Adaptive strategy is an approach to strategic planning that treats strategy as a living system rather than a fixed document. Instead of producing a three-year plan and reviewing it annually, adaptive strategy builds in mechanisms for sensing change, testing assumptions, and adjusting course as conditions shift.
The core premise is simple: in environments where change is constant and unpredictable, the organisations that learn fastest will outperform those with the "best" initial plan.
Traditional strategic planning assumes you can analyse the present, forecast the future, and chart a path between them. That works when change is gradual and predictable. It fails when disruption arrives faster than your planning cycle can accommodate.
Adaptive strategy acknowledges uncertainty as a permanent feature of the operating environment. Rather than pretending you can predict what's coming, it focuses on building the capabilities to respond, quickly and intelligently, when the unexpected arrives.
For strategy leaders and consultants, this represents a fundamental shift. Your job isn't to produce the perfect plan. It's to design a system that continuously improves the quality of strategic decisions across your organisation or client base.
At Portage, I've built tools specifically for this kind of work. The platform is designed around the principle that strategy should evolve as fast as the world around it—through structured learning loops, scenario testing, and real-time collaboration.
The case for adaptive strategy begins with a simple observation: traditional strategic planning was designed for a world that no longer exists.
Consider the standard strategic planning process. Great leadership teams spend weeks or months analysing market conditions, competitive dynamics, and internal capabilities but most do this in the few days prior to their strategy off-site. They then produce a strategic plan with (hopefully) clear objectives, initiatives, and metrics. The plan is cascaded through the organisation. Progress is reviewed quarterly or annually.
This approach assumes three things:
All three assumptions break down in fast-moving environments. By the time your plan is approved and communicated, the market may have shifted. By the time you conduct your quarterly review, a new competitor may have entered. By the time you complete your annual cycle, the strategic questions themselves may have changed.
Strategy leaders face a real dilemma. Abandon planning entirely, and you lose coordination, focus, and accountability. Stick with traditional planning, and you risk executing brilliantly on a strategy that's no longer fit for purpose.
The cost isn't hypothetical. Organisations that fail to adapt quickly enough lose market position, miss emerging opportunities, and waste resources on initiatives that no longer make sense. Strategy teams that can't demonstrate responsiveness lose credibility with executives and boards.
Adaptive strategy offers a path through this dilemma. By building learning loops directly into your strategic process, you maintain the benefits of structured planning while gaining the flexibility to respond to change.
This isn't about abandoning rigour. It's about deploying that rigour more frequently, on smaller decisions, with faster feedback, that are ultimately aligned to the overall strategy. The result is strategy that improves continuously rather than degrading between planning cycles.
Adaptive strategy draws on several interconnected ideas. Understanding these concepts provides the foundation for putting adaptive approaches into practice.
Adaptive strategy is a methodology that treats strategic planning as an ongoing process of hypothesis testing and refinement. Rather than locking in decisions for extended periods, adaptive approaches build in regular checkpoints where strategies are evaluated against emerging evidence and adjusted accordingly.
→ Read more: What Is Adaptive Strategy? A Complete Guide
Traditional strategic planning works well in stable, predictable environments. But when markets shift rapidly, competitors behave unpredictably, or technology changes the rules of engagement, static plans become liabilities. Understanding why traditional approaches fail helps clarify when adaptive methods are necessary.
→ Read more: Why Traditional Strategy Breaks in Fast-Moving Environments
When the future is genuinely unclear different strategic tools are required. Strategy under uncertainty involves techniques for making good decisions when you can't reliably forecast outcomes, including scenario planning, options thinking, and staged commitments.
→ Read more: Strategy Under Uncertainty: A Modern Approach
A learning loop is a structured process for testing strategic assumptions, gathering feedback, and incorporating lessons into future decisions. Effective learning loops operate at multiple levels: individual initiatives, portfolio-level strategy, and enterprise-wide direction.
→ Read more: Designing Strategy Loops: Continuous Learning in Practice
Sensemaking is the process of interpreting ambiguous signals and constructing coherent narratives about what's happening in your environment. For strategy teams, sensemaking capabilities determine how quickly you recognise when conditions have changed and what those changes mean for your current direction.
→ Read more: Sensemaking for Strategy Teams: A Practical Primer
Complex systems like markets, ecosystems, and organisations behave in ways that defy simple cause-and-effect analysis. Drawing on frameworks like Cynefin, complexity-informed strategy helps leaders recognise when they're operating in complex domains and choose appropriate responses.
→ Read more: Strategy in Complex Systems (Cynefin, sensemaking, nonlinear dynamics)
Having worked with strategy teams across corporate and consulting environments, I've developed a perspective on what makes adaptive strategy work in practice. This shapes how I've built Portage and how I recommend teams approach the work.
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1. Make assumptions explicit. Every strategy rests on assumptions about customers, competitors, technology, and the broader environment. Adaptive strategy requires surfacing these assumptions so they can be tested and tracked.
2. Design for feedback, not just execution. Traditional planning focuses on implementation: who does what by when. Adaptive planning adds a parallel track focused on learning: what evidence will tell us if this is working and how quickly can we gather that evidence?
3. Treat scenarios as decision tools, not forecasts. Scenarios aren't predictions about the future. They're structured thought experiments that help you stress-test strategies against different conditions. The goal isn't to guess which scenario will happen, it's to build strategies that perform well across multiple possibilities.
4. Compress the strategy cycle. Annual planning creates annual blind-spots. Quarterly reviews aren't fast enough for many environments. Adaptive strategy compresses the cycle by embedding strategic review into ongoing operations, not as a separate event but as a continuous process.
5. Document decisions, not just outcomes. Most organisations track whether strategies succeeded or failed. Fewer track why decisions were made with the information available at the time. Documenting strategic rationale creates institutional memory and enables genuine learning from both successes and failures.
I've built Portage around a workflow that puts these principles into practice:
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Sense → Gather signals and trends that might affect your strategic context. The Trend Database and Trend Reports provide structured foresight inputs.
Frame → Map your current strategy, articulating the key choices, assumptions, and expected outcomes. Strategy Boards guide this process step by step.
Test → Stress-test your strategy against alternative futures using the Scenario Generator. Identify where current plans are robust and where they're vulnerable.
Decide → Make informed choices about which strategies to pursue, which to adjust, and which to abandon. Document the reasoning behind each decision.
Learn → Track how strategies perform and compare outcomes against expectations. Feed lessons back into the next cycle of sensing and framing.
This isn't a one-time process. It's designed to repeat, weekly, monthly, or quarterly depending on your context, creating the continuous learning loop that adaptive strategy requires.
What Is Adaptive Strategy? A Complete Guide A comprehensive introduction to adaptive strategy principles, methods, and applications. Start here if you're new to the concept or want to deepen your understanding of the foundations.
Why Traditional Strategy Breaks in Fast-Moving Environments An analysis of why conventional strategic planning struggles in volatile conditions—and what that means for strategy leaders seeking better approaches.
Strategy Under Uncertainty: A Modern Approach When you can't predict the future, you need different tools. This guide covers techniques for making strategic decisions when outcomes are genuinely unclear.
Designing Strategy Loops: Continuous Learning in Practice A practical framework for building feedback loops into your strategic process. Includes examples from corporate strategy and consulting contexts.
Sensemaking for Strategy Teams: A Practical Primer An introduction to sensemaking techniques that help strategy teams interpret ambiguous signals and recognise when conditions have changed.
How to Build a 'Strategy That Learns' Using Feedback Loops Step-by-step guidance for implementing learning loops in your organisation. Includes templates and checklists you can adapt for your context.
Stress Testing Strategy: Methods & Examples Practical techniques for testing strategies against scenarios, with worked examples showing how to interpret results and make adjustments.
How to Align Foresight with Strategy Processes A guide to integrating foresight activities into your existing strategic planning cycle without adding unnecessary overhead.
Portfolio Strategy for Uncertain Environments How to manage a portfolio of strategic options when you can't predict which bets will pay off. Covers real options thinking and staged investment approaches.
In Portage, adaptive strategy comes to life through the integration of boards, scenarios, and collaboration tools.
Strategy Boards provide structured canvases for mapping your strategic choices, assumptions, and expected outcomes. Purpose-built nodes guide you through the process step by step, ensuring you capture the elements that matter for learning loops.
Scenario Generator creates alternative future conditions against which you can stress-test your strategy. The quantitative and qualitative impact scoring shows where your plans are robust and where they might break down.
Collaboration & Comments ensure that strategic discussions happen in context. When someone questions an assumption or suggests an adjustment, that conversation stays attached to the relevant element—building the documented rationale that enables genuine learning.
The workflow typically looks like this:
This cycle can be completed in hours rather than weeks—which means you can run it frequently enough to keep pace with change.
If you're ready to move from static planning to continuous strategic learning, Portage provides the workspace to make it happen.
Map your strategy loop in Portage. Start with a Strategy Board to articulate your current strategic choices and the assumptions behind them. Connect your strategy to trends from the database or your own uploaded research. Then use the Scenario Generator to stress-test your approach against alternative futures.
The result: a documented, testable strategy that you can revisit and refine as conditions change—without starting from scratch each time.
→ Start your first Strategy Board