Over my many years as a corporate CFO and, more recently, as an outsourced Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A) professional, I have been puzzled over why so many hardworking, smart, FP&A teams engage in static linear thinking as it pertains to their financial planning processes. I have come to believe that it is because we are trained to be comfortable with simple budget models that have static, consistent, palatable rates of growth over time. We are comfortable budgeting for things that have already occurred and adjusting sales revenue, along with associated production costs, to achieve our targeted growth after the fact. Rarely are other factors considered.