By strategic vision, we mean the disciplined practice of monitoring change, exploring multiple plausible futures, and using these insights to make better decisions in the present.
Organizations that get their strategic vision right excel in two key areas. The first is the process, with leaders who allow teams to see the entire spectrum of uncertainties in both the immediate and long-term horizons. The second is mindset: strategic vision leaders go beyond risk management to seek future opportunities amid unpredictability and routinely turn to data with the help of a sophisticated set of forward-looking analysis tools.
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These strategic vision leaders, spread across different industries, revenue brackets and ownership models, not only report being more prepared.
Companies with more advanced strategic vision capabilities also report a significant advantage over the competition: moving from a standard to a more advanced level of strategic vision is associated with a 5% increase in financial performance.
The good news for latecomers? They can take concrete steps to avoid falling behind.
How leaders structure their strategic visioning capabilities
Leaders with strategic vision understand that they need a comprehensive perspective on uncertainty — this includes different types of unknown scenarios, but also the ability to consider both current and future challenges.
If we think of uncertainty as a matrix, we see that some unknowns are predictable and short-term, while others are unpredictable and long-term, and so on. Leaders with a strategic vision design their processes to cover the four quadrants.
Covering two types of unknown scenarios
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Some features of the future are reasonably predictable. For these standard unknowns, it is possible to form evidence-based expectations using historical data.
Most organizations stop there, trying to identify which future will come to fruition through trend reports, expert analysis and performance extrapolations.
Companies may still find an advantage in interpreting signals, but their competitors will increasingly have access to similar data, and predictive analytics is becoming more accessible to a larger portion of strategic teams.
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Strategic vision leaders add a second layer by considering disruptive unknowns. These are aspects of the future that, even with solid data, teams would have difficulty predicting — often, these elements are not only unpredictable, but difficult to even imagine.
Leaders with strategic vision build systems to identify, explore and prepare for what cannot be predicted. They treat the true unknowns as a design challenge, not an exercise in prediction.
Strategically minded leaders are almost twice as likely to report having a systematic forward-looking analysis process to deal with “unknown unknowns” compared to lagging companies.
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Spanning two time horizons
Leaders in strategic vision overcome short-term pressures by conducting prospective analysis at two parallel speeds: a context-sensitive vision for real-time decisions and a shaping vision for long-term bets.
Lagging companies tend to neglect the former, with only 30% reporting frequently updating their forward-looking analysis, compared to 60% of leaders.
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At the same time, strategic vision leaders report using forward-looking visions from multiple time horizons (e.g., short-term and long-term) in parallel more than twice as often as lagging companies.
While many teams are stuck constantly fighting crises, strategic vision leaders remain responsive to rapid change while building disciplined visions of the distant future to guide strategy.
For example: at present, real-time weak signal detection systems capture the first signs of market and competitor movements; For the future, scenario planning sets the testing ground for advantageous strategic decisions in any situation.
Changing the mindset of strategic vision
Most leadership teams engage in some form of scenario planning and trend monitoring, but these efforts rarely change decisions.
Moving from dispersed, low-impact activities to leadership in strategic vision requires two changes in mindset: focusing on future opportunities for potential appreciation, and not just avoiding future risks; and put data ahead of intuition, so that predictions are trusted and put into practice.
Opportunity orientation
Most organizations use strategic thinking primarily to reduce losses—developing alerts for known risks and monitoring familiar lists of threats. This is useful, but insufficient. It’s one thing to keep track of what has hurt your company before; another is to detect what is likely to be relevant in the future.
Leaders with a strategic vision reverse this logic. When asked about their strategic orientation, leaders are about 20% more likely to report using strategic vision to pursue opportunities for potential value, using forward-looking methods amid uncertainty and changing conditions (rather than a more typical focus on avoiding losses), compared to laggard companies.
Considering value potential requires not only a vision of relevant possible futures, but also a clear understanding of how the organization creates value.
Instead of directing strategic vision solely to detect the next catastrophe, leaders structure systems to detect signals and predict characteristics of plausible futures that they could take advantage of thanks to their differentiated capabilities.
This does not mean that leaders focus on opportunities at the expense of being prepared for negative scenarios; they do both.
Data-driven strategic vision
Most companies still face difficulties in making objective sets of data the basis of leadership decisions; instead, intuition and internal politics play an inordinate role.
Strategic vision leaders, however, are data-driven by default using a set of tools designed to help them identify the signals and future visions most relevant to their strategic process.
Modern statisticians, in contrast, construct predictions from base rates of success in similar organizations and in similar situations, rather than relying on the individual past performance of a single organization.
Strategic vision leaders, when asked about their forecasting processes, were twice as likely to report using this more advanced approach.
The result is a virtuous cycle: better predictions lead to more confidence, which leads to wider use, which leads to better data and, ultimately, better predictions.
Advancing towards leadership in strategic vision
A simple retrospective can reveal what separates your team from leadership in strategic vision.
Start with a single episode
Recall a recent change in your operating environment that your organization did not anticipate. Looking back, what signs could have preceded this change? What would you like to have monitored?
Maybe you already had all the data, but somehow it wasn’t translated into the right strategic decisions. What decisions do you wish your organization had made?
Learn from what went unnoticed
Repeated failures to detect future changes often point to gaps in the strategic vision. The strategic vision matrix defines four complementary lenses to see the future of your organization. Analyzing missed opportunities can help highlight quadrants that may need more systematic focus.
Assess organizational attitudes
Not all strategic vision failures arise from gaps in prospective processes. For the strategic vision to guide business strategy, the correct organizational attitudes need to be present.
Consider what you and the senior leaders around you focus attention on: Are you continually stuck in a cycle of short-term reaction to the perceived threat of the moment, or can you focus on seeking opportunities in the midst of uncertainty? Is intuition taking center stage over quantitative approaches?
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