When 5 Years Are Not Enough

Most organizations swear by the same operating rhythm: a five-year strategy (usually with scenarios), a one-year budget, and in-year adaptations. On paper, it looks rigorous and responsible. In practice, it often hardens today’s assumptions and then lets you “adapt” only inside those walls. That’s motion, yes. 

But motion in a cage.

Let’s put our finger on the gap. The five-year plan typically collapses multiple futures into a single base case. The one-year budget then bolts that base case into money, headcount, and KPIs. The “adaptation” during the year is usually tactical firefighting within the budget envelope. This is what I’ve called prutures: extensions of the present polished until they feel like foresight.

This isn’t a critique of planning or budgets. It’s a critique of premature closure. And the research backs that up. Recent work in strategy argues against strategic formalism. The theatre of rigor without an ontological mechanism for how uncertainty is actually reduced and coherence maintained. It proposes a falsifiable, cross-domain account of strategy as recursive inference and action under entropy, precisely to avoid the ritualism many companies mistake for strategy (Williams, 2024). 

Where my work sits is here: governance for superposed futures. 

In plain words: keeping contradictory, unresolved futures legitimately open long enough to influence real decisions—before the budget locks them out. Futures is not esoteric imagining; it’s governance tied to business realities.

So what does that look like when you’re living with a five-year/one-year cycle?

1) Insert option windows into the cycle.Name a small set of decisions that must stay reversible until a dated checkpoint (e.g., “Keep Architecture X/Y in play until Q3 signal review”). This is governance, not vibe. You’re saying: “We choose not to collapse this decision yet, and we’ll pay the carrying cost because the option is valuable.”

2) Allocate exploration like you allocate CAPEX. Earmark a fixed % of budget and time (even small) to probes beyond the core. Short projects tied to live signals of change. The goal isn’t immediate ROI; it’s maintaining variation so you don’t mistake survival for stagnation.

3) Replace foresight theatre with a futures KPI.Having scenarios is irrelevant if they don’t touch choices. Track a single, unforgiving metric:

Decision Shaping Rate (DSR):% of strategic decisions in the last 12 months that were shaped by futures inputs (signals, scenarios, pre-mortems) rather than merely validated after the fact.

Why this KPI? Because it measures whether futures actually enter the governance bloodstream. You can audit it: pick your last 10 strategic decisions and mark, honestly, whether futures inputs changed the direction, timing, or allocation, or whether they were just cited in the board pack.

4) Shorten the corridor without losing discipline.Keep the five-year direction if you must, but move to rolling strategy that’s sensed and re-weighted quarterly. The point isn’t to be restless; it’s to keep inference cycles alive so unfamiliar options can still cross the threshold before the budget locks you in.

5) Release one ritual to make space.Suspend one energy-draining report/committee for a quarter and replace it with a signal review meeting whose sole purpose is to decide: which options stay open, which can safely collapse, and what evidence would change our mind.

None of this replaces fiscal discipline. It redistributes it—away from the illusion of certainty and toward the capacity to keep options alive until the evidence justifies collapse. That’s the heart of superposed futures governance: not predicting what will happen, but governing the timing of collapse so you don’t default to yesterday.

If you’re wondering whether your system is breathing or just decorating the cage, start with three questions:

• Which top-five decisions are deliberately kept reversible, and until when?
• What percentage of spend/time is tied to explorations beyond the core?
• What is your last 12 months’ DSR?

If you can’t answer, you don’t have a futures gap. You have a governance gap.

I’m researching this space in depth, and I’m codifying it into a playbook you can apply inside the classic planning/budget cycle. No esoterics, no theatre, just structures that let futures in without blowing up the basics. (Coming soon watch this space.)

The five-year plan isn’t the enemy. Closure without warrant is. Hold fewer things tighter; hold more things open longer. Measure whether futures shape choice. 

That’s not soft. That’s the work.

Whatever you do, keep thinking.

Williams, C. F. (2024). Strategy as ontology: From metaphor to mechanism in strategic thought (SSRN Scholarly Paper No. 5382747). Social Science Research Network. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5382747

Hi, 

I am Eva Tomas Casado, futurist by nature, engineer by training, and philosopher by heart. With Simple Thinking, I am exploring the intersections of these three realms to deduct, induce, and build new ways of acting on present complexities and futures. Join me! Or reach out and let's have a conversation, about how we could apply these ideas to your life, your environment, organization, or company.

My pieces are written with the support of AI for structuring and editing. The thinking behind it is entirely my own. After all, the brain is still mine.