There are two salient perspectives when it comes to shaping our future.

There is the perspective that change is both inevitable and intrinsic to resilience. And there is the perspective that change is an obstacle to be prevented and avoided. On one hand we cherish change as opportunity, and on the other we resist it as risk. It is not always easy to argue with people strongly aligned in either perspective. Many organizations can be divided into change agents and change resisters.

The question of change is often not the right question in the first place. At least, it is not the frame that will create strategic alignments.

I would suggest that the question of learning is infinitely more significant. It's one thing to argue that an organization should resist change as risk. It's another to argue that we should be a learning-disabled organization or community because we have taken a position to oppose learning. This includes learning from experience, our markets, and our local and global peers.

The opposite of learning is assumption. Strategic learning is continuous assumption identifying and testing.

Assumption identifying is looking for the assumptions behind what we feel committed to keep the same, change, or research and develop new. Assumptions are unknowns packaged as knowns. Assumption testing is doing the research, prototyping, and market testing to discover the promises of what works.

Learning is inquiry, research, and testing assumptions. The core of new learning is new questions. When we get better at strategic doing, it is significantly because we are living from new questions about our assets, constraints, and trends. We leave no stone of assumption unturned.

Here are some examples of questions that are often new for organizations.

What do people in our markets think we could do that they think other providers wouldn't or couldn't do as well?
What would surprise them that we could offer or provide?
What assumptions about the business do our own people question and how could these questions lead to new discoveries?
What are the assumptions behind our current priorities and investments and are we testing them?
What would new learning mean for our organization in the next two years?
What new achievements call us and what new learning would make them possible?

And there is the meta-question: What questions aren't we asking ourselves that could open new doors of insight, discovery, and learning.

Learning is the core of our capacity for proactively and agility. Being strategic only has power to the degree that it is a process inspired by new learning. The strongest strategic organizations are strong learning organizations.

If your organization is working from a strategic plan now, go through it and see how much actually represents engagement in new learning. If you are gearing up for strategic planning in the near future, make new learning core to your process and success.