Why you can’t copy Strategy
Apparently eating isn’t good enough for people now. Now you need strategic eating. If that wasn’t enough you can also do strategic napping and strategic shopping, not to mention the earlier disciplines of strategic thinking, strategic management and strategic leadership. It seems like everything is better with strategy.
What is the common feature of all of these examples? Next to nothing; strategy has established itself as such a infallible qualifier that it’s emptied of nearly all meaning. And that is a damn shame.
The reigning definition looks something like this
strategy =smart
tactics =less smart
Strategic thinking is abstract (because abstract means clever, right?) and big picture, while tactical thinking is concrete and myopic. This is a terrible definition: Firstly, it denigrates tactics (who would ever admit to be a tactician under this definition?) Secondly, and worse, it gives no instruction at all as to how to make good tactics or strategies. Think smart and see the big picture is hardly an actionable instruction.
A closer look at the historical development of the terms in military decision language reveals further nuances that can help make these terms helpful :
Doctrine: Doctrine is the set of assertions we accept as true in an action domain.
Strategy: A strategy is a set of action and sequencing commitments, consistent with doctrine, and driven by the unique features of an action domain that constrain, but do not define, plans and schedules.
Tactic: A tactic is an abstract action that can be applied in any of a large class of situations that conform to set criteria.
Operations: Operations is the discipline of realizing strategy in the context of a background of infrastructure systems, resources and processes using a vocabulary of tactics.
Rao is heavy on abstraction, but even a few simple takeaways can leave us with a vocabulary for strategy that can actually guide decision-making, and be meaningful across the myriad of things we call strategic. In my modest simplification, i propose that strategy is unique, and tactics are generalizable.
Strategic thinking is the art of being able to recognise the unique factors of a situation and how the tools at hand can be made into a solution. That’s why military generals and MBA’s (some of the foremost strategist) are taught by cases, not models: they need to practice seeing particularities.
Tactics on the other hand, is every pattern that can be reused or copied - and that is tremendously useful as well. Without a catalog of known actions, no strategy could be assembled.
This definition has several benefits:
1 It actually tells you what to do; when making a strategy, think about how to handle the unique factors. This is heaps better than “look at the big picture” or any such empty handwaving.
2. It’s shows why tactics are useful, why you can be proud of being a tactician, and why you might sometimes require one.
3. It makes it very easy to evaluate whether something is a strategy or a tactic: if it can be copied, reused and transposed to another situation, it’s a tactic.
The last point is perhaps the most important. It prevents the all too common attempts to copy the activities of market leaders like Apple without understanding the underlying rationale, which results in merely emulating tactical components (ie dominate market niche, add value, streamline supply chain etc) without regard for their unique, strategic, composition.
So what you can copy is tactics - and their generalisability makes them suited to that. Then you don’t need to figure everything out from scratch, but can draw from a reservoir. This leaves you to focus on the important part of strategy: understanding the unique situation, instead of mindlessly copying the moves of market leaders.
