Since all businesses have a sine curve of good times and bad times, you need to know how those are developing. You must know where you are in the cycle. Is your industry up or down? How long has it been that way? Is it on the upswing or downswing? How much longer will it go in either direction? These are the critical questions that must be answered from your timelines. The normal resistance will be to shorten the timeline and not push out but instead proceed in a “planning creep,” or an incremental growth fashion. The justification for not pushing is to give you time to react to the changing market or environment.
There is some sort of crazy belief that if you focus only on the short term (say, six months or a year), you can better responds to situations. That belief is actually counterintuitive, meaning it is exactly backwards. With long-term planning you can be in a position to deal with the new situations. Conversely, if your story is always short term you will always be in the reactive mode. Your model of the world will always be to play catch-up. You will never be the market leader or even close because all your energy will be spent trying to stay even. There is no way for you to break out. If you are a reactive-type business with a short-term orientation, I suggest you reconsider your basic assumptions and how they affect your time frame of planning.