Blockbuster, Kodak, HMV. Shorthand for corporate blindness, giants who failed to see the shift coming. Except that isn't what happened. Kodak had a digital camera in 1975. All three saw it coming - what killed them was pace, not foresight, as the gap between the world and the plan quietly widened for years.
That's the risk boards should be watching for now: not the sudden shock, but the quiet liability of a strategy slowly drifting out of step with the world.
Also in this issue
Risk usually arrives last: a heatmap bolted onto a plan that's already been signed off. Scenario analysis, pre-mortems and the Rumsfeld Matrix build risk in from the start instead, giving Boards the foresight to run towards uncertainty rather than away from it.
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Scenario planning to explore 27 possible futures shaped by society, AI, and external shocks. A practical tool for leadership teams to build strategic foresight.
Read →Tool of the month
Perigon's free Strategy Score diagnostic tests whether your business has the resilience to navigate what's coming next. Uncertainties dominate decision-making. Pressures undermine execution confidence. Progress feels hard won. Fifteen questions, five minutes, instant results. Find out where your strategy actually stands.
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Further reading
Question for the boardroom
A good strategy conversation doesn't start with a slide deck but with the questions the boardroom is willing to ask. Here's one to help your Board and ExCo reflect on the current strategy process and start to exercise new strategic muscles.
It's 2035 and [your business] has just entered administration. What was the cause of death?
Field Notes
Some years ago, working in the strategy team for a global bank in the aftermath of the financial crisis, I attended an offsite for the top hundred leaders, convened to align on strategy, set priorities and rebuild some sense of shared direction after a bruising period. The Chief Risk Officer ran a session built around a technique I hadn't come across before: a pre-mortem. He split the room into groups and asked each to imagine that the bank had failed within five years, then work backwards to identify what had killed it.
Given where the business had just come from, the exercise was laden with a heavy irony that wasn't lost on the room. But it was also one of the most valuable ninety minutes I've sat through in a strategy career - it gave people who had endured and just about survived a long period of intense retrospection and examination the chance to practise foresight instead. And I have no doubt that it improved the resilience of that business.
It's a technique I've returned to many times since. And it's hard not to reflect, even now, that a bank which had run that exercise a few years earlier might have had a rather different crisis to manage.
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