Strategic Planning through Complexity: Overcoming Impediments to Forecast and Schedule

Strategic planning1 is an exercise to visualize or anticipate or project the future and act accordingly (Terry, 1953; Allen, 1958 and 1973; and Strong, 1965), keeping in sync the organizational resources and objectives. Hence, visualizing the future and making adequate provisions to deal with the same to meet organizational objectives can be termed as strategic planning. Moreover, strategic planning is an intellectual process, the conscious determination of course of action, the basing of decisions on purpose, facts and considered estimates (Weihrich et al., 1986). Strategic planning involves decision making through alternative courses of action, with a view to implementing the same in future to synchronize with the changing external environment. It is important to note that strategic plans should exist to show directions, not to prophesize by rigidly fixing unalterable boundaries for any action in future. Future remains unpredictable and forecasting remains an effective way to counter the same. However, it is seen that forecasting sometimes misses its mark completely. The reason for this radical miss is explained through the complexity of the elements that affect the whole planning process. The strategic planning process, after the cerebral stage, asks for scheduling to form an action-plan necessary for implementation. Therefore, forecasting and scheduling can be seen as the essential elements of strategic planning and a framework is essential for the successful implementation of the same. The framework proposed in this paper is scenario-planning with the help of complexity theory that holds the potential to aid strategic planning overcome strategic planning impediments as well as to indicate the arts, science and technology involved in achieving the objectives generated from experience and expertise.