I often hear people use the word strategy when they seem to mean something else. This post will explain strategy, operations, and tactics. It will explain how they relate to each other, and it will explain the two most common problems I see with this topic when it comes to planning and execution.
A strategy is a plan for applying resources to achieve a set of objectives. Objectives are what you want to do. Resources are the things you will need in order to do it.
Operations link strategic objectives to the tactical use of resources. Operations define when and where to expend resources. Operations involve activities like planning and campaigning (i.e. conducting a connected series of tactical activities).
Tactics are the specific actions taken to achieve a task (i.e. a mission). One or more tasks form an operational objective. One or more operational objectives form a strategic objective.
Done well, all of this stuff nests, people know their areas of responsibility and how their efforts contribute to a larger objective.
Typically, all of this stuff is a mess, people are confused about what’s expected of them, and some significant percentage are actively at odds with the organization.
On this subject, the root problem I find most often with people building, leading, or managing teams is a misunderstanding of how to use these concepts.
Part of this is a training issue. “Tactics” seems to be an uncommon word outside of the military community, and the business world seems to define “operations” as “anything the CEO doesn’t want to do.” So people throw “strategy” around in conversation when what they really mean is “tactics” or “operations,” and the communication devolves into word salad.
But that’s a surface-level problem with a discrete, fixable, aspect. Teach your team what the words mean. Write down your strategy, your plans, and your tactics. Hold each other accountable for being precise. Watch as your coordination, cohesion, and results improve.
The deeper problem, the one I see people mess up constantly, the one I have messed up at various times of my life, is thinking you have a strategy when you don’t. In practice, this looks like:
- Literally not having a written strategy. If you can’t write it, you don’t have it.
- Copying someone else’s strategy. They aren’t you.
- Having a strategy that doesn’t reflect the situation.
I don’t know why this is so common. I used to think it was because people just didn’t know or understand the process of thinking about strategy. Or they could intellectualize the concepts but couldn’t embody them. (I’m dispensing with bad faith reasons here, such as the person doesn’t care, is irrational, is corrupt, lacks intelligence, etc. We’re assuming the person cares, is normally irrational, and sufficiently intelligent.)
Now I think the reason is simpler, albeit harder to solve. It’s that most people don’t actually have strategic objectives. It’s just tit-for-tat all the way down. So they define their goals based on depriving the other, which they naively understand as winning, with the result that the goal post is always just beyond their grasp. As a consequence, they are reactive, they overreach, and they wind up in a catastrophe.