This article first appeared in Forum, The Edge Malaysia Weekly on February 14, 2022 - February 20, 2022

“In preparing for battle, I have always found that plans are useless, but planning to be indispensable.”

— Dwight D Eisenhower (1890-1969), 34th president of the United States of America

Planning, as your resident office Mr Know-It-All will tell you, can be defined as deciding in advance what is to be done in the future. It is the process of thinking before doing. It involves determination of goals as well as the activities required to be undertaken to achieve the goals. Planning is, in its most basic form, a process of deciding in advance — what to do, how to do it, when and by whom.

Planning has always been based on foresight, the fundamental capacity for mental time travel. The better you are at thinking ahead, the sounder you are at hitting your goal. In fact, many modern sociologists consider forethought to have been a prime mover in human evolution.

As a bedrock, planning uses predictability for discussions and decisions. What happens when that bedrock is no more? Shock, horror! No predictability, unthinkable! But here it is — the disruptions we have faced since the discovery of the ­Covid-19 virus have made our lives so unpredictable that the term “business as usual” has morphed into “business unusual”. We are really in uncharted waters now. Uncertainty has become the norm. From the global oil markets to the Asian stock markets, the most common description for 2022 is “uncertainty”.

Our “normal” planning process is largely the linear extrapolation of quantifiable data, to find short-term and tactical risks and opportunities to develop a reliable forecast of the near future. To be sure, we still need to plan but that planning now has to be flexible and adaptable to the reality that, even in the very short term, the future is unknowable.

You see, in times of great uncertainty, extrapolation based on past events quickly becomes futile. As the Delta and Omicron variants of the Covid-19 virus continue to spread, how can we make long-term plans?

Cue the 12th Malaysia Plan — a five-yearly process used as a tool for medium-term economic policymaking in the country since the early 1950s. Five-year plans were once an indicator of certainty, a linear, cohesive ladder.

It is almost like a bad habit that is difficult to wean from. The government has to have its five-year plan — and it did. In September 2021, it announced its 12th — its effectiveness be damned. (While pondering the concept, I found this entry in Encyclopedia Britannica to be relevant: Five-year plans were conceived as a method of planning economic growth over limited periods, first implemented by the Russian communist leader, Joseph Stalin.)

However, in recent years, Malaysia’s five-year development plans have contained less and less information on detailed sectoral development allocations, which makes it difficult to assess the efficacy of development expenditures. This trend could be driven by the declining importance of development expenditures in the Malaysian economy and the greater role played by government-linked companies (GLCs) in driving private investment. We, the citizens, can no longer critically assess the success of these plans. Thus, there is a need in Malaysia for the government to reassess and explore alternative approaches to medium-term economic policymaking so that we, the people, can vote on whether Mr Government has implemented the plan successfully. May I suggest a shorter-term strategic plan in its place?

To successfully weather the present storm and recover from the pandemic, we need a shorter-term strategic plan. We may not know what is around the corner, but we need to be proactive in planning for the future so that our nation does not get left behind.

There is a range of possibilities for the future which are currently unknowable. How long until the spread of the virus slows? When is there going to be a fully successful vaccine? Will there be another round of mandatory shutdowns? Will there be additional support for individuals and businesses from the government? How long until consumers can resume their old routines, and what will their new routines look like? These are questions none of us can answer right now.

While we do not know the future, Mr Government, we can project with reasonable certainty a few possible scenarios for our nation and evaluate the risk of keeping the status quo and taking the wait-and-see approach versus making an investment in something new and bold.

If I may be so bold to share, here is some advice I gathered from a Harvard Business Review article on managing uncertainty: First, develop only a limited number of alternative scenarios — the complexity of juggling more than four or five tends to hinder decision-making. Second, avoid developing redundant scenarios that have no unique implications for strategic decision-making; make sure each scenario offers a distinct picture of our nation’s community structure, conduct and performance.

As your Economic Planning Unit is thinking about the possible scenarios that could play out and impact your strategic decision-making for 2022, here are some scenarios to consider:

•     Supply chain disruptions. As a major intermediate-goods-producing nation, do we know if any of our key suppliers are at risk? If they were to go out of business or be unable to fulfil our needs, do we have a Plan B? Have we identified other possible vendors so we don’t end up with a disruption in our supply chain?

•     Absence of key employees. Many schools across the country are not welcoming students for face-to-face teaching yet, so childcare concerns could have a considerable impact on our workforce. Additionally, the longer we go without successfully containing the pandemic, the more likely it becomes that members of our workforce will be exposed to the virus and need to quarantine, take time to recover, or care for family members who are ill. We need to ensure we have redundancy built into said workforce so that no one person is the only person who can complete key tasks.We need to ensure we have a plan to keep our work teams safe, healthy and productive.

•     Impact on consumers. Even if our businesses are able to successfully pivot their products or services to fit the current environment — delivering goods to customers’ doors, switching entirely to remote offerings or putting safety protocols in place — if our consumers can’t afford their products or services, we will still not succeed. If our consumers are at risk financially or are concerned and cutting expenses, how can we keep our businesses going?

Strategic planning in the midst of these unprecedented times is a real challenge. The way these questions are framed will feel like such a small question compared to what you, Mr Government, could be asking the people on the vision for their life during and post-pandemic: What’s important to you, and why? What communities would you like to be a part of, and how? What is the kind of world you might like to live in some day? What do you need now?

Maybe reconfiguring the “plan” to be a way of imagining life, so that it looks like a guide, is what we should be looking for, rather than a series of benchmarks to check off a list. The prize should not be how well we have stuck to the plan but rather, how the nation grows with us.

Zakie Shariff is executive chairman of Kiarafics Sdn Bhd, a strategy consulting group. He is also an adjunct professor at the Faculty of Industrial Management, Universiti Malaysia Pahang.

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