Watching my teenage daughters doing their homework the other day, I suddenly realised that they had replaced their BFFs for something much more powerful: various circles of friends. It also struck me that strategy should do exactly the same.

Back in primary school, both of them had BFFs (Best Friends Forever, I’ve been told) to make sense of the world around them and figure out what to do. A close and trusted friend whose opinions were highly valued was clearly the way to go. Today their BFF concept has been abandoned, replaced with multiple circles of friends, teams, and classmates to take on a much more complicated and dynamic secondary school environment.

Homework is made in close contact with many others through several WhatsApp groups on their iPhones, the iPad is within grasp to Google any missing information, their MacBooks allow them to capture the output of their efforts and share it with others, and the TV is on in the background for … well, I don’t know exactly why it is on. There is another group of friends to tackle life’s social questions of how to attract the interest of boys, not to consume alcohol until 21 (I am wishful thinking here), and how to deal with awkward situations. Figuring out which university to attend requires deliberation in yet another group of friends, and their sports activities put them amongst team members who unashamedly just want to win and kick other teams’ behinds.

In strategy we have arguably relied for too long on our two BFFs: analysis and ivory tower. Back in the day, analyses were very useful to make sense of the world around us and to extrapolate to get a glimpse of the future. Based on this, our leadership teams, complemented with specialist knowledge, provided the experience and expertise to plot the most advantageous courses going forward.

But, since then, strategy has moved to secondary school or even university and is facing a much faster changing, more complex, and dynamic business environment. We have left our ivory towers and made strategy much more organisationally inclusive, reaching out to our organisations to draw on their firsthand experience in dealing with markets, customers, competitors, and processes. We no longer just confront them with a ready-made strategy for them to implement.

When we started to research this years ago, we were positively surprised by the number of companies that had already moved on from their traditional strategy BFFs and let themselves be inspired by future trends instead of ever-more detailed analyses of the present, and that engaged their organizations in making sense of it all and identify opportunities for competitive advantage.

As it turns out I could simply have asked my daughters who would have probably just rolled their eyes when confronted with something so obvious to them.