Strategy is more of a creative art than a scientific act. Yet, most places approach strategy through a planning process. The biggest failure of strategy is thinking about it as an episodic event thus, conflating it with a one-off planning process with a list of items. Whereas most organizations have ‘strategic plans’, I can’t route for the fact that most of them have strategies. More than ever is the absence of strategy.
For one other reason, strategy also tends to sit within the finance functions (another grand error). In the sense that the incentives are not right for it to sit there. Whereas every organization should have a financial strategy, letting strategy to sit within finance makes skews the strategy towards financial objectives. Lo and behold if those objectives are short-term, and thus you end up with a ‘strategy’ aimed at surviving one financial year to the next.
Strategy should be under the stewardship of the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) or Managing Director. The office and function of strategy should sit within there. Secondly, there’s also a better way to approach strategy, that of path design.
Imagine that the market is a thick forest, where your organization is a person/warrior making their way through this thick forest. The forest is of different terrains, different physical features. You will find rivers, you will find hills, you will find thickets, you will also find all kinds of animals. What path do you create? How do you create this path? And how do you protect this path?
Path design is an art. It requires an integration of many pieces. You could design a path that’s extremely long for life. Yet, you could also design a short and dangerous path. Those that have explored the world of app design will understand this better. Predicting that user flow and behaviour and designing the path in such a way that enhances experience and output.
Path Design requires great imagination. Perhaps one of the number one skill of great strategists is sheer imagination. Because strategy is never present. There’s not a set of strategies to choose from. All you have is a set of choices that you should combine in such a way that you are able to create a meaningful strategy.
Let me quote something from Yoweri Museveni’s collection of essays in his book- ‘What is Africa’s Problem’. On Page 111, one of the essays is titled; ‘why we fought a protracted war’ and I certainly believe it’s one of Uganda’s best articulations of strategy. In this essay, Museveni reveals the strategist within him.
“Strategy means the methodology one uses to solve a problem as a whole, that is, to solve a problem from A to Z. Tactics, on the other hand, are the methods one uses to solve parts of a problem from A to B or from B to C.”
Back to our thick forest simulation, what is that methodology that approaches that problem from A to Z?
Museveni goes ahead to explain that the NRA had about four options. It could fight a conventional war, it could lead an insurrection, it could orchestrate a coup, or it could lead a protracted people’s war. Museveni says they had chosen a protracted war strategy.
“This is a strategy where popular forces, namely those forces supported by the masses, wage a protracted war against those in power. The elements in power may be colonial or local oppressors. Popular forces may start off with weak military units in terms of numbers, weaponry, and organization, but by using the strategy of a protracted war, they will turn potential into actual strength, thus overcoming their weaknesses vis-a-vis the enemy forces.
A protracted people’s war goes through three phases: guerrilla warfare, mobile warfare, and finally conventional warfare. The phase of guerrilla warfare entails operations carried out by small units—section, platoon, or company—operating almost independently and launching short, sharp attacks, ambushes, and executions of notoriously antipeople elements.
In order to cope with these attacks, the government or colonial forces will try to spread out their forces by fragmenting their army into numerous small units. These small units are thus made more vulnerable and subject to surprise attacks, harrassment, or annihilation. If, on the other hand, the enemy does not scatter his forces in this manner, he will lose control of territory and population to the popular forces. This is an absolutely insoluble dilemma for a repressive machinery, provided the cause is popular and the guerrilla commanders do not make mistakes through adventurism or defeatism.”
This is an essay written and published in 1984 (two years before the NRA takeover in 1986). I share it here not to show any support for Museveni, but to appreciate the articulation and understanding of strategy. But furthermore, to illustrate the point of Strategy as path design. Choosing a protracted war was choosing the methodology of that path. What happened at every stage of this path design are the tactics. But the overall philosophy was clear.
I love to think of Strategy as a formulation of a guiding philosophy, of the glue that holds everything together. You can think of it as a fighting style. Or in football, you think of it as a playing style. Barcelona has a certain style, so does Arsenal. That’s the glue that creates coherence.