Is Strategic Planning Like Visiting The Witch Doctor?

Selase Dugbaza
Jul 13, 2025
2 min read

After speaking with 200 businesses and organisations on “what’s the deal with strategy and planning”, one theme kept coming up: Strategic planning felt like an encounter with a witch doctor.

Mystical language
Flashy props
Promises
Noise.
Hope, and a lot of not being exactly sure how to tangibly connect the desired future to the present, apart from linking it through tasks, activities and KPI’s.

Yes, strat planning sessions paint a beautiful future but they rarely offer a clear bridge from today.

The result? Drifting goals, weak alignment, slow or stalled progress, and long-winded nervous explanations when it’s time to report progress.

Your experience might be different, but if it rings a bell, there is another way to approach it.

It’s called Ideal Present Design, courtesy of Jabe Bloom,

Instead of thinking about the future, you design from the present.

Here’s how it works. There are four key steps, each with a prompt:

Current State –What’s really happening now? Especially what’s not working?
Example: “Our revenue’s steady, but profits are shrinking. We have lots of low-margin jobs.”
Default Future – Where is today leading you by default if nothing changes?
Example: “We’ll stay busy, but slowly lose steam. Eventually, we’ll need to cut costs or raise prices.”
Ideal Future – What do you actually want instead?
Example: “Consistently high-margin work, fewer clients, more profit and less stress.”
Ideal Present – Design today as it would look if:
- the problems were being addressed right now,
- the drift toward the default future has been blocked, and
- the journey toward something better has already begun.