Got faith? Like MLK?

Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.  ~Martin Luther King, Jr.

Martin Luther King, Jr. is certainly a leader who practiced what he preached.  I'm assuming that as he embarked on his journey to seek change in our nation, he couldn't see the whole staircase, but with faith, he took the first step (and then some!).

Lately I've been contemplating how we go about strategy and planning in organizations (and maybe in life).  Because so much data is now readily available, are we relying on that data too much?  Are we assuming a much longer shelf-life for that data than what now exists in our very dynamic world?  Do we need to go about our strategy and planning with a little more faith?

Here are a couple of examples of what I mean.

It's becoming a holiday tradition for me to watch the Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan movie, You've Got Mail, which was released in December 1998.  I watch it because it's a holiday movie I enjoy, but it's also become a very stark reminder of how quickly, and dramatically, things change.  Two key trending businesses were highlighted in the movie: AOL and big box bookstores like Borders and Barnes & Noble.  A few short years later that landscape was radically altered in a flurry of change.

Amazon Kindle was released in 2007.  July 2010 Amazon reported that they sold more e-books than hardcover books in the first quarter.  January 2011 Amazon sold more e-books than paperbacks.  February 2011 statistics showed e-book sales had grown by 202.3 percent compared to a year earlier.  February 2011 Borders filed for bankruptcy.  At the end of the first quarter of 2012, e-book sales in the U.S. surpassed hardcover book sales for the first time.    

Even this past December, UPS misjudged holiday demand, significantly.  I'm guessing (couldn't find actual confirmation) that they projected demand based upon historical data and analysis (i.e., statistical trending). 

In the January/February 2014 issue of HBR, Roger L. Martin wrote an article entitled The Big Lie of Strategic Planning.  He suggested a number of perspectives that I found quite intriguing.  One of those suggestions was to focus less on what we've traditionally called an environmental scan (reams of data about trends that get us to the present day), and focus more on what we believe about our customers, the evolution or our industry, our competition, and our capabilities.  What we know may need to be replaced with what we believe in order to really create strategy.

As Martin explains, creating a detailed plan filled with what we know makes us comfortable, but comfort is not strategy.  Moving forward with a strategy that's based more on what we believe requires both risk and vulnerability. 

What Martin Luther King, Jr. did was risky and put him in a position of tremendous vulnerability.  Maybe our strategic planning in 2014 should embrace the faith of MLK from the 1960s, and we should take the first step even when we don't see the whole staircase.