Traditional strategic planning is typically defined by periodic (quarterly, annually, or ad-hoc) reviews untaken by a board or small group of senior executives. This approach often fails to keep pace with market shifts, technological advancements, and other unforeseen disruptions.
Whether it’s due to a competitor or a startup disrupting a product or service line, or an entire industry going into a decline during a global pandemic; organizational strategy today needs continual reassessment to maintain competitiveness.
Pathfinding proposes an ‘always-on’ strategic planning process that emphasizes real-time adaptability and responsiveness and can be scaled across all levels of an organization or ecosystem.
Instead of developing strategic plans annually or quarterly, Pathfinding insists organizations should focus on enabling easily accessible communication and decision-making lines that enable all stakeholders to both feed into and take direction from strategies that can adapt to shifting market conditions.
Key to this approach is the ability to capture and integrate feedback loops and real-time analytics across strategy development, execution, and evaluation, enabling organizations to reassess and realign their strategies constantly. It is critical that there is a clear link between strategic planning and execution at a behavioural, tools and systems, and reporting level; and that execution monitoring capabilities are designed to observe and measure strategic alignment and drift.
Pathfinding also promotes inclusive stakeholder engagement to help ensure that strategic planning is a collective effort involving not just individuals from various departments and authority levels within the organization, but also individuals of diverse perspectives, experiences, and working styles.
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