HBR Guide to Setting Your Strategy

CHAPTER 11

How to Do Strategic Planning Like a Futurist

by Amy Webb

I recently helped a large industrial manufacturing company with its strategic planning process. With so much uncertainty surrounding autonomous vehicles, 5G, robotics, global trade, and the oil markets, the company’s senior leaders needed a set of guiding objectives and strategies linking the company’s future to the present day. Before our work began in earnest, executives had already decided on a title for the initiative: Strategy 2030.

I was curious to know why they chose that specific year—2030—to benchmark the work. After all, the forces affecting the company were all on different timelines: Changes in global trade were immediate concerns, while the field of robotics will ...