Question

How can businesses better equip their executives with the skills needed for adaptive strategic planning?

Businesses can better equip their executives with the skills needed for adaptive strategic planning by encouraging them to accurately evaluate the predictability and malleability of their environment. This involves understanding that achieving goals often depends on factors beyond their control. Additionally, executives should be trained to build adaptive capabilities to address unpredictable environments. This could involve shifting their strategic planning approach from setting a goal and analyzing how to get there, to being more flexible and adaptable in their planning. They should also be encouraged to value the speed of decisions, especially in fast-paced environments.

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Misplaced confidence – in order to choose the right strategic style, one must first accurately evaluate the predictability and malleability of the environment. As a part of the study conducted under Reeves' leadership, executives' perceptions with objective measures of their actual environments were compared. A strong tendency to overestimate both factors was revealed as a result – over 80% of the executives said that "achieving goals depended on their own actions more than on things they could not control." Unexamined habits – although the majority of the executives surveyed agreed that building the adaptive capabilities required to address unpredictable environments was important, fewer than one in five felt sufficiently competent in them. Nearly 80% said that in practice they begin their strategic planning by articulating a goal and then analyzing how to get there. 70% said that they value accuracy over speed of decisions, even when they are well aware that their environment is fast...

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