Can You Really Plan the Future of Your Business? | #209

Where do you see your business in five years?

God only knows.

We're taught that serious businesses have plans: annual plans, five-year plans, growth targets, forecasts, objectives, KPIs, exit strategies. And plenty of that planning is genuinely useful.

But there's an awkward problem. We don't know what's going to happen.

In this episode of Messy Business, I look at how we plan intelligently for a future we can't possibly predict, and why having a clear strategy isn't necessarily the same thing as having an immaculate plan.

I explore the comfort that planning gives us when business feels uncertain, why a plan might be better treated as a hypothesis than a prediction, and the difference between changing direction because you've learned something and simply chasing the next shiny thing. 

I also look at something I've increasingly come to value after 15 years in business: judgement. Some of the most important developments in my own business haven't come from executing a plan. They've come from noticing something: an opportunity, a change, work I particularly enjoyed, something that stopped working, or something I simply didn't want anymore. 

Because perhaps the point of strategy isn't correctly predicting where your business will be in five years.

Perhaps it's knowing enough about what matters that, when something you couldn't possibly have predicted happens, you can make a bloody good decision about what to do next. 

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