Combining Long-Term Thinking With Real-Time Action

The growing challenge that companies face these days is the real-time stream. News, information, developments, feedback, et cetera are increasingly available and confronting you in real-time. Real-time information often requires real-time action, but how does that affect long-term planning?

Long-term strategies—or strategies in general if you will—have always focused on achievements, objectives that needed to be reached by a certain point in the future. A more real-time focus on business would dictate objectives to be around a shorter time cycle and could be detrimental to long-term strategic planning.

However, I disagree. While the real-time stream does stress more real-time action, action must be focused on protecting the future. This does call for an adjusted approach to business. Achievements should focus more on shorter-term objectives but should contribute to a longer-term goal. Policies need to be created to deal with real-time interferences and processes need to be ironed out to improve responsiveness. The strategy should become more of a philosophy, a way of doing business with certain goals or ideal future situations as targets. Tactics and operations should become more agile and should focus more on short-term measurable results that can be continuously tweaked.

Prepare yourself to deal with the real-time stream but don’t lose sight of the future.