Day Two Lineup – June 21st (Friday)

Welcome to the Long-Term Strategic Planning Conference 2024 with my guest Dr. Kaihan Krippendorf. You are eager to create a new strategic plan in your company. But lurking in the background is some baggage - the kind which can derail any well-intended activity. When it comes to strategic planning, can you jump right into the creation of a new vision without being bogged down by either the recent history or current environment?

Welcome to the Long-Term Strategic Planning Conference 2024 with my guest Craig Perue. Your company wants to commit to long-term strategic plans. It has some important initiatives that will take 10-30 years to complete, at minimum. However you have seen how poorly projects are managed. You seriously doubt the organization’s ability to execute projects which are complex. What can you do to increase the odds of success?

Welcome to the Long-Term Strategic Planning Conference 2024 with my guest Chris Fox. Your long-term strategic plan is finished and it’s a hit. Staff is excited to be engaged. However, six months later you discover that little progress has been made. People are complaining that they have simply pushed off long-term actions until later…but apparently, later has never come! So nothing is happening. How should you intervene so that people decide to implement the long-term strategic plan?

Welcome to the Long-Term Strategic Planning Conference 2024 with my guest Debilyn Molineaux. You are someone who has influence with the leadership of an organization. You care about the long-term future of the planet, and you think they do also based on casual conversations over the water-cooler. However, the company has nothing more than a three to five year vision, and strategy. You think that longer term commitments and vision would assure the long-term value the organization says it's committed to. How do you intervene with a top leader when you have the chance to talk with him or her?

Welcome to the Long-Term Strategic Planning Conference 2024 with my guest Maggie Greyson. Your executive team made a poor start to its strategic planning process. An initial SWOT brainstorm meeting turned into a rehash of old arguments and disagreements. There are different schools of thoughts, and some fierce protectors who are trying to prevent a repeat of past mistakes. Now, as you prepare for a strategic planning workshop, you are concerned that attendees may not be able to get past their personal histories. If they don’t, they won’t be able to discuss or envision any futures which are free from the shackles of the past.

Welcome to the Long-Term Strategic Planning Conference 2024 with my guest Mathias Behn Byornhof (Mateeas ben Byornhof) You want your company or client to think about a future that’s far away - 10, 20, 30 years out. But you are concerned that it may lose out on the present by spending too much time in the future. You don’t want the organization to be distracted by the kind of long-term thinking which could cause immediate problems.

Welcome to the Long-Term Strategic Planning Conference 2024 with my guest Cecily Sommers. Your company faces a wide range of futures to choose from. Each of them is vague, and there is no apparent way to narrow down the options. Should it go into the next retreat hoping to explore them all? Or is there a way to explore the future and make the decisions more manageable?

Welcome to the Long-Term Strategic Planning Conference 2024 with my guest Dr. Katindi Sivi. You consider yourself a realist, someone who is committed to dealing with facts and the truth about the way things are. But in strategic planning you have noticed that some people you work with want strategic planning to be a happy space - filled with positive emotions. As such, they refuse to engage with poor results, failures and disappointments which are a part of any organization’s past. You want to engage in strategic planning which is truthful, but how do you make this happen…especially when you are outnumbered?

Welcome to the Long-Term Strategic Planning Conference 2024 with my guest Sergio Brodsky. You are someone who has an interest in strategic foresight. You have studied the methods and believe they are vital for every organization to use. But you also believe in strategy development. The difference? While the strategic development process is one that often aims to take a client to a specific destination, thereby maximizing existing resources, strategic foresight is different. How? You believe it anticipates multiple futures, risks and opportunities, thereby providing an abundance of resources can be used to prepare for the unforeseeable. However, you have stumbled in attempts to convince others. They don’t seem to get it. But you must get the point across to leaders in your company or your clients if you hope to have the impact you desire.

Welcome to the Long-Term Strategic Planning Conference 2024 with my guest Mithun Sridharan. Your enterprise has been successful but it needs a long-term transformation. This is no easy task, but you want everything to happen in concert - the bottom-line results, customer satisfaction, the culture… they all need to happen at the same time. How can you achieve these results?

Welcome to the Long-Term Strategic Planning Conference 2024 with my guest JT Mudge. Your organization has made it to this point by sticking to a success formula. It’s been effective, maybe profitable, but now things are changing quickly. In fact, you see challenges which can’t be solved without some fundamental changes. However, your colleagues (or clients) are quite reluctant to change their usual approach. After all, there is no strong evidence that it’s failing…not yet! How do you proceed?

Welcome to the Long-Term Strategic Planning Conference 2024 with my guest Timothy Jaiyeoba. Your company is stuck in a rut. It’s old way of thinking has begun to fail to produce the results it’s always enjoyed. You need to shake things up and get the senior management team and the board to reconsider the limits of its own thinking. You believe that scenario planning may help to shake things up. But will it force them to see a different world that unlocks fresh commitments?

Welcome to the Long-Term Strategic Planning Conference 2024 with my guest David Booth. The past four years have convinced many people that the ‘traditional’ approach to strategic planning is no longer fit for purpose. What’s the point of investing all that time into an intensive project taking several months and involving so much management effort to produce and document a strategic plan that is highly likely to be overtaken by events that no-one could foresee? How do you contemplate the future when it’s so uncertain? How do you develop a more dynamic, ongoing approach to strategy? How can you make your organisation agile and adaptable to be able to meet whatever challenges and opportunities come along?

Welcome to the Long-Term Strategic Planning Conference 2024 with my guest Bill McClain. You are at the start of a strategic planning retreat. As it progresses, you realize that the attendees are looking backwards, not forwards. The problem is clear - but how do you tackle it effectively? You can’t just order them to think differently.

Welcome to the Long-Term Strategic Planning Conference 2024 with my guest Barry Eustance. You want to introduce a game-changing strategy to your company, but the fact that it’s not an easy, quick fix is a problem. Some executives are stuck in the past, defending “the way we do things around here.” You need to get past them, but what steps can you take?

You are someone who believes in the power of long-term thinking. As such, you welcome the idea of long-term strategic planning. However, while a vast majority of executives agree, a meager number actually have written plans which stretch more than five years. Why the discrepancy? Many are just too busy. Others believe they are alone and therefore can't convince their board, colleagues, or staff to begin. Some perceive the effort would take too long, and cost too much.

You are no stranger to the idea of Big Hairy Audacious Goals (BHAGs), an idea that's been around for more than 30 years. In fact, your leadership team sometimes uses the term. However, this hasn't translated into a written set of long-term measurable targets spanning more than a half-decade. Even though each individual in the C-Suite, board and management team knows they can work, there are doubts. Even if the team could find the time to create them (which it can't), they have seen brash promises made in the past. After all, anyone can make them. But maybe there is a problem with the way BHAGs are made that the inventors of the term never anticipated. Or maybe their research missed a few beats.

Your organization has set some lofty goals. They are truly aspirational - long-term in nature, and impossible to achieve via business-as-usual operations. But you see a yawning gap between the actions needed to accomplish a lofty vision and current efforts. It's as if a silent "Build It and They Will Come" attitude has taken hold, fostering a belief that ordinary, status-quo activity will somehow produce transformed results. Some think it's because people aren't inspired. You may agree, but you think it runs deeper than a matter of excitement and emotions. Your suspicion? Staff and Board aren't taking extraordinary measures because there is no credible, long-term strategic plan connecting the same lofty goals with daily activities. Without that vital link, how can anyone truly believe those bold visions will be realized?