Planning is needed precisely because the future is uncertain. Organizations usually have enough information to make reasonable plans about important coming changes in markets and technologies. Thinking with your team about the future helps you prepare for and find opportunities in change and build an organization that can survive and even thrive when the unexpected happens, not simply react to events or, worse, fail to act at all.
“It may be hard to predict the timing of the future, but we can see trends,” Coffey says. “A lot of people predicted that online sales were important; COVID-19 just threw us seven to 10 years forward.”