For many years, a close friend and business advisor told me that I must have a strategic roadmap, a five to ten year plan, but I resisted. Like many leaders with an entrepreneurial bent, I enjoy the freedom of the open road. I am always looking for new opportunities. Once I understood all the planning that was involved in such a roadmap, I felt that the plans would only restrict me. I was wrong.
Here is why I resisted having a defined strategy. Imagine your business was to sell horses and carriages just before cars became popular. Your ten-year plan may have been to go from 100 horses to 1,000. Would your plan prevent you from completely shifting with the introduction of cars, to include major repurposing, downsizing, and diversifying? That’s what scared me about these types of plans, numbing our minds and relying too much on a plan, when survival is usually birthed from erasing, then redefining who we are, from doing complete overhauls of our business models.
When long-term planning prevents us from innovation and looking for existential risk, it becomes dangerous. However, when planning is mutually exclusive with being doggedly watchful and willing to change, we align ourselves with success. As good stewards, we must do both.
So then, what is a strategic roadmap? To put it simply, it is defining what you want to do in one, three, and five years (or longer), then aligning all your efforts, all your teams, all your departments, and all your infrastructures to support your top-level goals.
As a Christian leader, I believe this fits within our mandate to be good stewards of what God has entrusted to us. Along the way, be open and obedient to the voice of the Lord. If He wants you to change your plans, or even to scrap your plans altogether, then do it. Otherwise, build upon what you have, with His direction.
Bottom line: Make a plan, but don’t let it be your master. Expect to modify, change, or even redraw the whole plan if you have to along the way.
