A Modern Approach

to Strategic Planning
This deck is an introduction to a new approach to strategic planning
that we’ve been leading with clients (including U.S. public companies)
since 2019. We call it “Adaptive Planning” (AP). Bridging traditional
planning and agile methodologies, it’s designed for our modern world,
a world rife with uncertainty that demands curiosity and organizational
dexterity.

Email us at heart@nobl.io to get started.

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Client Responses to Adaptive Planning
● “This is the most holistic view of the company I’ve ever had,
including our self-inflicted stumbling blocks.”
● “The emphasis on building competency around aligning goals to
strategy and up to vision has been beneficial to building more
strategic thinkers in the business.”
● “We paid lip-service to this idea in the past, but we are now truly
prioritizing our work and focusing on how to make this company
better under this process.”
● “Teams for the first time have permission to say ‘no’ because they
finally understand their role in the overall mission and can be
ruthless in avoiding distractions.”
● “It’s a new kind of success metric for us, but we’ve actually killed
or paused several high profile projects because this process
exposed them as either off-strategy or dependent on other, more
essential work.”
● “Please, please keep this process going. I’m learning more as a
leader about how this business actually works than ever before,
even though that’s hard to admit.”
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Introduction
The need for Adaptive Planning
Prepare to Be Wrong
Industry titans. Innovation gurus. Startup darlings. Category kings.
They’ve all been wrong. Some failures have been recoverable, yet many
have led to surrendering whole categories, or even catastrophe.

You will be wrong. On a long enough timeline, without methodical

reflection, you will be disastrously wrong. You will misunderstand what
customers need. You will miscommunicate the value proposition. You will
mistime the opportunity and misread the demand. You will overestimate
the returns and underestimate the risks.

As uncertainty—of both initial conditions and eventual outcomes—

ratchets up in the market, your likelihood of being wrong escalates
accordingly.

You’ve long known that the traditional five-year plan is futile, but what
have you replaced it with?

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From Inc.:
A Return to “Normal”

67
Is No Guarantee
%
of strategic plans fail
Even before 2020’s global pandemic and widespread social unrest in the
U.S., corporate plans were already wrong more often than right, and
executives were worryingly skeptical of their teams’ innovation plans.

and So even if you think the return to pre-pandemic conditions will bring a
return to normalcy, “normal” still means that your plans are likely to be

74
wrong.

%
of execs lack faith in their
innovation plans
Organizations need a new model for strategic planning (including
innovation investments) and they need it now.

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Organizations need a 21st century

replacement for the five-year plan,
one that respects uncertainty as
the norm and values the ability to
change as a competitive
advantage.

We call it Adaptive Planning.

Adaptive Planning in Three Parts
01 - Core Values
Four core values inform and
align mindsets during the
process. We expect firms to
pursue AP in many different
forms, while still upholding
these values.
02 - Essential Practices
These twelve practices have
been developed with our clients
in response to their feedback.
They spur teams to higher levels
of performance and impact, even
in the face of change and
uncertainty.
03 - Living Canvas
This is how an organization map
the work of AP, from their north
star all the way down to this
quarter’s intentions. Over time,
this becomes a living, learning
representation of the
organization.
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Core Values
The four fundamental beliefs of Adaptive Planning
The Four Core Values
of Adaptive Planning
1. Outcomes over outputs

2. Iteration over perfection

3. Learning over comfort

4. Individuals and mindsets over processes

and tools

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Value No. 1
Outcomes are what the business needs or wants to achieve (e.g., market share

Outcomes growth, loyalty, recognition, etc.). Outputs are the tactics that the business hopes will
produce those outcomes (e.g., new features, ad campaigns, etc.).

over outputs Adaptive Planning values outcomes over outputs because:

● In a complex world, there are many ways to achieve the same outcome,
and there’s rarely a clear, obvious path at the start. Teams need the freedom
to probe, sense, and respond before committing to one path and ignoring
others.
● Teams are far more engaged when they own the pursuit of outcomes, not a
to-do list of outputs.
● Between outcomes and outputs lies strategy. By engaging teams in the
work of connecting their day-to-day to the organization’s multi-year goals,
we’ve seen clients build a more strategic organization overall

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Value No. 2
When teams pursue perfection, they can be free to sequester themselves for

Iteration indefinite periods of time to reach a level of quality determined foremost by the team
itself. When teams pursue iteration, they define a fixed near-term time horizon (e.g.,
2-4 weeks) and work toward a result that can be tested and further refined with

over perfection feedback from others.

Adaptive Planning values iteration over perfection because:

● Iteration combats groupthink by stressing continuous hypothesis testing
with folks external to the team.
● Long-term plans degrade in accuracy over time; iteration replaces this with
predictable short-term resource and goal-planning.
● Iteration provides a recurring rhythm on which to reflect and improve as a
team.

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Value No. 3
Especially in large organizations, there’s a constant pull towards comfort—agreeable

Learning decisions, amiable meetings, and no surprises. This unearned comfort leads to
complacency. Adaptive Planning embraces learning, even when it means being
wrong in front of others and having to start over. Here, learning isn’t just the

over comfort accumulation of best practices, but also a) the wisdom to know when best practices
are no longer indeed “best” or even appropriate, and b) the psychological safety to
voice those concerns.

Adaptive Planning values learning over comfort because:

● More teams routinely sharing their “lessons learned” gives rise to an
organization better equipped to sense change.
● A focus on learning ensures a speedier response to change, both in
recognizing an error or suboptimal choice and in the time it takes a team to
pivot.

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Value No. 4
Adaptive Planning borrows heavily from Agile software development, and one Agile

Individuals and pitfall we hope to avoid is the rigid obsession with processes and tools even over the
intended mindsets of Adaptive Planning or the people doing the work. Adaptive
Planning does have suggested practices, but they should always be subservient to

mindsets over diverse and psychologically safe teams embodying the values of Adaptive Planning.

processes and tools

Adaptive Planning values individuals and mindsets over processes and tools
because:
● Agile “theater” can give teams the illusion of working in a new way
without the intended benefits.
● A focus on “Are we doing this right?” robs attention from the more
important question, “Is this producing our desired outcomes?”

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Practices
Twelve core practices that bring Adaptive Planning to life
Essential Practices of Adaptive Planning
01
Harvesting and Testing of
Hypotheses
Borrowing from Bayesian reasoning,
the AP process begins by asking
leaders and their teams to make their
hypotheses and assumptions explicit
and transparent. Then, at the end of
each quarter, teams are asked to
reflect and revise those hypotheses
based on new observations.
02
Balanced
Strategic Themes
In AP, an organization’s three-year
mission is translated into a series of
balanced strategic themes that
aggregate initiatives into categories
(e.g., “efficiency seeking” vs.
“innovation”). This ensures that
comparisons are fairly made across
initiatives and that the organization’s
goals are well represented at all times.
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Delineating Work as
“Lights-On” vs “Bets”
In AP, ongoing operations that are
essential to running the business are
labeled “Lights-On” programs. All
other novel, uncertain, and large-scale
programs are dubbed “Bets” to
encourage teams to apply risk-
tolerance and experimentation.
04
Agile Teaming for “Bet”
Teams
For those projects labeled “Bets”
because of their novelty or
uncertainty, teams are encouraged to
adopt Lean and/or Agile practices.
This includes: small team sizes,
multidisciplinary structures, Scrum or
kanban methods, recurring
retrospectives, and working in the
open.
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Essential Practices of AP (cont’d)
05
Monthly Roundtables
Each month, “Bet” teams meet with
other teams in their Strategic Theme
to share any lessons learned and the
revisions made to their hypotheses
and assumptions. These lessons, with
adequate context, should be
distributed to the rest of the
organization.
06
Quarterly Alignment
Each quarter, teams across the
organization share their past results,
along with their plans for the next
quarter. A governance team reviews
these plans, primarily to identify
cross-team conflicts and possible
derailers. Any issues identified are
sent back to the teams to solve.
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Yearly Forecasts, Ongoing
Dispersions
Budgeting is one of the trickiest
aspects of AP, given the need for
organizations to define resource needs
upfront. We recommend a yearly
budget forecast, but revising per
quarter as plans are adjusted.
Moreover, for “Bets,” we encourage
VC-like funding gates unlocked by
milestones and outcomes.
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Minimum Viable
Bureaucracy
Given the autonomy required for
teams to succeed at AP, organizations
need just enough process to make
things work, and nothing more. This
requires a significant investment in
trust and a constant vigilance against
any and all unnecessary complexity.
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Essential Practices of AP (cont’d)
09
Rigorous
Team Development
AP requires psychological safety
across the organization for teams to
try new things and report back with
candor. Organizations using AP have
to embrace a continual focus on
interpersonal relationships and team
development, including the executive
team.
10
Strategy as
Coaching Function
In AP, strategy is a continuous and
dispersed process. Therefore, existing
planning and strategic units tend to
shift to become much more of a
capability-building and coaching
function for the organization.
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Accelerated Learning and
Development
AP pushes teams and individuals to
try new things, frequently requiring
either more advanced or wholly new
skills. In response, learning and
development programs often have to
speed up to keep pace with the
emergence of these new needs.
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Visual Project
Management
Organizations adopting AP benefit
from a shared and living visual of the
work-in-progress (WiP) and
prioritized backlog for the entire
enterprise. It’s also beneficial to show
the WiP limit across teams and
strategic themes.
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The AP Canvas
The strategic architecture of Adaptive Planning
The AP Canvas
The Adaptive Planning (AP) Canvas is a living, learning architecture of an
organization’s goals for the future and its plans to achieve them.

Organizations embarking on the AP journey first complete this canvas

based on past definitions and best guesses. After the AP process kicks off,
this canvas is revised each quarter to reflect new lessons learned, current
results, revised ambitions, and new shared plans.

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Creed and Vision
The AP Canvas begins with an organization’s north star, a unique and just out-of-
reach point meant to act as a guide amid uncertainty and turbulence.

We simplify an organization’s north star into two parts:

1. Creed: the most sacred, persistent, and pervasive belief held by members
of the organization (e.g., Nike believes that if you have a body, you’re an
athlete; NOBL believes that change may not always be painless, but
together, it’s always possible)
2. Vision: the “so what” of the organization’s creed; the reason why it’s
worth championing; and the change it could result in if more folks
believed

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Mission and Scorecard
Next in the Canvas comes the organization’s three-year mission. Why three years?
Based on our research and work with clients, three years has felt both aspirational and
within the organization’s sphere of control. Moreover, three years is the time horizon
many noted visionary leaders gave themselves to achieve new ambitions. The
organization’s three-year mission is broken down into three components:

1. Commercial position: an ambitious yet achievable market position

2. Customer purpose: the role/function customers (as a whole) perceive that
the organization plays in their lives
3. Cultural perception: the viewpoint or meaning that the organization is
recognized as championing in culture at-large

Lastly, this three-year mission is measured by the Company Scorecard, a discrete set
of metrics that demonstrate the progress (or lack thereof) toward the three-year
mission.

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Strategic Themes
Third in the Canvas is defining a balanced portfolio of strategic themes that can
deliver the organization’s mission.

There are many ways to structure this section, including time horizons (short-,
mid-, and long-), distinct customer needs, individual products/services, or
something closer to leverage points from a systems perspective. Ultimately, you
want three to five categories that allow you to prioritize projects against one
another fairly (apples to apples versus apples to zebras). For example, if you
always compare urgent needs against future innovations, innovations will always
be delayed or even sacrificed for immediate gains.

For organizations without experienced strategy teams, this step can be paralyzing.
However, the best approach for everything AP is to take a best guess and revise as
you go.

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Hypotheses
The fourth step in completing the Canvas is the harvesting of all assumptions,
hypotheses, and biases among the organization. These may include:
● Key indicators: the measures that are believed to best signal forward
momentum
● Conditions: in terms of systems thinking, these are “stocks,” like total
market size, that are resources for the organization to use
● Models: any mental models or strategic frameworks that the team is
reliant upon and believes best describes reality
● Causation: strongly held beliefs about cause and effect relationships
(e.g., if we do X, Y will undoubtedly happen)
● Strategic trade-offs: prioritized courses of action, often stated top-down,
and the evidence for why

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“Lights On” vs. “Bets”
The fifth step in Adaptive Planning is differentiating “lights-on” work from the more
uncertain and novel “bets” per strategic theme.

1. “Lights on” work is essential to the operation of the business and

therefore considered a priority. Leaders should be vigilant, however,
against this work ballooning in importance and consuming more than 50%
of the organization’s resources, especially given changing market conditions.
2. “Bets” are novel, unpredictable, and/or large-scale projects that should
be approached with Agile teaming methodologies and high risk-
tolerance. Diverse teams should be tapped internally to brainstorm potential
“bets” that could deliver the organization’s three-year mission. Bets that
don’t fit immediate needs should be saved in the organization’s backlog.

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Near-Term Planning
Finally, the sixth and last step of the AP process is to define the organization’s one-
year intentions by strategic theme, and the most immediate quarter’s release plan
across the organization.

Especially in the first year of AP, organizations should avoid tying compensation to
any one-year intentions as there needs to be a process for determining the “right”
goals, their level of specificity, and the capability of teams to pursue those goals.

Even in the first year, though, as each quarter ends, teams within each theme
should meet to align their deliverables, to pre-mortem any blockers and
dependencies, and to communicate any adjustment in the organization’s
expectations.

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About NOBL
Our background and POV for change
 To make lasting change, we break from tradition.
CAPABILITY, NOT
DEPENDENCY
___________
Our goal is to equip your
leaders and teams to make
change long after we’re gone,
which is why we approach the
relationship as a trainer and
coach. We mark the day you
no longer need us as a win, not
a loss.
FIT,
NOT FADS
___________
Our recommendations will be
the product of studying your
culture, your business context,
and your strategy—and not a
blind pursuit of what’s popular
or a lazy copy/paste from a
previous client.
BEHAVIORS, NOT
PRESENTATIONS
___________
When leaders discuss change,
what they really want are new
behaviors and new skills
among their teams.
Presentations, no matter how
polished, don’t deliver
behavior change—active
coaching and in-the-trenches
upskilling is what delivers new
behaviors that leaders want.
PROGRESS,
NOT PARALYSIS
___________
The best way to understand if
an organization can make
change is to try (in a safe
way), and then learn from the
effort. Instead of endless
discovery phases and circular
discussions, we leap into
testing new behaviors as soon
as possible, and then iterate on
what we’ve learned.
INCLUSION,
NOT EDICTS
___________
Often our first move with a
client is to assemble a diverse
group of their talent and ask a
simple question, “What have
you always wanted to try, but
have been unable to?” When
teams feel like change is
something they are leading,
versus something being done
to them, change is far more
likely to endure.
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We offer two core services, often in rapid succession.

01 02
ORGANIZATIONAL DESIGN CHANGE & TRANSFORMATION
____________________________ ___________________________

Who must you become, collectively as an How do you move past merely talking about change to
organization, to reach that next horizon? inciting a transformation movement across your
organization?

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 Organizational
Organizational Domains
Our process for assessing organizations is
inspired by decades of research that shows

Design Overview
that organizational structure should follow
purpose and strategy, especially in highly
dynamic markets. Far too many
organizations allow how they're organized
today to dictate the decisions they make for
the future. Our process can help you avoid
Organizational design is the strategic process of aligning how to win together with how to
this fatal trap. work together.

This work begins as an exercise in listening and assessment. Our team interviews your folks,
runs project retrospectives, sends a survey, reviews competitors and comparative companies,
and presents your leadership with a list of strengths and gaps across the domains of Purpose,
Cultural Maturity Model Strategies, Structures, and Systems.
Through both direct experience and after
reviewing years of research into scaling
orgs, we have developed a checklist to From there, depending on our findings, we may help you redefine your
help growing organizations know when to purpose/mission/vision, sharpen and socialize your strategies, architect revised
focus on what organizational design topics
organizational structures, and coach your teams to collaboratively devise new ways of
(such as decision making) without having
to boil the ocean or pursue unnecessarily working together.
complex processes.

For more information, visit https://nobl.io/organizational-design

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Change and Transformation Our Unique Change Process
Our change process borrows from agile and

Overview
lean principles in that we start small
(introducing safe-to-fail changes), learn and
iterate, and then scale based on results and
evidence. Our teams typically work in 90-
day sprints to immediately test and iterate
Organizational transformation is individual behavior change at scale. To transform new ways of working with your teams.

your organization and its culture, you must focus on both what maximizes
individual change and what makes change spread.

Our process combines positive organizational psychology, co-active coaching and

facilitation, and an understanding of complex systems science to make both
immediate and lasting change. Ultimately, we design an enduring social movement
for change versus a top-down mandate. Narrative
Any change effort requires
communication and propagation to be

For more information, visit https://nobl.io/organizational-change-management successful. We work to reduce signs of

loss and symptoms of skepticism/cynicism
that could harm or slow the necessary
changes.

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Additional Resources
See our minds at work
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NOBL Academy
We’re ardent believers in sharing everything we
know. NOBL Academy is our repository then, of all
we learn and explore, as an organizational design and
change management agency. There are fresh ways of
working, explainers, and case studies freely available
to the world here.

https://academy.nobl.io
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Peer Communities
We consider ourselves stewards of the org design
community, and in that spirit we have built Slack
communities for both in-house partners and external
consultants. Monthly, we host brainstorms, book
clubs, 1:1 networking, and more.

https://academy.nobl.io/join-a-nobl-slack-community/
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The Decider
Making decisions is an absolutely necessary function of
any productive group. Without decisions, literally
nothing happens. Decisions are crucial, yet we rarely pay
any attention to how we decide.

The Decider is an interactive web experience and Slack

bot that help you explore better ways to decide together.

https://thedecider.app/
Thank you.