The best strategic planning processes focus on insight, preparedness, and agility—not bureaucracy.
Most organizations are dissatisfied with the way they make strategy. They see their strategic-planning approach as too rigid, bureaucratic, reactive, and disconnected from execution. Confronted with faster-changing environments, they doubt their process can see around the bend to reveal the big, disruptive opportunities that will drive long-term value creation.
At the heart of these concerns is the misconception that strategic planning is just about annual budgets and five-year plans. These traditional planning approaches work well in stable and relatively predictable sectors, but stability is less and less the norm. More turbulent environments call for nimbler approaches that match the clock-speed of planning to that of the market.
The most effective planning approaches emulate four best practices and deliver strategies with four essential characteristics.
Strategic environments are increasingly diverse. And different environments call for different styles of strategy.
The Center tracks 90+ known and emerging megatrends that can provide critical tailwinds to accelerate strategic moves.
The Center helps clients enhance the strategic capabilities of their organizations.
The Center helps clients find tomorrow’s best opportunities by mining vast, unstructured data sets for insight.
In this pandemic year, leaders who embrace bold vision-setting, backstopped by robust analysis, can create a once-in-a-career opportunity to change the trajectory of their organizations.
Traditional strategy processes are incompatible with agile ways of working. How can organizations balance autonomy with alignment?
Leading companies are improving upon their traditional strategy-setting processes by adding something much more dynamic and agile. We call it always-on strategy.
BCG interviewed 48 CSOs from around the world to better understand how their roles and responsibilities vary depending on company size, industry sector, and CSO model.
Helping clients enhance their processes for developing winning strategies is an important part of our practice. For example, we helped:
