Why Strategy?

The world today contains an ever-greater number of associations whose objective is to effect positive change in our world.  What many, though by no means all, have in common, is creative and effective strategy.  Strategy is sometimes considered to reside in the realms of warfare and politics, where, to be fair, the greatest investigation has been done and the most useful principles extracted.  My thesaurus includes under strategy: “plan, scheme, policy, approach, tactic, line of attack, stratagem.”  To many, the second will always be a stumbling block.  Strategy to some seems like the province of scheming Machiavellis and bloodthirsty military leaders. 

But there is a far more interesting and enlightening way to view strategy.  The approaches taken by a species to surviving and thriving in its environment are called “strategies.”  Some of the greatest positive movements in our world have succeeded through a well-planned, highly strategic approach of non-violent civil disobedience.  The Indian independence movement, led by Ghandi, the Civil Rights movement led by Martin Luther King, the Czech dissident movement led by Vaclav Havel- these are only a few of the prominent items on a much longer list.  None of these victories would have been possible without clear strategy, deep psychological insight and organisation.

What made these strategies superior to those that opposed them was their breadth of vision, their insight into human psychology and human society. 

What then is strategy? 

Strategy is everything about how we relate to ourselves, to each other, to our communities, to the world, from the moment we gain the ability of conscious choice.  It is everything.  Our choice of worldview, of associates, of faith, of passions, of careers, and especially of goals and the definition of what is in our interests, all this is strategy, because, in the global sense, strategy is everything that helps us to live and thrive. 

But does not strategy suggest conflict?

No.  The greatest strategies are those which alleviate conflict, which create positive-sum relationships.  We hear less about them, at least when they are successful. 

However, the strategies we do hear about, which find their way most obviously into the historical record, are mostly strategies employed in conflict.  Even a strategist whose goal is peace can learn most effectively by studying conflict, albeit with a critical eye.  Without such understanding, I would argue, such goals cannot prosper, because the logic of conflict is very much at play in our world on many levels and cannot be defeated by the logic of peace unless proponents of the latter truly understand it.

The Strategist Does Not Wear Blinders

I realise very clearly that many of those who study strategy from a military or political perspective would dismiss the deeper aspects and broader applications of strategy, and that many of those who are concerned with these aspects and applications are squeamish and dismissive of the more classical realms of strategy and suspicious of those who understand them.  Nonetheless, I cannot turn my back on the fundamental unity of the strategic realm, much as it may be fractured and twisted by the limits of the vision and understanding of its practitioners.  To that end, I must accept going in that half of my readers will dislike at least half of my posts. 

So much the better.  One of the attributes of the successful strategist is the attempt to attain deep understanding even of perspectives with which he disagrees.  A strategist’s fundamental activity is the breaking down of barriers to understanding caused by prejudice and ideology, particularly within her or his own mind.