Blog #34: Is Your IBP Playing the Long Game? It Bloody Should Be.

I spent most of May travelling in western China. Within days of my arrival, President Trump landed in Beijing, then Putin. I can only assume word got out that I was in the country.

Aside from visiting me, the framing inside China was different to Trump's, quite different. State media told citizens to re-read Mao Tse Tung's 1938 essay "On Protracted War". While the Americans came to make an immediate trade, the Chinese people were re-reading the playbook for a multi-decade campaign.

By the end of the visit, Trump had his handshakes and some headlines. President Xi had his "strategic stability for the next three years and beyond."

Same room, different horizons. Same handshakes, different games.

Of course, my mind went to IBP. Sad, I know. So ask yourself - what horizon is yours actually playing in?

Three phases, three horizons

Mao’s essay outlines three phases of a long contest with a stronger opponent. I’ve researched it so you don’t have to. Phase one: Strategic defence - you avoid being knocked out. Phase two: Strategic stalemate - you accept attrition while building relative strength. Phase three: Strategic counter-offensive - accumulated advantage gets deployed.

Three phases. Three horizons. Three different definitions of what winning looks like at each one.

Good business planning has the same shape. The short horizon is about responding - protecting service, hitting the quarter, surviving the disruption in front of you. The medium horizon - the 4-to-36 month window - is where the real work of change happens. Building capability. Placing capacity bets. Creating optionality. Most of the moves that decide whether you win in five years get made here, quietly, three years before anyone notices.

The question isn’t whether you have all three. The question is which one your IBP is actually doing. My experience says most companies, unfortunately, are stuck in the short-term one - busy winning months and losing years.

What the textbook says

Oliver Wight, who invented IBP, are unambiguous. IBP is designed for a rolling 4-to-36 month horizon. Above it sits corporate strategy at five-to-ten years. Below it sits Integrated Tactical Planning at one-to-three months. IBP is the medium-to-long instrument - the home for capability decisions, capacity bets, and cross-functional commitments that take eighteen months or more to land.

Now here’s the kicker. Oliver Wight themselves admit - in their own white paper - that most IBP implementations collapse into the one-to-three month firefight. Senior managers get dragged into short-term tactical issues. The 24-36 month horizon shows up on the slides but not in the decisions.

You know how it goes. Strategic item, last on the agenda. You reach it with four minutes left and half the room late for their next call. “We’ll pick it up next month.” You won’t. There’s always a fresh fire. That’s not a process - it’s a treadmill.

The people who designed the framework concede that most organisations turn IBP into Phase 1 work and call it strategic.

Three checks

If you’ve sat in enough of these, you can tell inside ten minutes. The agenda is dense, the discussions are urgent, and nothing on the table changes anything beyond August. Three quick checks.

The agenda. How many discussion items sit inside the next quarter? If most of them do, your IBP has become tactical planning wearing IBP’s name badge.

The decisions. In your last three IBP cycles, how many committed to something that won’t pay off for eighteen months or more? If the answer’s zero, you’re running an execution forum, not a planning one.

The attendees. Are the people who can authorise 24-month commitments actually in the room? Or is a delegate taking notes to brief their boss - who’ll make the call later, without you?

Cheap to do. Uncomfortable to answer honestly.

For a live measure, run a click-counter during your next IBP meeting. Four buttons - today, 1-3 months, 4-18 months, 18+ months. Hold each one while that conversation runs, and watch the truth show up at the end. Ask Claude or ChatGPT to build it in twenty minutes. Or message me and I’ll send you mine, free.

The point

A stronger player on the wrong horizon can lose to a patient weaker one on the right horizon. That’s the whole logic of “On Protracted War”. It’s the warning sitting underneath the China-US story this month. It’s also the warning sitting underneath most IBP implementations.

If your IBP is solving the quarter, you’re not playing the long game. You’re playing the short game and calling it strategic.

At your next IBP cycle - are you solving the month, or building the decade?

I don’t write these to chase work. I write them because too many planning processes run on autopilot and nobody says anything. If this sparked a thought, that’s enough. If you want to talk about it, find me at planninglab.co.nz/blogs.

#IBP #S&OP