The 4 Horsemen - Bill McClain

Why is Strategic Planning in this "age of disruption" so different from strategic planning before 2020?

It is because the traditional mindset of incremental growth and extrapolation-planning is no longer applicable in this age of Pandemics, foul politics, social unrest, and the arriving Digital Transformation.

While the old tools of SWOT analysis and Voice of the Customer (VOC) still have immense value, the application of those tools is inadequate if the mindset has not been transformed to "envision the future" and then to plan backward from that vision.

The challenge in the early 2020s is to see past the intense disruption and confusion of the 4 Horsemen, to be able to imagine a time when these disruptors are tamed.

That is where this book comes in.

These 4 Horsemen on our stage now are not only each immensely impactful by themselves, but they have intense interrelationships with each of the other 3 Horsemen until the landscape is disorienting. This causes our horizons to close in. Every institution from education to how we work, to the technologies we use, and how we communicate, pray, date, and many other functions, are radically different since the 4 Horsemen came on stage.

While scholars will write about this period for decades, the goal of this book is simply to understand these 4 Horsemen and their interrelationships with each other, as well as to start to understand the basics of their "ripple effects" to a degree that we can once again begin to "envision the future" as we first described in "Strategic Planning in This Age of Disruption" (Amazon, 2018).

Our strategic planning at work, in our families, and for ourselves, needs to come to terms with what the 4 Horsemen are doing to our society. This book is a step in that direction.