Balancing Short-Term and Long-Term Strategies with Strategic Foresight

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Strategic foresight should not be the sole basis for organizational strategies. Instead, organizations need to practice ambidexterity, which involves exploiting existing competencies while exploring new ones. Strategic foresight bridges the gap between short-term and long-term thinking by linking present actions with future goals. This approach enhances short-term performance and prepares the organization for future challenges, demonstrating that short-term and long-term strategies complement each other rather than contradict.

So much has been written about how to future-proof a strategy. But Peter Scoblic says that too many companies still rely on short-sighted strategies that don’t effectively plan for different potential future scenarios.

Scoblic is a co-founder and principal of the consultancy Event Horizon Strategies. In this episode, he explains how thoughtful and ongoing scenario-planning exercises can help organizations decide which investments will allow them to thrive — even in a crisis. He also shares how to balance short-term factors with longer term modeling and why it’s so important to ensure that your planning team is truly diverse. As he says, “This is a case where diversity absolutely matters, in all senses of the word, because what you want is to get people to think outside of the box. It’s very difficult to do that if you don’t recognize the box that you’re in.”

Key episode topics include: strategy, strategic planning, crisis management, scenario panning, modeling.

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