Recent times have shown that there have been many moments and situations of uncertainty that have impacted businesses globally. Businesses that struggled to plan for uncertainty and struggled to adapt to changing circumstances were worse affected by the changes in the business landscape, but businesses that strategically planned for uncertainty were able to adapt and to continue to be successful. The ability to plan for uncertain events is at the forefront of many businesses’ strategies, and in this article we will explain why strategic planning is an essential skill for every business leader to master.
Being an effective business leader requires you to be able to adapt your planning methods to suit the situation. Traditional strategic planning methods requires a logical and binary view on a situation. It requires predictable outcomes to be able to form strategic plans around them. This form of strategic planning is ineffective when there are no predictable outcomes to plan for. Due to this, when a business faces uncertainty, traditional strategic planning methods won’t work. In these situations, business leader need to adopt more agile, instinctive form of strategic planning. They need to be able to trust their intuition and their instincts and to be able to quickly adapt strategic plans to suit changing situations.
Strategic planning is essential due to the unpredictable nature of running a business, however taking into consideration unpredictable scenarios is not often considered when making business plans. When making plans for the future within business, we often do so assuming the business climate will remain unchanged. However, in order to be successful in a changing business landscape, more businesses now are more frequently planning for unpredictable outcomes. They are adding more contingencies into their business plans, and they are allowing more flexibility and agility in their strategic planning. Traditional strategic planning methods are often too rigid, and they ignore the possibility of circumstances changing.
As a business leader, it is important to be able to identify prospective changes to the marketplace, and to know what changes are valuable enough in order to adapt the business to capitalise on the change, or when the market change is not valuable enough to adapt the business, and it is more worthwhile to continue operating as normal. By being able to identify valuable market changes and to be able to quickly adapt the business to incorporate these changes in the market you can put your business at a considerable advantage by adopting an early market change and successfully capitalising from it early on.
Our Strategic Decision Making for Leaders - CMI Level 7 programme focuses on teaching delegates everything they need to know to be able to make effective strategic decisions, and it also gives them the skills to be able to adapt to changes within the marketplace to be able to maximise the success of their business. Effective strategic decision making is an essential skill that business leaders need to hold in order to ensure the success of the workplace.
At In Professional Development, strategic decision making is a skill within the workplace that we also cover on many of our other professional training courses. To find out more about our courses, visit our Courses page, and click on the relevant course. Alternatively, or if you’d like more information before booking, email us at enquiries@inpd.co.uk, send us a message using the form on our Contact page, or call us on 0161 826 3139. We look forward to hearing from you and advising you on the right course for you.