An awkward silence falls over boardrooms when directors flip through a newly printed plan and instantly recognise it. To their frustration, almost nothing has changed since the last one done five years before. Despite clearly stated expectations, little has shifted. So what’s missing?
The reason the strategic logic remained unchanged (and your company didn’t move up the Businessuite Top 100 list) is usually blamed on the executive team. Not enough creativity. Not willing to challenge assumptions. Not able to rigorously examine calcified, stale doctrines.
Unfortunately, rotating C-Suiters doesn’t work. Neither does a demand for bolder thinking. Or outside experts who merely recycle known frameworks.
But before you intervene, consider the actual inputs which feed into the process. Your senior team reads the same Harvard Business Review articles as others in the region. They listen to the same lecturers explain the same frameworks. They follow the same big players.
And when they reach for inspiration, they draw from the same narrow pool as always. This is why regardless if you replace the entire C-Suite tomorrow, the next plan will look the same.
The condition is called “input homogeneity.” Same inputs = same outputs. Here is a way to intervene in even the most stubborn situations.
The Ghost Conversation
There is an element of the overall discussion which takes place in every company…but not in the formal process. Where does it happen? In the car park, over drinks, or in the hallway between sessions. The topic? A threat only addressed in quiet tones.
It never makes it onto a slide deck, but it keeps senior executives up at night due to its power and danger. The single-revenue dependency. The demographic shift. The regulatory change. The new technology tearing up the industry in Asia.
You know which conversation this is at your company. (And even if you belong to the public sector, you are well aware of defunded organisations which lost their way, only to be folded meekly into others.)
The reason these discussions remain informal is not cowardice.
Instead, the common three-to-five-year planning horizon is just short enough to filter out these questions. Why? Inside the usual retreat, everyone unconsciously assumes the current business model will survive… ”it only needs a few tweaks.” The industry structure is also accepted: it won’t change either.
Nobody has to challenge these assumptions because the truncated window makes them seem reasonable. Plus, your incentives reward confident planners, not the ones that point out uncomfortable vulnerabilities.
Consequently, the most strategically valuable conversation in the company remains permanently and repeatedly excluded from the corporate strategy.
Three Inputs That Change Everything
If the problem is structural, so is the fix. Forgo reshuffling the C-Suite, and craft three fresh inputs instead.
Stretch the horizon. In your next session, ask the team to select a new time frame between 15-30-years. Not to forecast, because no-one can predict that far. Consider this a stress test of your company’s “winning” formula, if it follows the current path.
The gap between the projected faraway future and your likely, default trajectory shows the reality you must confront. You will find that a longer window does not necessarily produce better predictions. But it will produce better (but uncomfortable) questions, the kind a five-year horizon conveniently avoids – but shouldn’t.
Contaminate the reference base. Stop benchmarking only your direct competitors. Introduce strategic patterns from industries and geographies your team has never studied. When a Caribbean financial services firm studies how a logistics company in Southeast Asia restructured its value chain, the specific details are irrelevant. But the unfamiliar pattern breaks the grooves worn by years of studying the usual suspects. (Recommendation: use my compilation of cases at StratCinema.org to be efficient.)
Formalise the ghost conversation. Create a structured session — early in the process, not as an afterthought — where you explicitly ask the team to name the slow-burning threats everyone discusses privately.
This is not just brainstorming.
It is a permission structure. Most executives will not raise existential concerns unless the architecture of the session boldly invites them to.
Picture the boardroom again. The directors open the new plan. They begin reading. And for the first time in a decade, no one recognises it. Not because it is reckless, but because it addresses questions, the previous plans were incapable of asking.
It names what everyone knew but nobody had been permitted to say aloud. The team sitting around the table is the same one that produced the last plan. But the talent didn’t change. The inputs did.
The CEO who engineers that moment won’t need to explain what strategic leadership looks like. The room will already know.
