Strategy for… the Rest of Us

An Interdisciplinary Viewpoint

This short-essay series on strategy began life as a long, dull, 30-page academic paper. As the author of that opus, I have to be honest. You are getting the better end of the stick by reading this shorter version. Enjoy!

We started this project primarily to initiate a conversation between the folks working on policy and the everyday Americans who entrust their lives, livelihoods, and their children's future to those policymakers. Our point is that if the people and their government are not speaking clearly to each other, our Union cannot succeed.

With that in mind, we focus on "strategy" in this first deep dive on "touchstone" terms. Touchstone terms are foundational words whose meanings should be commonly understood. The importance of touchstone terms cannot be overstated because they help us start complex discussions from a place of mutual understanding. Unfortunately, touchstone terms are some of our language's most abused and misused.   

We have no doubt that the views expressed in this series on strategy will be both controversial and perhaps outright rejected. That is to be expected. Having spent our careers surrounded by policy and academic professionals, we see a total lack of consistency in how we define strategy. When discussing strategy, we find the very intelligent professionals around us all have the same big words coming out of their mouths… but they are talking about entirely different things. That there will be those in violent disagreement with our thoughts on strategy is, therefore, inevitable.

There are a couple of excellent reasons for these inconsistencies. First and foremost, strategy is hard to talk about. Strategy is art, not science, but it is unusual as art. It is not art for the sake of enjoyment or aesthetic beauty. Strategy is functional art. It seeks to provide an output with executable options. If strategy does not meet its function, it is a failure, no matter how elegant its design. That function and the associated output lead to strategy's second "difficult" characteristic. To remain relevant, the definition of strategy cannot be rigidly fixed in the past; it must evolve. Evolution of the term has to occur because our context evolves. In a world moving exponentially faster, stasis is stagnation, and stagnation is rot and failure.

It is a no-brainer to acknowledge that strategy, as a term, has already evolved over the several millennia since the Greeks first coined it. Obviously, no one today is using the word as the Greeks originally intended (except perhaps ancient Greek historians and linguists). Similarly, we cannot be bound to Clausewitz's 200-year-old understanding of strategy or even Liddel Hart's 70-year-old definition. Both are foundational and evolutionary in their own right, but their precepts were not chiseled in stone by the Almighty and carried off the mountain by Moses.

Igor Ansoff, Michael Porter, Carl von Clausewitz, Adam Smith, Sunzi (Sun Tzu), and Niccolò Machiavelli understood what we characterize today as "strategy." These great thinkers' differing fields and contributions to strategic thought prove that strategy is not confined to a specific discipline. If nothing else, that is what you should take away from this series on strategy. There are standard, shared precepts of strategy (updated from time to time) that are the same no matter which profession, discipline, or level that the strategy is being created for.

Heresy, we know, but we are prepared for the debate (we started by memorizing the entirety of "sticks and stones").

Today, Apple (alone) has a market cap larger than the GDP of 96% of the world's nations. If you believe that Apple, Google, and Microsoft have no strategy... (more importantly) if you think that Aramco, Vitol, or the 13 Chinese companies in the Forbes Top 50 do not have the power to harm the United States strategically, then perhaps you may be a great historian, but you are no strategist. Choosing to believe that Grand Strategy and policies that tie the use of armed forces to the definition of strategy are myopic and narrow. If those are our strategic touchstones… the world has moved on without us.

We can give dozens of examples off the top of our heads to illustrate the need for evolutionary change in our understanding of strategy. But Monday morning quarterbacking (although always fun) is never productive. So, instead, let's dive right in.

“Strategy is the summation of all efforts to gain leverage/position, in relation to our peers, within a band of acceptable steady states, across time.”

Strategy is a framework for thinking about problem sets across all disciplines. It is ever-evolving, but evolution does not occur erratically or in an unconstrained environment. There are distinct characteristics that define a strategy. When properly understood, those characteristics provide a foundational understanding (and a basic litmus test) of what strategy is.

1. A strategy is not temporally bound. A line of effort that is bound by time is a plan. A strategy must be constantly assessed and revised, always looking “further” forward.

2. A strategy does not have fixed means. Because a strategy is not bound by time, means can be developed. A line of effort with fixed means is a plan.

3. A strategy does not have limited ways. Strategy is everything; it is not limited to a specific discipline. Strategy is resource agnostic. A line of effort bound to a particular set of resources, a specific discipline, or specific instrument(s) of power is a plan.

4. Strategy has no ends. A strategy seeks to maintain an acceptable position across time between the most desired steady state and the least acceptable steady state. A line of effort that has a defined final goal or end state is a plan. A series of plans with complementary ends is an operation, and a series of operations with an end state is a campaign plan, not a strategy.

In its most concise form, a strategy is the summation of all efforts to gain leverage or favorable position (in relation to our peers) within a band of acceptable steady states across time. 

Admittedly, that description has a lot of $2 words, and it is hard to understand (I had to read it twice to make sure I got it right, and I wrote it). So, let's break it into four parts: goals, time horizons, our efforts, and our resources. Many of the amateur strategists reading along (like us) will recognize Lykke's end, ways, and means model. It is helpful for us to contrast against, and it is foundational but (as we will explain) better suited to operational design than strategic design.

These four characteristics (time, goals, efforts, and resources) are interrelated, and the strategic process overlaps a lot, so linearly describing them (like moving down a production line) is impossible. However, any line of effort aims to get a desired "result." So, the remainder of this post will center on defining the result we expect from our strategy as a valuable starting point. Future posts will focus on the time horizon, our efforts, and resources.

Are We Winning?

At almost any level, the goal of the participants in competitive interactions is to "win." The exception is at the strategic level. For a good description of this concept, we recommend Simon Sinek's book, "The Infinite Game."¹ Sinek focuses on business but as I mentioned earlier, the fundamentals of strategy are not constrained to any discipline, so Sinek's strategic-level observations about business hold true across disciplines. Some of what you see here dovetails with his thoughts on competition.

At the strategic level, competitors are perpetually engaged in competition. Competition will literally exist as long as two humans exist. The result is that it is impossible to define what winning looks like because every day the game continues. At the strategic level, there is no climactic resolution. That means that "snap-shot-in-time" declarations of success or failure have little meaning. In other words, how we keep score is not the same because the game never ends.

A strategist's job is to design a path that puts us in a position of leverage (or strength) over our competitors across time. We know we can never be in the strongest position forever; nothing lasts forever. But we can define both how we would optimally like to be positioned and the minimum position we will accept.

Because the competition never ends, we are not trying to reach an end-state. We are trying to find a place of strength and stay there over time. Therefore, finding and maintaining our best position of strength over our competitors would be identifying our "most desired steady-state." The minimum position we will accept is our "least acceptable steady-state." In other words, we want to be #1 forever (most desired steady-state). But knowing that it is impossible to be #1, every day, forever… we will settle with staying at #3 or above (our least acceptable steady-state).

Our whole government's efforts, every day, should be focused on keeping us within our "band" of acceptable steady states (in this example, between #1 and #3). Dropping below our least acceptable steady state would be considered an existential threat and require a fundamental change of strategy. 

Victory is not the goal of strategy. The goal is to maintain a position of leverage over our competitors over time. Culturally, this is a difficult concept for Americans to accept. If victory is not the goal, why compete? Victory is a tactical goal. In a surprisingly concise but insightful statement, Ghandi said, "Victory attained by violence is tantamount to a defeat, for it's momentary.”² Although Ghandi was talking about morality, he was also saying that a tactical win does not equal a strategic victory. Tactical (and operational) victories are momentary. What we are looking to do, is to change the paradigm over time.

Clausewitz opined that war is diplomacy by other means.³  Diplomacy itself is political discourse (conversation) among nations. Therefore, war is an argument (raised voices) between countries or groups of nations. The argument will eventually end, but the conversation will always continue. This applies to organizations at all levels in strategic competition. Strategy is focused on gaining leverage and position across the never-ending conversation between competitors. It is not focused on winning specific arguments.

The fluidity of position is at the core of competition. In genuinely competitive environments, it is impossible to maintain a singular position indefinitely. No one can be #1 forever. With that in mind, American pop culture has long warned us of those looking to supplant us. Pundits speak admiringly of the Chinese as famous players of the “long game.” It is not uncommon to hear politicians and pundits opine that we are playing Checkers while the Chinese play Chess.

“The goal… is not to destroy your opponent. The goal is to dominate… moving skillfully, slowly, deliberately, en masse, to place yourself in positions of leverage…”

However, Chess is not traditionally played in China. The Chinese traditionally play We qi (the encirclement game) or “Go” as it is commonly translated. The goal of Go is not to destroy your opponent. The goal is to dominate more of the board’s space than your opponent. Isolated pawns can be destroyed (encircled and taken), but destroying enemy forces is of limited value. 

Skillful Go players know that moving skillfully, slowly, deliberately, en masse to place yourself in positions of leverage denies your opponent board space and allows you to dominate. In our opinion, the Chinese are not playing Chess while we play checkers, as our policymakers would have us believe. Instead, the Chinese are playing Go. 

The Chinese, for example, are not trying to destroy our forces. Instead, they are strategically working to leverage us out of the resource-rich global south. They are positioning themselves to dominate the board. At the same time, they are working to replace us in leadership positions in international institutions. Where they cannot displace us, they create competing organizations. Where they cannot gain public support, they buy influence. No, the Chinese are not playing Chess. The Chinese are playing Go while we marvel at what we believe is their ability to play Chess and debate the rules of our game of Checkers.

We hope that this post has left you with something to think about. Leave your comments below! Having addressed the goals of strategy, look for follow ups on this topic to complete the series on strategy!

Part 2 of this series is:

Part 3 of this Series:

1. Sinek, S. (2020). The Infinite Game. London, England: Portfolio Penguin

2. Gandhi, Mahatma. (3 May 1919). Satyagraha Leaflet No. 13.

3. Clausewitz, Carl. On War, trans. Col. J.J. Graham. New and Revised edition with Introduction and Notes by Col. F.N. Maude, in Three Volumes (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & C., 1918). Vol. 1.