Maintaining relevant strategies in an era of accelerated change
The approach to top-level strategic planning that most defense and intelligence organizations use today worked in the 1960s.
It was the industrial age. Data was far costlier and more difficult to collect, access, and analyze. By necessity, organizations assessed their environments less frequently. The pace of change was slower. Strategies enjoyed multiyear shelf lives.
In the digital age, all that’s changed.
“Keeping pace with the speed of war means changing the way we approach challenges, build strategy, make decisions, and develop leaders.”
“New technologies are fielded faster than ever before,” Gen. Joseph Dunford Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, observed in a recent issue of Joint Force Quarterly. “Tactics, techniques, and procedures are adapted from one deployment cycle to the next.. The speed of war has changed, and the nature of these changes makes the global security environment even more unpredictable, dangerous, and unforgiving.”
When disruptive change and unforeseeable global incidents are the norm, traditional strategic plans—typically updated only every 2 to 4 years—aren’t going to work.
Agencies saddled with long-term strategies that are unresponsive to real events tend to operate reactively, diminishing their ability to deliberately add value and maintain relevance in an unstable environment. This leaves them vulnerable.
With missions at stake, defense and intelligence organizations must adopt a new approach to planning and executing, one that’s compatible with a world that’s moved beyond the 1960s. In other words, they must develop a dynamic strategy and execution capability that enables them to rapidly set and achieve strategic goals as part of their day-to-day business routines.
Informed by decades of partnering with a wide range of defense and intelligence agencies, Booz Allen has settled on a proven method for doing just that.
Decoupled from static plans and reviewed on a frequent cadence appropriate to each particular organization, our dynamic strategy and execution capability is characterized by four mutually reinforcing elements.
Download the PDF to learn those four elements and how you can bring them to your organization with the help of our certified experts in strategy development, change management, Lean and Agile methodologies, and design thinking.
