Rethinking Strategy: How to Anticipate the Future, Slow Down Change, and Improve Decision Making

Strategy When the Future Refuses to Hold Still

Most organizations are not short of plans. They are short of ways to think about a future that keeps moving. Steve Tighe’s Rethinking Strategy addresses that gap directly. First published in 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Australia, the book is built for leaders, strategists, and managers who want to anticipate change more clearly, avoid reacting to every shift, and make decisions with better bearings.

The title’s promise is not about predicting the future. It is about improving the quality of strategic conversation before the future arrives.

Searching, Learning, Doing

The book moves through three broad parts:

• Searching: begins with the trouble with trends and why familiar forecasting habits can mislead.
• Learning: explores latent resources, where the future fits, reframing strategy, overcoming myopia, and the shape of things to come.
• Doing: turns toward the strategic challenge, the language we use to see what we think, and the practical questions of what’s next, so what, and now what.

That arc gives the material a useful rhythm. It does not stop at ideas about foresight; it asks how those ideas change positioning, transition, and day-to-day decision making.

From Trends to Strategic Judgment

Part of the book’s value is its skepticism toward easy trend-watching. Tighe treats trends as starting points, not answers. The harder work is learning how to notice what an organization is not seeing, how to reframe strategic questions, and how to make sense of patterns in chaos without overclaiming certainty.

Readers encounter themes such as organizational myopia, the latent resource, strategic positioning, and the transition from insight to action. The final chapters frame the work through three deceptively simple questions: What’s next? So what? Now what?

Who This Book Is For

This is a business and strategy book for people who carry responsibility for direction: executives, strategy teams, planners, consultants, and managers working through change. It is likely to suit readers who want a more disciplined approach to uncertainty than either rigid forecasting or vague scenario talk provides.

If your organization needs to slow down reactive change and improve the decisions that shape its future, Rethinking Strategy offers a structured way to think before acting.