Strategic thinking is concerned about the big things that matter. Putting it another way, strategic thinking concerns itself with strategy, which can be defined as “a plan of action or policy designed to achieve a major or overall aim. ” While good, I think we an do better than that.

Two of the foremost experts on strategy today are Lawrence Freedman and Richard Rumelt. Freedman is an emeritus professor of War Studies at King’s College London while Rumelt is an emeritus professor at Anderson School of Management at the University of California. Both have written extensively about strategy from the military and business perspective. Its interesting to see how they talk about strategy. In an essay titled Strategic Fanaticism, Freedman states that

“In practice strategy starts with the problem at hand and then proceeds with the options for each stage shaped by those preceding. “

The critical point here is that strategy is the ultimate form of problem solving. You don’t need a strategy if you don’t have a problem. This dovetails nicely with Rumelt who, in Good Strategy Bad Strategy, defines three components in within strategy: the diagnosis of the challenge, a guiding policy to address it, and a set of coherent actions to carry out the policy. Both define strategy as starting from the challenge and working to overcome it. But we don’t have to stop there, we can drill down even further. Freedman continues on.

“Plans rarely work out as intended largely because other actors, allies, and clients as well as competitors and enemies do not behave as expected. The relationship between ends and means in in practice dialectical. If means cannot be found to achieve set ends, then ends will need to be reset. “

Here, we see the elements of strategy make their first appearance: ends, ways, and means. Strategy is a constant balancing between those three elements. Ends are our goals. They are what we want. Means are the resources we need to accomplish our goals. And ways are how we use those resources to achieve our goals. Every strategy ever built or to be built can be decoded into those three elements by asking three questions:

1. What does the person want? (ends)
2. What do they need to get it? (means)
3. How are they going to get it? (ways)

Of the three, ways and means have the most visibility. Things are constantly in motion. Companies make investments, develop products, create markets. Countries fight wars, enact trade and economic policies, pass laws for their citizens. All are part of some strategy crafted to achieve some aim, some purpose. Over time, these strategies become apparent.

Freedman also introduces a second concept, that of a strategy having stages. Many times the ultimate goal we are pursuing is not available to us in the immediate future. We have to get there over time. So there may be several stages of a strategy. A company for instance, may want to dominate a particular marketplace but their immediate concern is survival. What good are future goals if your very existence is at stake? So you stage your strategy. First is survival, second is stabilization, third is domination. This staging makes sure the appropriate priorities are chased at the appropriate time.

Freedman makes one more point that is important in our Frankensteinian world today. That is plans rarely work out as intended because of the actions of other players. A new competitor makes an unexpected move in the marketplace, disrupting your plans with a completely new approach. You have to pivot and rethink what you are doing. This is the dialectical tension that occurs between ends and means. You may have to reset ends to what can be accomplished with the means at hand. This constant tension also helps to avoid treating strategy as a mere formula of ends, ways, and means and enters strategy into the realm of dynamic activity.

Rumelt goes through much of the same thought process, though he does not mention ends, ways, and means directly. You can see them implicitly as you correctly assess the current situation to figure out what the challenge is and then how to overcome that challenge. The strategy that emerges can indeed be broken down into ends, ways, and means which cane be broken down into strategy.

Both Rumelt and Freedman agree on one final point; strategy is not a static, rigid plan. It is a fluid problem solving process that is both iterative and adaptive. It requires the ability to constantly evaluate the environment as well as the ability to calculate the effects of any moves you make. This means again that strategy is a constant process between knowledge and action, particularly in the highly complex world we live in today. Moving forward, this model of strategy will be a constant theme as we discuss the decision making process of intelligent agents in today’s world.