that foster safety.” This reminds me of Mark Twain’s famous quote, “when you find yourself on the side of the majority, it’s time to pause and reflect.” Martin further argues that this is a terrible means to create a strategy as fear and discomfort are an essential part of strategy making. He states, “if you are entirely comfortable with your strategy, there’s a strong chance it’s not very good.”

Henry Mintzberg is a Canadian Professor at McGill University Montreal. His 1994 book, The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning, distinguished between deliberate strategy and reactive strategic actions he called emergent strategy. Mintzberg argued that managers and executives overestimated their ability to predict the future and plan for it in a “precise and technocratic way.” Given this, even the most comprehensive strategic plans were likely to fail as the environmental conditions in which they operated shifted and strategy became emergent.

Mike Tyson, the notorious boxer, put this concept much more succinctly when he said, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth”.

Just like we learn the most in our hardest times, embracing the concept that risk is uncomfortable is critical for effective Strategic Planning. We, humans, have a highly tuned internal operating system designed specifically to recognise patterns and relegate complex situations to more simplistic scenarios so we can deal with them as we have before. This has served us incredibly well through the ages as our highly tuned response mechanisms mean that when the Sabretooth Tiger appears, we have the means to survive. The downside to this, and as discussed earlier, the positivity bias means that although we think we have the answers and know the environment in which we are reacting, the odds are we have overestimated our ability, and things are not as we predicted.

It is clear that embracing risk and uncertainty is a critical essential element of effective strategy making.

Is your strategy making you feel safe or uncomfortable?