The Denial of Uncertainty

Probably the biggest challenge to good strategic planning is those who are in denial of uncertainty. Regardless of what they may say, these people's actions indicate that they do not believe in uncertainty. They deal with the uncertainty and unpredictability of the future by creating concrete action plans, along with detailed task lists designed to achieve success. Their belief in the certainty of the future is reinforced by the coincidence that the future does, in fact, often behave like the past.

Where this belief falls apart is when the future is complex or long term horizons must be considered. In these circumstances, the risks of unpredictability become greater and more robust planning methodologies need to be employed in order to avoid surprises.

Scenario planning is one way of anticipating the future's surprises and developing a response for MANY possible future worlds instead of just one fixed view of the future. By anticipating many possible futures, we can understand commonalities between them, assess risks more realistically, and when liklihood and impact of a possible future is great, we can take actions to either mitigate or take advantage of that future state.

Those who are in denial of uncertainty are guilty of either oversimplifying the planning process, or of the false belief that when there is uncertainty, there is nothing we can do about it, so we may just as well ignore it. Good strategic planning always embraces uncertainty and builds plans that are robust enough to address multiple possible outcomes.

The Uncertainty Paradox

When we're talking about planning for the future, we are always dealing with uncertainty. We have positive uncertainty about opportunities as well as concerns about risks. There are several ways we can approach the challenges of uncertainty.

The first approach is usually to try to minimize uncertainty as much as possible. This involves research into trends, similar situations other industries have faced, learning more about competitive pressures, etc. But, because the variables are infinite and the future is unknowable, this method quickly becomes frustrating.

The second approach is to create the future.

"The future never just happened. It was created." Will and Ariel Durant, Civilization.

This is essentially the job of strategic planning where execution is integrated into the plan. The process of planning and executing means that we're not just trying to reduce uncertainty by understanding the vectors and trends of the current situation, but that we are intentionally trying to shape the future by our plans and actions.

The third approach is to reduce, rather than increase, the amount of information that we use to describe the future. This is the uncertainty paradox.

Think about the decision making process that the FBI and CIA used to determine whether there was a threat on 9/11. There was a ton of information that said something was going on, but, on the other hand, there is ALWAYS a ton of information. At any one time there are some 16,000 leads coming into the CIA which cannot possibly be followed-up on. The issue is not that there is not enough information, but rather that there is too much and that so much information presents itself as "noise" instead of coherence. The job of the CIA and the job for us as strategic planners is to develop "stories" and "scenarios" that pick out what is important and filter out the rest.

The process of storytelling is not just a matter of filtering the important from the unimportant. Most of the time we can't tell the difference, which would then make storytelling ineffective. Storytelling does several things for us. It forces us to spot trends and patterns. Stories are essentially ways of making sense out of the patterns we see in the information. Stories may be right or wrong and still be coherent and in agreement with the facts presented. By using scenario analysis we create several stories around similar themes and "test" them against each other and against the patterns and trends we have traced. By telling multiple stories about the "same" situation, we create a sort of "meta-pattern" that may reveal new perspectives by looking at how the disparate stories overlap in some ways and contradict each other in other ways.

The uncertainty paradox helps us to understand our real goals in strategic planning. It is not to predict the future with certainty. It is, rather, to understand the trends and to be able to create a story out of the information that presents us with opportunities. Our plans then contain the actions we need to take in order to actualize the opportunities that present themselves. We do this, not by finding MORE information in order to reduce uncertainty, but by organizing the existing information into scenarios/stories to make sense of things and to create a vision of future success.