To build resilience, include long-term foresight in strategy planning process
Businesses should remind themselves that change happens all the time, and those that have stagnated with one idea will soon be left behind, writes Michiel Jonker
An obsession with short-term goals, and a dependency on the interpretation of short-term signals, are preventing many businesses from planning appropriately for the future. Organisations will be infinitely more resilient and successful once leaders include long-term foresight into their strategic planning processes. Many businesses believe they are focused on the long term, only to be caught on the back foot when changes in the contextual (political, socioeconomic, technology etc) and competitive (industry-related) environments happen. And many of these changes could have been foreseen. A perfect example of this reliance on short-term signals is the change in business sentiment following the recent credit rating downgrades in SA. When business leaders were questioned about their confidence in January this year — after the country escaped a downgrade to junk status in December 2016 — most were rather optimistic, seeing this as a sign that the economic outlook trajectory had perhaps t...
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