Let’s start with a hard truth: your five-year strategy plan is fiction. Not malicious fiction, more like fan fiction. It’s what you wish the world would do, if only it had the decency to follow your slide deck.

But the real world? It doesn’t care. Customers zig. Suppliers vanish. Technology moves on while you’re still polishing your quarterly roadmap. And just when you think you’ve figured things out, someone changes the rules or the entire playing field.

Strategy today isn’t about clairvoyance. It’s about reflexes.

From Stalin to Slide Decks: The Strange Origin of Long-Term Planning

Five-year plans began, quite literally, with Stalin. The idea was simple: centralised control, clear quotas, predictable output. The results were anything but. Industrialisation came, but so did famine, chaos, and one of the most brutal reminders in history that reality resists top-down control.

Somehow, the logic stuck. Western organisations adopted their own flavour of rigid planning: comprehensive documents, tidy timelines, and a belief that if you just planned well enough, you could conquer uncertainty.

Spoiler: you can’t.

Why Plans Break (Even Beautiful Ones)

Traditional strategic planning fails not because people aren’t smart enough, but because the world isn’t obedient enough.

Rigid plans assume stability, yet most industries today live in constant flux. They require predictions, but offer no forgiveness when those predictions turn out wrong. And worst of all, they discourage improvisation—treating any deviation from the plan as a problem to fix, rather than a clue to follow.

Ask Kodak. They invented the digital camera, then buried it. Blockbuster laughed Netflix out of the room. Sears cut costs, ignored customers, and slowly vanished. These weren’t failures of intelligence. They were failures of adaptability.

From Plans to Reflexes: A More Human Approach to Strategy

So what’s the alternative? You don’t need to throw out strategy. You need to rethink it and shift from blueprint to rehearsal.

Enter applied improv thinking.

This isn’t about being unprepared. It’s about being prepared to respond. Like improv on stage, the goal isn’t to control every line, it’s to listen, build on what shows up, and move the story forward.

A team trained in improv doesn’t freeze when someone drops the script. They listen. They say, “Yes, and…” They recover without blame. They make the other person look good. And they keep things moving.

It’s not chaos. It’s practised responsiveness. And it works because the team has built a kind of muscle memory. Not for prediction, but for adjustment.

Strategy as Rehearsal, Not Script

Rather than locking yourself into a singular version of the future, try rehearsing multiple ones. What if the market crashes? What if it booms? What if your most loyal customer suddenly disappears? Strategic foresight isn’t about being right. It’s about being ready.

And when new data or ideas emerge from the frontline, don’t treat it as an exception. Treat it as a gift. Some of your most important strategies will come not from the C-suite, but from the shop floor, the customer conversation, or the late-night workaround that somehow solved a problem no one saw coming.

That’s emergent strategy. It doesn’t wait for permission. It just happens, and smart organisations make space for it to be noticed.

Thriving on Surprise: A Final Thought

Most businesses treat surprise as the enemy, but what if surprise is actually your biggest asset?

Antifragile organisations, the kind that get better when things go wrong, don’t aim for perfect conditions. They design for volatility. They make small bets. They limit downside but leave room for upside. They expect disruption. And bake in the ability to pivot.

This is where applied improv and adaptive strategy converge. You don’t need to script every scene. You need to trust your cast, rehearse your reflexes, and give your team permission to respond when the lights change and the props fall over.

Make Strategy a Living Conversation

Forget the grand unveiling of your strategic plan. Forget laminated values in the staff room. Instead, make strategy a living, breathing dialogue. Something your team does together every day , not once a year.

Ask what’s working. Ask what changed. Ask what you’re learning. And when the unexpected happens (which it will), don’t panic. Step in. Take a breath. And carry the scene forward.

That’s strategy in real life. Not a script. A practice.