consultant with a background in quality. His title is Knowledge Architect.
He’s been guiding companies for a long time. We were talking about finding
your niche and he had the following advice. He suggested the easiest way to
find your niche was to grow into it. That if you took on all manner of
tasks that were in your range of skills, you would eventually be drawn into
a specialty. It puts the marketplace in the loop for helping you decide on
one. I thought about this and it seemed like a good idea.
He emailed me this weekend with an article he wrote on the topic of planning and being flexible. I think that this speaks well about the need to chart a direction for your quest but still watch the situation to see if you need to adjust your direction for an opportunity. We should always be ready to accept a better option if the universe choses to provide it. Here’s the article.
A Dual Strategy Doubles the Chances of Success
Strategic planning is the process of reviewing where one is, identifying where one wants
to go, and developing plans to get from the current to the future state. Hopefully most
business professionals and organizations know and do this.
However, there’s another aspect of strategy, emergent planning, that needs to be
leveraged. Emergent planning is paying attention to what the market is telling you,
regardless of whether it supports or is different from your strategic plan.
Why is both strategic and emergent planning necessary or useful? Because strategic
planning gives us a vision and roadmap … a way to guide our day-to-day behavior
towards the future. However, emergent planning is the process of recognizing that our
business world (and the society within which we live our personal life) is a complex
adaptive system.
Here’s an example. As a consultant I develop an annual strategic plan, identifying which
products/services I would like to provide to which market niches, and lay out activities to
develop, market and deliver according to these plans. However, often the marketplace
has come to me and asked me for something I hadn’t planned to offer. In nearly every
case this new opportunity has turned out to create a dramatic growth in my business.
You might wonder, then, why bother with strategic planning. Why not just wait till you
get one of those emergent gifts? One obvious reason is that you never know whether or
when they’ll come along. For another, because the strategic planning process helps you
identify/clarify your core competencies, and when an emergent opportunity arises, it’s
much easier to know whether or not you should consider it.
In effect, it’s all about being clear about what you want, but being flexible for what the
universe brings you. Who knows, it may be much more than what you expected!
© 2007 Duke Okes
