Strategy

October 16, 2009

In the past 6 months spent working in a Web agency, I think the term I’ve seen most painfully misused (including, quite likely, by myself) is strategy. Most people say “strategy” when they actually mean a tactic, or a scheme, or just… an idea.

To help me avoid the mistake, I keep repeating to myself this simple sentence, inspired by the insightful David Rollert:

In a war, a general will have a goal (e.g. achieve fast victory with minimal losses and no civilian casualty), which combined with an analysis of the situation will result in a strategy (e.g. play the surprise effect, blitzkrieg, etc). The strategy will then be put to effect on the ground through tactics (e.g. attack here, attack there, and reinforce defences there to alleviate the potential impact of a counterattack).

If I’m not too far off, I hope this may help me ban misuse of the dreaded s-word from most of my daily conversations. Wish me luck.

P.S.: nothing wrong with not being a strategists. Any war will need many more able tacticians than strategists.

P.P.S.: make love, not war.

Update, January 2012: no, no, no, no, wait. That's just… simplistic. Not very deep. And with a bit of hindsight and distance from the time I wrote it, it's not hard to see it's a fair bit wrong, too — so much so I've been tempted to just delete this entry for a while. But it may be better and more honest to make amends.

Sure, most organisations will have a broad vision, a global strategy which everyone shares (yeah, right); but in most larger groups, you'll find that one person's strategy is another's tactic. So the game is really a fractal-drawing exercise: get the whole organisation to build and agree upon the broad strategy, while make sure each group thinks about a “strategy” which will in effect be a tactical way of realising the broader one. Lather, rinse repeat until you get the coast of britanny.

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