Manufacturing leaders prioritize precision, measuring everything to the nearest decimal. But when it comes to growth planning, they accept vague buzzwords that would never fly on the production floor.
This played out recently when executives at Thermal Co., a global manufacturer of heat-transfer systems, filed out of the conference room, congratulating themselves on another successful meeting. As they left, the CEO shook his head and sighed. The team had just burned two hours debating investment priorities, and while they all agreed on the need to “be bold” and “transform for the future,” they were unable to decide on where to invest.
Over the past five years, Thermal Co. had doubled its business and had ambitious plans to quadruple it in the next 10 years. However, as those hours of debate revealed, their leaders couldn't agree on investment priorities. Half of the team wanted to double down on proven capabilities, a quarter pushed for adjacent market expansion and the rest advocated for entirely new business models.
Same buzzwords, different priorities, no actions.
I've seen this dynamic play out hundreds of times. The bigger the recent success, the harder it is to move past the buzzwords to achieve alignment and take action toward a shared future.
And it all starts when leaders use the same words while meaning completely different things.
The dangerous illusion of consensus
This isn’t just about words. There is a real cost to misalignment. For most manufacturers, the cost is the difference between market leadership and slow, creeping market irrelevance. For Thermal Co., the cost was $1.4 billion—the difference between its historical 6% growth and its aspirational 11% growth in core markets and entry into three new ones.
With this billion-dollar bogey clear in his mind, Thermal Co.’s CEO could no longer ignore the dangerous divide between the leadership team’s words and their willingness to act.
Working together with the CEO and head of strategy, we tried a new approach. Using Strategic Foresight, a process pioneered by the U.S. military and proven by Shell, we designed an activity to explore multiple “bold” futures, anticipate opportunities and risks and establish a specific and shared understanding to enable informed decisions that lay the foundation for long-term success.
While the process of scenario-planning has traditionally taken months to complete, with clear planning and strong motivation (like a $1.4B growth gap), it can now be completed in days.
Here’s how we did it:
1. Define your specific strategic question with the same precision and rigor you use to set specs. We didn’t ask, "How should we boldly transform for the future?" but rather "What bold decisions must we make to generate $1.4B in net new revenue in the next 10 years?" To encourage specific answers and minimize the time required for prework, leaders answered this question by writing “Postcards from the Future”—short notes from their 2035 selves outlining the three decisions that helped Thermal Co. achieve its $1.4B goals.
2. Build multiple futures, then map business implications. Prior to the one-day leadership working session, we developed four scenarios describing the world in 2035, ranging from industry consolidation, rapid technology obsolescence and a radically transformed workforce. Leaders divided into groups, spent 30 minutes describing Thermal Co. within the context of a given scenario, and one hour outlining the decisions required to move from the Thermal Co. of today to the future company they described. Within 90 minutes, executives who had been talking past each other for months were debating specific investment tradeoffs.
3. Connect scenarios to immediate decisions. We then looked across all four scenarios to identify common investments, warning signs and accelerants of change. Focusing on elements common to three or four scenarios, we then identified how these would influence the company’s three-to-five-year strategic plan. More important, decisions that had been stalled for six months were incorporated into Thermal Co’s annual operating plan with clear go/no-go criteria.
At the end of the day-long working session, the visibly relieved CEO remarked that, "For the first time in years, we're having honest conversations about where to place our bets and acting on what we say."
Strategic foresight works
Strategic Foresight succeeds where traditional planning fails because it forces leaders to abandon aspirational language for operational specifics. When you're planning for multiple futures, you cannot hide behind buzzwords. You have to get specific about markets, capabilities, and investments.
The process reveals hidden assumptions about customers, competitors and capabilities that teams did not realize they disagreed about. Most important, it links long-term vision directly to this year's budget decisions.
Want to test this in your next leadership meeting? Pick one 'strategic priority' your team keeps discussing. Give everyone five minutes to write down what success looks like in operational terms and three specific actions to achieve it.
Don't discuss it beforehand. Just collect the papers and read them aloud.
If you get different answers (and you will), congratulations! You've just identified why your growth is stalled. The good news is that now you know exactly what to fix.