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06/06/2018

Does Your Strategic Plan Need a Refresh?

As the world moves faster, strategic plans get stale quicker

It’s a VUCA world out there. And it’s only getting VUCA-er.

VUCA, as you may know, is an acronym for “volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity.” The term began in military circles in the 90s, but it’s since gotten traction in management, and for obvious reasons—so much of strategy-setting at organizations these days involves responding to challenges that can be hard to anticipate or even identify. (Think of what companies like Uber and Facebook have faced in the past year, or old-line retailers like JCPenney.) VUCA is an ugly-sounding term, but perhaps that helps make it an appropriate one—nobody ever said that getting whipsawed by unseen forces was going to be pretty.

Because change occurs more rapidly and is harder to get a fix on now, that’s had an impact on the linchpin of an association’s operations—its strategic planning process. In a recent article for the Stanford Social Innovation Review, three writers from the consultancy Deloitte set their sights on the “familiar, time-delimited planning processes” that risk making associations and other nonprofits slow-moving ships.

Please select this link to read the complete article from Associations Now.

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