What Does It Mean to Be an Explorer?
Each quarter, I am privileged to participate in a number of interviews with public and private company directors, CEOs, CHROs and global heads of talent. In the final months of 2020, those interviews revealed that the most pressing discussions within most companies centered upon how to plan for and incentivize 2021. What data, what signs and auguries from 2020 or 2019, best pointed to the right set of targets and performance metrics for the coming year?
In speaking with leaders who were furthest along in rethinking their planning processes, the recurring theme was one of preparing for multiple options rather than forcing a more traditional, detailed and single-minded focus on predicting how their strategy and its execution would play out over the next 18-24 months. These leaders spoke of building resiliency into their planning and of readying the workforce for fast pivots.
Yet, for most organizations, that is easier to say than to do. As Mike Cordano, then-President of Western Digital wrote in these pages in the Summer 2020 issue of
People + Strategy, “For decades, organizations have incentivized efficiency over resiliency. Resiliency costs money.” Breaking habits is hard, even when the upheavals of the past 12 months have reminded us of the limitations and risks of our traditional planning tools.
In this issue, guest editors Shawn Layden and Jeanette Gorgas bring their backgrounds and their networks as senior-level strategists, leaders and, in Gorgas’s case, as Chief Strategy Officer and Chief HR Officer, to this discussion. The resulting set of conversations considers how a variety of leaders, thinkers and industry-disruptors have adapted. What does more fluid strategy-creation look like? How does distributed decision-making work in real time? How have companies succeeded or struggled with building trust on the fly?
Contributors from private equity, public company boards and C-suites, from HR, IT and academia, examine the limitations of “scientific management,” including how artificial intelligence and machine learning can be applied rather than misused to help leaders chart a path through the fog. They consider what experimentation looks like in organizations where profitability and expense management are still very present realities. You’ll read how scenario planning has taken on a greater role in strategy formation, and how preparedness and responsiveness drives both strategy inputs and rapid decision-making deeper into organizations’ front lines—even when those front lines are employees’ kitchen tables.
Planning in the fog, navigating a future one simply cannot predict, is messy. It’s relationship dependent. It’s prone to missteps and misdirection. But it’s also wildly exciting. As Layden put it in an early discussion, “If the old means of planning, predicting and executing called for military precision and bureaucratic process, this new world calls for explorers comfortable with half-drawn maps.”
In that spirit, we hope you will find this group of guides and guideposts useful to your own explorations.
David Reimer
Executive Editor