The recent and ongoing flow of extreme global business environment changes calls for a new mindset and tools for strategy work. Strategies vary in their emphasis and scope of assumed control. For some, the business environment is considered an external force that primarily requires timely adaptation from the company. At the other extreme, shaping strategies refers to understanding the business environment as a co-created system that individual actors, such as companies, can affect through strategic choices and actions. In this article, we introduce future shaping, a novel conceptual construct that combines and synthesises multiple viewpoints with active strategising.
It is widely accepted that strategy development requires an analysis of the business environment. Future shaping, however, calls attention to the longer-term goals of the strategy. This requires a more ambitious future orientation and a more sophisticated foresight approach. It has been noted that strategy processes today mainly employ the same approaches as 40 years ago. Of the respondents to the recent follow-up of a 1983 study, “Strategic Planning in the Fortune 500”, 85 per cent follow a strategic planning cycle. What has changed in the past 40 years is the realisation that for a successful strategy, not only the whole company but also its stakeholders need to be engaged (Halal et al., 2021). This stakeholder engagement calls for . In summary, today's main challenge is not strategy analysis but how to turn it into actionable business plans in a continuously changing business environment.
