How to Reimagine Strategy Planning to Embrace the Unpredictable
If the pandemic and the ensuing few years have taught us nothing else, it is the fact that we are in a world of terminal turmoil. Change comes fast and often. Black swans lurk around every corner. Yet many companies are still executing their strategic planning like it’s 1985. The new unpredictable normal calls for a different approach.
Historically, strategy creation was a long, linear process with a singular plan to win. This method worked well when product lifecycles were lengthy and technology-fueled disruptions were infrequent. The challenge with that now is that when conditions change—and they inevitably will—an organization wed to a singular plan is left paralyzed without an alternative. Or they overcompensate by trying many different things, reacting in the moment. On either extreme, a few things happen that rapidly derail growth and progress.
Some companies march toward their long-term plan ignoring signals that it’s time to shift—like lemmings off a cliff, they are unable to save themselves. Polaroid, Blockbuster, and Blackberry are unfortunate examples.
Then there are the companies that adopt a rapid reactive mode, trying to quickly pivot, without a future-focused view as their North Star. These organizations suffer from shiny ball syndrome, chasing something new with every market signal. They can’t gain any solid ground and they exhaust themselves in the process.
Walking the line requires “both/and” leadership: 3 ways to make it real
The middle and most optimal course is to hold on to the tension of creating energy and excitement in setting a compelling long-term vision while also working with all the teams to figure out how to realize that goal. The “how” is the hard task and will require leaders—and their teams—to do their best thinking and most challenging work.
Here is what to do differently to bring those two tensions together.
1. Deliberately broaden your approach and strategic aperture. When thinking through strategy, the best organizations look beyond the common or expected path, seeking not just to rely on a given Total Addressable Market or on packaged industry trends created by an in-house strategy team. To be sure, market size is important, but deliberately embracing strategy development in a different way can help teams break the common pattern of merely extrapolating current trends into the future. The best ideas and new perspectives truly come from everywhere, so engaging leaders (and the organization more broadly) to think bigger can help people break out of their current rivers of thinking, allowing them to view the business of today and the potential business of the future in fundamentally different ways.
2. Create discrete possibilities to focus thinking. With a wide runway for strategy creation, people (and leaders) can easily produce a list of strategic alternatives a mile long, to a point that they become quickly overwhelmed. This result is driven by the same logic that makes someone lose their way in the cereal aisle, paralyzed by having so many choices. After starting with a wide approach to explore strategic possibilities outside of a given industry or against known competitors, the best organizations then intentionally narrow the list to frame a few discrete and mutually exclusive options for the leadership team to consider. Evaluating a few potential options allows leaders to better access longer-term strategic thinking.
Take, for example, the experience of a fast-growing founder-led software company that had just gone public. Shortly after their IPO, the senior managers told Wall Street they would reach $1 billion in revenue in three years. Unfortunately, there was internal disagreement over which direction to take to achieve that target, creating unrest and confusion throughout the organization. We started by helping the senior managers gain clarity about which approaches to pursue and to define three mutually exclusive strategic plans. We then helped the executive team to better understand current state realities, to determine potential risks, and to solidify the ideal execution plan. We did that in part by leveraging the power of a quantitative model of their business to help them see the challenges and opportunities within each of the three strategic options.
1. Extend scenario planning beyond the C-suite. Stress-testing various scenarios and pre-planning responses is a well-honed tactic for traditional strategy development. Much of the power of scenario planning is that it creates space for debate and discussion, and for placing concerns on the table in a productive way. It also builds confidence and a sense of ownership in the planning group tied to the belief that their best thinking has been considered and applied. And it leads to more resilient and adaptive strategy execution. Rather than trying to cascade and communicate a linear plan throughout the company, the most adaptive organizations define the overall direction and use scenario planning to engage employees to work together on a solution. Here’s an example.
A company in a highly regulated industry was facing a slew of new carbon regulations being debated in the state legislature. Eager to prepare a response to whatever emerged from the legislature, the executive leadership team looked to their functional and business unit leaders for a deeper understanding of the technical and business implications of the full range of likely outcomes. We helped the functional leaders assess the potential regulatory paths, use scenario planning to explain the implications of each path for the company’s business, and scope out the likely responses of competitors to all of the possible changes. The cross-section of this data was then used to identify no-regret decisions that the company would make for each of the outcomes. The use of scenario planning allowed the functional leaders to suggest a menu of strategic options to the C-suite—and then provide the opportunity to continue down the various paths and “experience” the technical and business problems they would likely encounter. Overall, the approach exposed the functional leaders to the core strategic trade-offs of each decision and created a strong sense of ownership of the problem.
The fact is that while the world is no longer predictable, companies still approach developing their strategies as if markets are consistent and reliable. This is one of the 3 biggest reasons why companies fail to execute on great strategies (check out this white paper to find out more about the other two.) Actionable strategy is about engaging the organization in an integrated process of defining the future state, making that future believable and real to the touch, enabling people to change to make the organization ready for its changes, and creating the environment to assess and pivot along the way. Our work and research have shown that people can and will change—happily—and it’s our role as leaders to provide the conditions for their success. Start by embracing the unpredictable and make strategy development your organization’s super power. You’ll be well on your way to making your strategy actionable.
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Organizations have long wanted to scale coaching, but have been limited by cost and capacity. With AI, that's beginning to change as new platforms make coaching more accessible, flexible, and available on demand, extending support beyond a select group of leaders to entire populations.
For talent leaders, this shift creates both opportunity and complexity. With greater reach comes a new set of trade-offs: how to balance access with depth, flexibility with accountability, and efficiency with meaningful development.
The limits of unlimited (coaching).
Unlimited coaching sounds like the obvious answer. Remove the barriers, give everyone access, let people engage on their own terms. What's not to like?
In practice, quite a bit.
When coaching has no defined structure or cadence, engagement tends to become episodic - people show up when something feels urgent and step back when it doesn't. The coaching relationship never quite deepens. Conversations cover ground but don't build on it. And the development that was supposed to happen keeps getting pushed to the next session, and the next.
Three patterns emerge:
- Sporadic engagement over sustained development. Without a rhythm to anchor the work, coaching becomes reactive. Clients bring whatever is most pressing that week rather than working toward something larger. Progress happens in bursts, if at all.
- Insights that don't compound. Great coaching reveals patterns over time - things a client can't see in one session but can't unsee after several. Without continuity, and without a consistent coaching relationship to hold the thread, each conversation starts close to zero.
- Outcomes that are hard to measure. No milestones. No defined endpoint. No clear way for the organization, or the client, to know whether it's working. Activity fills the gap where impact should be.
The result is a model that's easy to scale and hard to defend. Which is exactly the problem talent leaders are navigating right now.
The relationship is the lever.
Decades of research into what makes coaching work keeps arriving at the same answer: it's the relationship. Not the platform, not the methodology. The relationship.
When a coach and client build trust over time, developing shared language, and returning to the same themes with increasing depth, something shifts. Conversations get more honest. Insights stick. The client starts doing the work between sessions, not just during them. That's when coaching becomes genuinely transformative, and it can't be rushed or replicated in a one-off session.
The ICF and EMCC are clear on this: continuity is what dives outcomes. The coaching engagements that produce lasting change are the ones where each session builds on the last, not the ones that simply offer more access.
Three principles make that possible: Consistency, Continuity, and Completion.
1. Consistency
The foundation everything else is built on.
The temptation when designing a coaching program is to treat flexibility as a feature - let people book when they want, swap coaches freely, engage on their own schedule. But frequent coach changes reset the clock. Every new coach has to earn trust, learn context, and find their footing with the client. That's time spent getting started, not getting somewhere.
A stable coaching relationship works differently:
- The coach starts to see around corners, uncovering patterns the client can't see on their own
- The client stops performing and starts being honest
- The relationship itself becomes a source of accountability, not just the sessions
Consistency doesn't constrain the work. It's what makes the deeper work possible.
2. Continuity
What turns a series of sessions into genuine development.
Without continuity, coaching tends to be additive at best- each session offers something useful, but nothing compounds. With it, the work builds on itself in ways that can't happen in isolated conversations.
What continuity makes possible:
- A limiting belief surfaced in session three becomes a thread that runs through the rest of the engagement
- A behavioral pattern the client couldn't see at the start becomes impossible to ignore by the end
- Space opens up for the harder work - the kind that requires sitting with discomfort across multiple sessions, not resolving it quickly and moving on
That slower, deeper work is where lasting change actually happens. It doesn't come from more sessions. It comes from the right sessions, in the right order, with the same person.
3. Completion
The most underrated principle of the three.
In a world of unlimited access, there's no finish line, and without one, it's surprisingly hard to know what you're working toward, or whether you've gotten there. A defined endpoint changes the entire shape of an engagement.
A clear endpoint creates urgency and focuses every session on what matters most.
- Shifts the question from "what should we talk about this week?" to "what do we need to accomplish before we're done?"
- Gives both coach and client a body of work to look back on, not just a log of conversations
For talent leaders, this is also what makes coaching legible as an investment. Sessions logged is an activity metric. A cohort of leaders who completed a structured engagement and can articulate what changed, that's a result.
Don't just scale it, design it (here’s how)
The opportunity in front of talent leaders right now is significant. The organizations that will get the most from this moment are the ones that treat coaching design as seriously as coaching delivery.
Practical design decisions:
- Define the arc before you launch: set the number of sessions, the cadence, and the goals upfront, not after people have already started booking
- Protect the coaching relationship: Make coach switching the exception, not the default, and design your program to discourage unnecessary re-matches
- Build in milestones: create structured check-ins at the midpoint and end of each engagement so progress is visible to both the coach and the organization
- Separate on-demand support from developmental coaching: Use AI-enabled tools for in-the-moment guidance, and reserve structured engagements for the deeper work
- Measure completion, not just activation: Track how many people finish an engagement, not just how many start one
Questions to pressure-test your design:
- Does every participant know what they're working toward before their first session?
- Can your coaches see enough context about a client's journey to pick up where they left off?
- Would you be able to show, at the end of a cohort, what changed, and for whom?
Access opened the door. Intention is what makes it worth walking through.
Three decisions that changed everything.
Two years ago, we made three deliberate decisions about how BTS would move with Applied AI.
We would become our own Customer Zero.
While others were building strategies, defining governance, and waiting for clarity, we made a different call: we decided not to wait. Not because the stakes were low, but because they were high. And because in a space evolving this quickly, clarity wouldn’t come from planning. It would come from movement.
So instead of starting with a roadmap, we started with three principles:
- No top-down mandate. The people closest to the work figure it out.
- IT must evolve from gatekeeper to enabler - leading AI trials and fast experimentation.
- Don’t wait for certainty.
We set the organization in motion, and once we did, things started to move quickly.
What if we started this company today?
Waiting for certainty is itself a choice, and it’s costing companies more than they realize.
We started where we knew the work best: our simulations. No perfect plan, just teams moving, trying, and iterating.
Simulations are core to who we are at BTS. Companies that simulate don’t just make better decisions; they execute faster and build more engaged cultures.
The team asked a simple question:
"What if we were to start our company today?”
That question started the flywheel.
They asked IT for a few licenses and started building - vibe-coding, writing agents, and testing tools - moving at a pace that would make any VC-backed start-up smile.
The messy middle.
At first, the team was underwhelmed.
The early reports were blunt:
“Not good with math.”
“Poor graph capabilities.”
The team wasn't discouraged. They kept tinkering - jumping between tools, staying on top of new releases, experimenting constantly.
This was a small team, across 24 countries, building off each other’s ideas. Laughing at crazy creations. Breaking things. Iterating in a sandbox alongside real clientwork.
Each cycle produced something:
- A sharper scenario
- A faster build
- A more powerful simulation
The flywheel was turning, and it was generating something real.
When the diamond appeared.
Then something shifted.
The team moved into client trials across five countries. They figured out ISO compliance and built the architecture to handle the complexity, the “spaghetti.”
And what emerged wasn’t incremental:
- What used to take weeks started happening in days.
- Limited creativity started to feel like unlimited innovation.
- Clients became self-serving.
- Agentic simulations were built directly into client systems for real-time updates and preparation.
This was our first AI diamond - a high-impact outcome created by many cycles of experimentation compounding into real value.
It only appeared because we kept the flywheel turning, each cycle increasing the odds that something would break through.
95% adoption in eight weeks.
Then it was time to take the AI diamond global.
BTS is decentralized and highly entrepreneurial. We operate across 24 countries and 38 offices, where local teams have real autonomy.
And historically? That’s meant a low appetite for adopting something built somewhere else and pushed from the center.
So we expected resistance.
Instead, something surprising happened.
In the first eight weeks, we saw 95% adoption across our global footprint.
It felt completely different from our own digital initiatives, ERP implementations, top-down rollouts of the past.
This moved on its own. Why?
We realized it didn’t start with a framework or a model, it started with a feeling.
The feeling of being at the leading edge of one’s craft and profession.
- Joy
- Excitement
- Pride
As we watched this play out across teams it stopped feeling like isolated wins.
There was a pattern to it. A repeatable, organic, innovation motion.
And the flywheel didn’t stop with simulations.
It spread across finance, sales enablement, legal, operations, and client delivery. Some cycles led to small improvements, and others revealed new diamonds.
Not becausewe planned for them, but because we built the conditions for people to find them.
The question I'd ask any CEO right now: Is your flywheel turning, or are you still waiting for the perfect plan?
In part 2, I’ll share the key success factors behind the breakthrough, and what we’re now seeing across more than 120 global clients.
La maggior parte delle riunioni di vendita non fallisce.
Semplicemente non porta a una decisione.
Ed è lì che si perde valore.
I clienti di oggi sono più informati, più selettivi e hanno meno tempo.
Non hanno bisogno di altre presentazioni di prodotto.
Hanno bisogno di conversazioni che li aiutino a stabilire le priorità, decidere e andare avanti.
Eppure, il 58% delle riunioni di vendita non riesce a creare valore reale.
Non perché i venditori manchino di capacità, ma perché le conversazioni non sono progettate per far avanzare le decisioni.
“I clienti non agiscono su ogni esigenza che riconoscono.
Agiscono quando qualcosa diventa una priorità.”
In questo breve executive brief scoprirai:
- Perché la maggior parte delle conversazioni informa… ma non porta all’azione
- Cosa spinge davvero i clienti a stabilire priorità e muoversi
- Come creare urgenza senza compromettere la fiducia
- Il passaggio dal presentare soluzioni al facilitare decisioni
- Cosa distingue le conversazioni che si bloccano da quelle che accelerano il progresso
Se i tuoi team stanno affrontando trattative bloccate, decisioni ritardate o un pipeline lento, questo brief ti aiuterà a capire il perché e cosa fare in modo diverso.
Scarica l’executive brief e scopri come progettare conversazioni che portano davvero a decisioni.