"The adventure may be crazy, but the adventurer must be sane" (GK Chesterton in "The man who was Thursday").
One of the topics of debate that are being discussed in different international forums on business strategy, as reflected in the article written by Michael C. Mankins and Richard Steele for the Harvard Business Review, entitled “Stop making plans, start making decisions ”Is the role that strategic planning has to play in the operation of the current company.
Although we all know the saying that says “Plans are made not to be fulfilled”, the purpose of this article is not to contribute to the demystification of strategic planning, but quite the opposite, to show strategic planning, not as a set of Actions to be carried out by the executive in an unavoidable manner, but rather as a coherent scheme of action that must allow the employer to define and achieve reasonable objectives for his company, safeguarding it, as far as possible, from the instabilities of the business environment.
The evolution of the business model of productivity to that of competitiveness, and the evolution of "management" towards management by processes, where the objective is to optimize each process of the activity to satisfy the company in a higher overall performance, makes it seem that the Strategic Plan, as it is structured in many cases, is inefficient to provide an adequate response to the temporary needs of management.
However, modifying the structure of the Strategic Plan does not represent a solution to the problem before us, but rather, a useless effort, since, as we said before, the mission of the Strategic Plan must be to formalize a coherent scheme of action, in which executives can have sufficient decision-making freedom to guarantee the proper functioning of the company.
And it is at this point where the controversy arises, since on the one hand we speak of freedom of decision-making and, on the other, of the need to have a Strategic Plan that should govern the actions of the company.
The Strategic Plan is a living and changing document, because the taking of certain decisions causes the circumstances on which the initial plan was written to change it towards another approach, which we can call the current strategic plan, which may or may not resemble the approach initial.
If we find ourselves in a situation in which the strategic objectives of the company have changed significantly, it will be clear that we are managing by criteria of opportunity, which may mean that we have not anticipated in the initial Strategic Plan a conjunctural situation that could have been exceptional, or simply that the strategic reflection developed by the company was either not correct or has been rejected or not taken into consideration by the organization.
If the approach has simply changed the company's action plan, but has respected its strategic objectives, we can say that the decision-making has been consistent with the strategic planning.
Logically, if the company at a certain moment has made the effort to plan its future to achieve specific objectives, a priori it is more interesting that it has managed to stay on the path to achieve them, by making the right decisions to do so.
And that is where the strength of the Strategic Plan lies, in setting the importance of the decision criteria, which in turn is one of the priority aspects indicated by the different multi-criteria techniques for decision-making.
When handling decision criteria that conflict with each other, by definition, an increase in the satisfaction of one may imply a decrease in the satisfaction of the other (s), and in many cases it is the responsibility of the executive to decide on the importance of some or others, when these criteria can really be defined, if not in their entirety, if in general terms, within the framework of the Strategic Plan, in such a way that regardless of the decisions that have to be made, we can guarantee their orientation towards the achievement of the strategic objectives of the company.
Thus, decisions on which it is necessary to weigh the values of the organization or the policies of price, distribution, etc… must have their support in the Strategic Plan, which must form one of the pillars of the organization's management.
Obviously, as we say, it will not be easy in all cases to set the business performance criteria from the framework of strategic planning and, of course, it is not a matter of facilitating decision-making by setting action criteria that later do not lead to decision-making. of the best decisions.
We must be aware that there will be alternatives that are incomparable to each other and others that are indifferent or equivalent for making a certain decision, but it is clear that the inclusion of decision criteria in planning will allow combining the efforts of the same with those of management.
In this way, although we can consider that the structure of the Strategic Plan may be adequate, we can also consider that its content should be more focused on being a tool that facilitates decision-making, than on being a document that delves into planning plans. long-term action, highly susceptible to modification.
