Mar 12, 2017 06:11 AM
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2017/02/23/th...#more-5789
EXCERPT: [...] Strategy is everywhere in our society. But strategy is also nowhere. Businesses have “strategy” for managing competition. Yet this seems to do very little for them in a dynamic and unstable external environment. The Pentagon has “strategy” for winning wars. But we’re going on a decade and a half of inconclusive bloodshed in the Middle East and elsewhere. Policy analysts perpetually talk about having a “grand strategy” for American geopolitics but seem unable to get this strategy through government. And if you don’t have a strategy for convincing a bunch of politicians and bureaucrats, how “grand” really is your strategy?
One possible (if depressing) conclusion to take from this is that strategy is just an illusory abstraction that we have invented to give meaning to that which has none. We use it as a retrospective framing device to explain a complex series of events (of our own making but mostly of external provenance) that we do not understand. So maybe strategic theory is really just an gussied up form of conspiracy theory. We need to impose order on the world and believe that someone, somewhere, knows that the hell is going on. That certainly has a grain of truth to it, but its also too excessively nihilistic. What seems more clear is that the dominant ways of thinking about strategy that we use – which are actually just variations on the same underlying assumptions we have about the world – don’t work. I will explain at length why it does not work and I have already hinted as much in this section and the one that opened this essay.
But before I explain further, I would like you to temporarily take your mind out of the realm of “serious” things like war, politics, business, foreign policy, or geostrategy. As a PhD student I have learned the hard way that the manner in which I thought about serious things was profoundly unserious and un-scientific.
When I thought about areas of life where strategy decided something big and important, I often did so without an open mind. I took for granted the things that were written in textbooks and the things that practitioners said. I would often discover upon closer investigation that these things I took for granted had an at best minor relationship to reality. The elegant theoretical model in the textbook was a just-so story that was destroyed by “out-of-sample” data. The memoir of the general was a mixture of some ground truth but far more self-serving selective memory and self-promotion. And the cutting-edge of research in academic journals often was little better and sometimes much, much worse.
These big ideas — as well as plenty of small and medium-sized ones — can become a trap because they can separate you from seeing the obvious. So leave all of that behind for a moment and think purely about your own life experiences as an individual. You do not have to be an great political leader, a decorated soldier, a captain of industry, or really anyone important. Suppose that your experiences are “data” that should be counted and measured just as much as any of the aforementioned figures’ histories. And so imagine that you are trying to explain to a neutral observer about the how and why of major life decisions you have made or how you perform an intricate professional skill that you have spent years and years mastering. You could try to explain it as the outcome of a series of explicit plans you have made (“I knew I was going to do N, which requires K, and so on”) or a policy/rule that you adopted (“My logic is to always do N in situations of K”). You could try but you would likely fail.
For example, you did not know in advance that you were going to meet your husband at that bar, and perhaps he was your second or third choice but grew on you when you got to know him. Maybe you did not know in advance either that you would stay together at all given the tests that your relationships endured even when it became serious. On a different tack, perhaps you could say that it was your goal to become president of the fraternity and you took the actions that were contextually and pragmatically necessary to reach that goal. But that doesn’t tell you how you balanced your goal of being fraternity president with other competing imperatives, such as the need to eat, sleep, attend classes, maintain a romantic relationship with your girlfriend, and work part-time. And what if you were on the fence about wanting to be president and the sudden and unexpected exit of an formidable rival pushed you to do it? Or that you may have never originally wanted to become president at all and you ended up doing it because you failed at something else important to you? And what about situations where you did not have a goal at all and managed to somehow, through tinkering, curiosity, and exploration, arrive at a major achievement that you would later retroactively claim was the result of a pursuable goal you always had?
The same explanatory problems occur when we think about the aforementioned ‘serious’ topics described a few paragraphs up. We always tend to leave something out when we think about strategy, perhaps because it is simply too large and multifarious to be any one thing independent of our own subjective beliefs about what form of strategy matters and where strategy can be found. When you try to explain in retrospect how you fought decades ago in that particular battle, you will leave critical details out unintentionally and describe how you fought vaguely and incompletely. When people read about the strategy of a particular figure in history, they also are the helpless victim of the historian or the social scientist’s need to make the figure’s strategy coherent and linear enough to fit into a coherent narrative. He was bound to do X because of his overriding idea of how the struggle was to be waged, an idea that the researcher has often retroactively read into a pattern of behavior with no logical organization or the contradictory documentary evidence available from the historical figure’s personal papers. And to what degree can a particular leader’s success really be attributed to her own strategic genius as opposed to the opponent’s mistakes, the quality of her subordinates, or the favorable geostrategic position of her country? Maybe we might even say that we cannot talk about strategic success or failure at all without discussing the human genetic and evolutionary heritage and the benefits and limitations it offers anyone engaged in a competitive interaction? The purpose of the study of history and the pursuit of better theoretical and empirical knowledge of strategy is that study is supposed to rectify this problem. But have they been successful at finding the answer?
Yes and no. Disciplines that study strategy are products of the Enlightenment and its urge to formally represent, systematize, and organize the world’s knowledge in great chains of being and tree-like hierarchies. The hope is that this yields time-invariant principles of how the world works. Perhaps they are not to be mechanically applied in action. They are, as the caveat goes, only a guide to professional thinking that must be done contextually. All models are wrong but some are useful. Yada yada. You have heard many of these cautions — or less charitably, handwaves — before. But there is still some expectation that theories and concepts provide meaningful guidance due to their capturing of regularities. Things that exist outside of individual human minds and survive long after particular humans are dead. Ideas about strategy are also products of a secular but nonetheless mystical belief that everything serves a clearly definable, teleological end. So strategic knowledge aims to formalize, to discover and lay out the rules, and most importantly to make the complex simple. That has proven to be a tremendously successful way of doing research on and thinking about competitive interaction in many cases. But it has flaws. I will briefly list them here before moving on.....
EXCERPT: [...] Strategy is everywhere in our society. But strategy is also nowhere. Businesses have “strategy” for managing competition. Yet this seems to do very little for them in a dynamic and unstable external environment. The Pentagon has “strategy” for winning wars. But we’re going on a decade and a half of inconclusive bloodshed in the Middle East and elsewhere. Policy analysts perpetually talk about having a “grand strategy” for American geopolitics but seem unable to get this strategy through government. And if you don’t have a strategy for convincing a bunch of politicians and bureaucrats, how “grand” really is your strategy?
One possible (if depressing) conclusion to take from this is that strategy is just an illusory abstraction that we have invented to give meaning to that which has none. We use it as a retrospective framing device to explain a complex series of events (of our own making but mostly of external provenance) that we do not understand. So maybe strategic theory is really just an gussied up form of conspiracy theory. We need to impose order on the world and believe that someone, somewhere, knows that the hell is going on. That certainly has a grain of truth to it, but its also too excessively nihilistic. What seems more clear is that the dominant ways of thinking about strategy that we use – which are actually just variations on the same underlying assumptions we have about the world – don’t work. I will explain at length why it does not work and I have already hinted as much in this section and the one that opened this essay.
But before I explain further, I would like you to temporarily take your mind out of the realm of “serious” things like war, politics, business, foreign policy, or geostrategy. As a PhD student I have learned the hard way that the manner in which I thought about serious things was profoundly unserious and un-scientific.
When I thought about areas of life where strategy decided something big and important, I often did so without an open mind. I took for granted the things that were written in textbooks and the things that practitioners said. I would often discover upon closer investigation that these things I took for granted had an at best minor relationship to reality. The elegant theoretical model in the textbook was a just-so story that was destroyed by “out-of-sample” data. The memoir of the general was a mixture of some ground truth but far more self-serving selective memory and self-promotion. And the cutting-edge of research in academic journals often was little better and sometimes much, much worse.
These big ideas — as well as plenty of small and medium-sized ones — can become a trap because they can separate you from seeing the obvious. So leave all of that behind for a moment and think purely about your own life experiences as an individual. You do not have to be an great political leader, a decorated soldier, a captain of industry, or really anyone important. Suppose that your experiences are “data” that should be counted and measured just as much as any of the aforementioned figures’ histories. And so imagine that you are trying to explain to a neutral observer about the how and why of major life decisions you have made or how you perform an intricate professional skill that you have spent years and years mastering. You could try to explain it as the outcome of a series of explicit plans you have made (“I knew I was going to do N, which requires K, and so on”) or a policy/rule that you adopted (“My logic is to always do N in situations of K”). You could try but you would likely fail.
For example, you did not know in advance that you were going to meet your husband at that bar, and perhaps he was your second or third choice but grew on you when you got to know him. Maybe you did not know in advance either that you would stay together at all given the tests that your relationships endured even when it became serious. On a different tack, perhaps you could say that it was your goal to become president of the fraternity and you took the actions that were contextually and pragmatically necessary to reach that goal. But that doesn’t tell you how you balanced your goal of being fraternity president with other competing imperatives, such as the need to eat, sleep, attend classes, maintain a romantic relationship with your girlfriend, and work part-time. And what if you were on the fence about wanting to be president and the sudden and unexpected exit of an formidable rival pushed you to do it? Or that you may have never originally wanted to become president at all and you ended up doing it because you failed at something else important to you? And what about situations where you did not have a goal at all and managed to somehow, through tinkering, curiosity, and exploration, arrive at a major achievement that you would later retroactively claim was the result of a pursuable goal you always had?
The same explanatory problems occur when we think about the aforementioned ‘serious’ topics described a few paragraphs up. We always tend to leave something out when we think about strategy, perhaps because it is simply too large and multifarious to be any one thing independent of our own subjective beliefs about what form of strategy matters and where strategy can be found. When you try to explain in retrospect how you fought decades ago in that particular battle, you will leave critical details out unintentionally and describe how you fought vaguely and incompletely. When people read about the strategy of a particular figure in history, they also are the helpless victim of the historian or the social scientist’s need to make the figure’s strategy coherent and linear enough to fit into a coherent narrative. He was bound to do X because of his overriding idea of how the struggle was to be waged, an idea that the researcher has often retroactively read into a pattern of behavior with no logical organization or the contradictory documentary evidence available from the historical figure’s personal papers. And to what degree can a particular leader’s success really be attributed to her own strategic genius as opposed to the opponent’s mistakes, the quality of her subordinates, or the favorable geostrategic position of her country? Maybe we might even say that we cannot talk about strategic success or failure at all without discussing the human genetic and evolutionary heritage and the benefits and limitations it offers anyone engaged in a competitive interaction? The purpose of the study of history and the pursuit of better theoretical and empirical knowledge of strategy is that study is supposed to rectify this problem. But have they been successful at finding the answer?
Yes and no. Disciplines that study strategy are products of the Enlightenment and its urge to formally represent, systematize, and organize the world’s knowledge in great chains of being and tree-like hierarchies. The hope is that this yields time-invariant principles of how the world works. Perhaps they are not to be mechanically applied in action. They are, as the caveat goes, only a guide to professional thinking that must be done contextually. All models are wrong but some are useful. Yada yada. You have heard many of these cautions — or less charitably, handwaves — before. But there is still some expectation that theories and concepts provide meaningful guidance due to their capturing of regularities. Things that exist outside of individual human minds and survive long after particular humans are dead. Ideas about strategy are also products of a secular but nonetheless mystical belief that everything serves a clearly definable, teleological end. So strategic knowledge aims to formalize, to discover and lay out the rules, and most importantly to make the complex simple. That has proven to be a tremendously successful way of doing research on and thinking about competitive interaction in many cases. But it has flaws. I will briefly list them here before moving on.....