Brooke Struck, the CEO of Converge, contributed to this story.
In today’s volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) world, many worry that by the time a strategy is built, the world will have already moved on and the strategy itself will be outdated before it’s even launched. Many articles explore the idea that the pace of change has outpaced the discipline of strategy—though (spoiler alert) they always circle back around to reaffirm the necessity of strategy.
Back in 2011, I wrote my most popular blog post for Forbes, Porter or Mintzberg: Whose View of Strategy Is the Most Relevant Today?, it has got almost 90,000 views. And how the world moved on since then! Though both are now seniors, their ideas continue to be relevant.
But how to do strategy in a VUCA world is a central concern for us today. We find that many of these articles often overlook the real question—not whether strategy is relevant, but how strategy-crafting must evolve to foster agility and clarity amidst the chaos.
Strategy: Fostering Clarity and Alignment in the Face of Change
At its core, strategy is about enabling change and creating your future value.
If your organization is standing still, you don’t need a strategy, you need a work plan and a budget. But if you’re navigating dynamic shifts—whether internal, market-driven, or due to broader societal pressures such as climate change and ethical concerns about AI—then standing pat with the status quo becomes less and less viable. In this context, you need a wide-angle lens rather than a telescope. A friend at BCG, Alan Iny, calls this An Uncertainty Advantage, and he argues that it is the ability to prosper by being better prepared than the competition for whatever the future holds.
But change can take all kinds of different paths, and the kind of change that positions you to create great value in the future is a change that is coherent across the organization. Strategy as a conceptual framework is what helps to clarify the choices about whom we will serve and how we will create value for them.
Strategy as a process fosters alignment between the participants, guiding individuals and teams in the organization to act coherently toward a shared goal. It’s what enables your people to be autonomous yet coordinated.
Without this clarity, even the most well-intentioned teams can end up pulling in different directions, creating friction instead of synergy. Strategy is the beacon that ensures every team member knows what to focus on, how to add value, and how their actions contribute to the larger mission. In a VUCA world, where the price of standing still is steep, alignment is not just a nice-to-have; it’s critical to continued success.
Agility Through Collective Clarity
What’s described above represents a subtle but important shift: the outcome of strategy is now as much about conveying “What we have chosen to do,” as it is about “How we will make choices.”
The latter is key for agility, because what we choose stands still even as the ecosystem around us evolves, but how we choose can empower new choices to emerge through time—from many decision-makers throughout an organization.
Strategy can indeed be ineffective if the process is lengthy and the outcome is a static set of (already potentially obsolete) choices. But the opposite is also true: an effective strategy process can actually enhance agility.
When a strategy is built around clarity and alignment, it equips teams to respond more fluidly to new developments. Leaders and employees alike understand the underlying rationale behind decisions, so when circumstances shift, they can pivot together without losing coherence. They also have a shared language for communicating those decisions, updating their shared direction, and maintaining accountability.
From Educated Guesses to Guesses for Learning
Let’s look at one example together: forecasting.
Forecasting has long been a cornerstone of strategy, helping organizations project market trends and financial outcomes. But in a VUCA world, of course, our confidence goes way down in the likelihood of a long-term forecast turning out to be right.
Does that mean that forecasting is no longer valuable? Far from it.
In a VUCA world, forecasting’s value has simply shifted. It’s no longer about trying to predict the future with precision and accuracy; instead, the process of generating forecasts is about making assumptions explicit, so that your team can learn and adapt more rapidly when the world around you shifts—whether in the ways that you anticipated or in completely different ways.
When you work through different strategic scenarios together—such as preparing for potential disruptions in your supply chain or responding to emerging technologies—you may not predict exactly what will happen. But the act of strategizing as a team builds the collective reflexes needed to react effectively when new situations arise.
Even if you completely throw out the playbook you prepared ahead of time, the fact that you’ve built a playbook in the first place prepares you to respond more effectively to an emerging change. Often, our corporate strategy only performs well in an expected future; scenarios can help develop a more resilient strategy that can respond to the changes that creep up on us. In a world of more futures not being what we expected, this becomes even more important.
By engaging the leadership team in forecasting exercises that build scenarios—whether for market shifts or operational disruptions—you build a shared understanding of each other’s perspectives and decision-making processes. This fosters a deeper level of trust and alignment, which ultimately leads to faster and more coherent action when change occurs.
With President-elect Trump, we see a particularly compelling example of the need for building scenarios. Given that he has strong positions in the Senate and the House, his economic policies appear reasonably certain of going forward. Many businesses in the U.S.—and perhaps even more here in Canada (where both authors of this article are based), in Europe and indeed around the world—should be analyzing a range of possible futures.
This should be refracted through the lens of the context of your business in particular: your specific context, your history, and your set of competitive strengths.
As you assess this range of scenarios as a group, you’ll build the muscles of a strategic culture within your team. And keep your eyes open for a specific pattern: choices that are good moves across a wide range of scenarios. These discoveries are pure gold.
Practical Steps to Evolve Your Strategy Process
Coming back to strategy as a whole (beyond forecasting): the way we do strategy has a history.
How to build corporate strategy nowadays was developed under specific circumstances and as a response to specific challenges, and it has evolved as those circumstances and needs have changed. The VUCA circumstances represent an emerging set of challenges, and are accordingly forcing us to rethink some of the practice of strategizing, evolving the practice to keep up with evolving needs. (And it’s not like there was ever a moment when we pivoted from pre-VUCA to VUCA; all of these exist along a spectrum.)
So what are some of the ways that strategizing can evolve, to keep up with an increased pace of change? Strategy needs to be more deeply embedded into daily practice inside the organization (rather than being a punctual exercise), and it needs to figure in the work of more people inside the organization (rather than being the strict purview of those at the very top of a pyramid). Here’s what that might look like in practice, to keep your organization aligned and nimble:
● Clarify the rationale: Legacy strategy processes communicate only the final choice that was reached, whereas modern processes emphasize the rationale for the choice, as a means to help others emulate the logic in their specific contexts, to create coherence across the organization.
● Shine a light on assumptions: Legacy strategy processes presented the final choice as “beyond reproach.” Hence, the 100-slide decks, fully armored up, ready to ride off to battle against any naysayer. Modern strategy acknowledges uncertainty and makes explicit the conditions under which it would need to be revisited. This empowers everyone involved to monitor the situation for early signals of risk & opportunity.
● Broaden who is involved: Legacy strategy processes reduced the number of people involved, fearing “death by committee.” Modern strategy processes engage the organization more widely, acknowledging that an effectively run team should (given the additional insight & creativity of the larger and more diverse group) be able to reach a better outcome than any of its individual members. Additionally, the deep context that people get through that engagement helps them to make better choices in their daily work AND to monitor for signals of risk.
● Calibrate towards action: Legacy strategy includes a number of steps and processes, the function of which has become subsumed by the process itself. Modern strategy clearly identifies the actions and decisions that each piece of the process is supposed to inform, which enables participants to be more intentional about how & when they engage—for the process to evolve as needs evolve, and for extraneous steps to be trimmed when there ceases to be value in taking them.
These steps position a modern strategy process as a key driver of making teams more nimble and responsive, more engaged and empowered, and more action-oriented. This leads to more coherent, responsive actions from the group as a whole—and ultimately to creating more value in a VUCA world.