Il piano quinquennale è una reliquia del passato.
Oggi l'agilità è fondamentale: eppure, occhio, perché agilità non vuol dire incoerenza. Ecco perché.
For decades the five-year strategic plan was the founding document of every serious organisation.
It was written once, presented to the board, put in a drawer and dusted off at the annual reviews.
Today that model is described, in no uncertain terms, as an anachronism: outdated, costly, often ineffective.
It takes an enormous amount of time; it costs considerable sums; it becomes obsolete through inaction, and it has little real impact on the organisation’s mission.
Planning has not, of course, become pointless.
It is simply that the way we have always planned assumed a stability the current market no longer offers. Here is why.
The autopsy of the five-year plan
Traditional planning rests on what might be called the myth of predictability: it assumes that funding flows behave regularly, that the economy remains reasonable and that external factors follow a linear trajectory. It is an assumption that is, to put it kindly, idealistic at best.
Geopolitical instability, technological advances, unpredictable competitive dynamics: all factors no five-year plan can accurately predict.
Add to these internal variables such as staff turnover, leadership changes and fluctuations in operational capacity. The result is a succession of events that a static document simply cannot absorb.
The core problem is a lack of agility.
What is taking its place
Analysts call the strategy that has replaced five-year plans “Continuous scenario planning”: ongoing, scenario-based planning, in which AI is used to simulate how market shocks, a sudden economic crisis or a competitor’s product launch could affect the company roadmap in real time.
Many also believe the fixed annual plan is dead: in its place, agile planning is taking hold, with regular review cycles and continuous adjustments throughout the year, in contrast to the traditional model that sets rigid, unchangeable objectives.
It’s a bit like when the map gave way to GPS, so to speak.
The pace of the times demands constant route calculation: updates for the unforeseen and for unexpected changes, and continuous recalculation towards the destination.
Well, the same applies to brands, to companies and to every organisation that has spent too long building rigid plans.
The future is dynamic.
It is no coincidence that many organisations are adopting the 90-day cycle. Real strategy moves in quarterly increments: if software, processes and company culture are not built for that rhythm, the plan becomes a dead letter on the shelf.
Agility is not the absence of strategy
Obvious as it may seem, agility and the absence of strategy are not the same thing.
This view very often comes from those who need everything settled in advance before they can work: but 2026 and excessive rigidity do not go together.
Agility, in fact, does not mean stopping planning.
If anything, it means planning differently, with a shorter horizon but a long-term vision that remains intact. The alternative analysts propose is an annual plan with near-term, achievable priorities, combined with long-term visions, ‘north star’ goals and strategic pillars that stay fixed. The plan is monitored monthly, adjusted when necessary and updated every year to reflect current reality. But this is only one option.
Another concrete proposal is the six-month survival experiment, a principle guided by one constant question: ‘what must we do to thrive over the next six months, given what we know now?’. Every six months, the answer to that question sets the direction.
In all these scenarios, the constant is the same: the goal is known, but the time horizon of activations is calibrated to keep pace with the times.
And so the mission stays fixed, while the method for achieving it remains flexible.
The new horizon for brands
This shift in strategic planning naturally has enormous consequences for brand governance.
A brand lives on consistency over time. Its strength depends on accumulating confirmed expectations over a long horizon.
If business planning is compressed into 90-day cycles, the real risk is that brand positioning will also be treated as a quarterly variable, and therefore changed, adjusted and reworded every time the operating plan changes.
This is the mistake to avoid.
Operational planning can and must become agile. The brand’s identity direction (that is, who we are, what we promise, which values guide every decision) must instead stay fixed, outlasting quarterly cycles. In other words, tactics adapt. Identity does not.
In short, the answer is not to stop having a direction but to separate what must remain stable (the mission, the identity, the principles that guide decisions) from what must remain flexible: the method, the tactics, short-term resource allocation.
The organisations that can draw this distinction with discipline will build a competitive advantage that outlasts any plan drawn up behind a desk. Those that blur it will discover, sooner or later, that they are either too rigid or far too agile, and therefore lacking an identity.
New Connections (FAQ)
If the five-year plan no longer works, does long-term forecasting still make sense?
Yes, but on what you want to become, not on how you will get there. The mission and the principles that guide decisions can and must remain stable over a long horizon. What no longer holds up in a plan drawn up behind a desk is the operational route: the specific steps, the timings, the tactics. Long-term forecasting applies to the destination. Short-term planning applies to the road, recalculated every ninety days.
Does moving to quarterly cycles not risk the company losing a consistent vision over time
The risk is real if agility also reaches brand identity, not just operational tactics. Quarterly planning that changes the positioning, tone or stated values every three months produces a company that is fast and unrecognisable. Quarterly planning that changes only the method, keeping mission and principles fixed, produces a company that is fast and consistent. The difference lies in what those cycles are permitted to change.
With CFO confidence so low and macro conditions changing every quarter, how do you persuade a board to abandon a five-year plan that has already been approved?
By showing that the alternative is not the absence of planning, but planning that is more honest about its own limits. A five-year plan gives the illusion of control over variables no one can predict with that precision. An annual plan with near-term goals, a long-term direction that stays fixed and quarterly reviews offers less illusion and a firmer grip on reality. The board that resists change is often not protecting the strategy: it is protecting the sense of certainty the old plan offered, even when that certainty no longer matched the facts.