Ideas from the Association for Strategic Planning Annual Conference

Any reason to get out of Washington’s recent slush-and-ice storms would have been a good one — but I
got to head for sunny Southern California for a great reason. February 27 was the annual meeting of the Association for Strategic Planning, a group dedicated to strategic management, vision, and leadership in general.

I have only one complaint: I didn’t get to spend enough time with everybody. What a fascinating group of people.

Here are some of the many ideas floating around in the conference, in no particular order:

• As much as people talk about strategic planning, they don’t always actually plan. (See Tanaia Parker and enterprise architecture for more)

• Having a decisive, aggressive strategy can lead to fantastic success, and also, total annihilation. (See Michael Raynor’s interesting new book The Strategy Paradox)

• TRIZ, a Russian methdology to solve engineering problems, can be applied quite cleverly to solving strategic issues — people love to take nebulous questions of strategy and use a rigorous methodology to understand them.

• People love getting together to discuss strategy with other professionals – there aren’t as many forums for this kind of thing as you’d think.

• Lucky for me, people still want to talk about THE FUTURE.

Now, time for our next stop on the Future Inc. tour…

-Garland