In a Volatile World, Your Strategy Must Be Flexible

Although it sounds cliché, the world really is a more volatile place than it used to be. That’s because the drivers of uncertainty are more intense — there are more and more change vectors affecting outcomes and these vectors are more and more inter-related. The range of likely outcomes five and 10 years has grown much larger than it was even a decade ago, dooming traditional approaches to strategy setting and planning to failure. To have a hope of succeeding, strategy makers need to give themselves plenty of opportunities to change course and treat their strategic plan as an evolving construct rather than a fixed roadmap.