This week, I joined credit union leaders at CU Conferences' "Reaching Your Members in the 21st Century" event at the Hyatt Regency Grand Cypress in Orlando.
I led a session titled, “Strategic Vision: Turning Today’s Challenges into Tomorrow’s Opportunities,” which challenged the audience to answer a single, critical question:
“How resilient is our strategic plan?”
It’s a question that cuts to the heart of the primary challenge facing boards and leadership teams today: the "governance gap."
The Governance Gap: When the Old Playbook Fails
The pace of change—from technology to member expectations—is accelerating faster than ever before.
The problem is that traditional strategic planning often focuses inward and assumes a stable, predictable future. This creates a dangerous "governance gap" between our current operations and the realities of the emerging environment. We end up with a static plan that is brittle and vulnerable to the first major disruption.
This isn't a theoretical risk. It's the "Uber scenario," where a business model that was stable for decades becomes obsolete in a matter of quarters.
From Static Plan to Resilient Model
So, how do we close this gap?
We must move from a static plan to a resilient, dynamic model. Our session detailed a disciplined, three-part process to build this resilience:
- The Blueprint (The "Now") First, you must create a clear, honest snapshot of how your credit union creates, delivers, and captures value right now. We use the Business Model Canvas as a powerful, one-page blueprint. Before you can plan for the future, your entire leadership team must agree on the present.
- The Test (The "What If") Second, we test that blueprint against a range of plausible future stories, or scenarios. This isn't about predicting the future; it's about challenging our assumptions with plausible cause-and-effect stories. What if a major FinTech launches a high-yield account targeting your core demographic?
- The Intersection (The "What Matters") Finally, we analyze where these tests have the greatest impact. We prioritize each scenario based on its Likelihood, potential Impact, and Time Horizon. This focuses our strategic response on the threats and opportunities that matter most, rather than the "crisis of the day."
Putting the Model to the Test (Live)
During the session, we moved from theory to practice with a live, interactive workshop. We fed a sample credit union's Business Model Canvas to an AI to generate three distinct, plausible scenarios:
- Scenario 1: The National Deposit War (Near-term)
- Scenario 2: The Indirect Channel Collapse (Mid-term)
- Scenario 3: The "Local" Irrelevance (Long-term)
This exercise forced a deep, specific, and actionable understanding of cause and effect. I then led the group in a discussion on how these scenarios would impact the sample model and what a strategic response might look like.
The group quickly recognized the implications: scenarios like these put immediate pressure on revenue (from both lower deposit growth and drying up loan demand). At the same time, the high infrastructure costs supporting the business model's channels—like the branch network—don't simply go away.
One strategic option the group defined was to pivot into the "Personalized In-Branch Service" as a key differentiator. The group acknowledged this was a conscious trade-off: in a tech marketplace where personal service is often cold or discouraged, the high-touch market might be smaller, but it would allow the credit union to build far deeper and more profitable relationships.
Your Vision Isn't a Statement—It's a Direction
This process is how you forge a dynamic vision. Your strategic objectives are no longer created in a vacuum; they become a direct, logical response to the most significant scenarios you face.
The key takeaway for the leaders in the room was simple:
Vision isn't a statement you write; it's a direction you build. It is the continuous process of aligning your business model with the realities of tomorrow.
