Musings on project management: Grand strategy

Wednesday, December 2, 2015

Grand strategy

Every enterprise engages in strategy.

It's a matter of routine to some: Driven by the calendar, it's now time to do the "strategic plan".
To others, it's another name for how to engage with risk -- a risk might be a tactical failure, but at the same time, it could be a strategic success: The other guy won today, but he killed himself doing it.

And, of course, there is always self-interest: To be accused of not thinking strategically is a definite career limiter.

But, is grand strategy an illusion? I think not! But, consider these pro-illusion ideas from a recent essay on just that point:*

"It makes sense to put stock in strategy if:

The [enterprise] has consistent preferences, if

It can assess the costs and benefits of alternative courses of action (and make decisions more or less rationally), and if

It has the capacity to follow through on its strategic choices.

But [perhaps] none of this is possible, and thus strategy is an illusion .....

In the complex and highly uncertain world of [big project and big enterprise] politics, it is all but impossible to identify the ideal strategy ahead of time. The [enterprise or project] lacks full knowledge about the threats it confronts, in part because [other businesses and markets] act [in private] and in part because their interests change over time. As a result, the consequences of [strategic] policy are consistently unpredictable.

The strategizing ritual contributes to a .... sense of insecurity. Psychological blinders, moreover, make strategizing still more difficult.

People suffer from all sorts of cognitive limitations that hinder decision-making—in particular, a tendency to rationalize.

Instead of acting on the basis of ... beliefs, we revise our beliefs to make sense of our improvisations.

We avoid identifying priorities and the tradeoffs among them.

Moreover, businesses are not unitary actors, and bureaucratic battles impede strategic planning and consistency.

This sounds like the "noestimates" version of "nostrategy": As a result, the consequences of [strategic] policy are consistently unpredictable.

I'm not buying the thesis that not thinking about a future that has a discriminating difference with the present is somehow a good thing. Just because -- the future is unpredictable with precision and there are unknowns and unknowables that will drive us off course -- is no reason not to tackle the hard stuff

*David M. Edelstein and Ronald R. Krebsein, writing in the Nov-Dec 2015 issue of Foreign Affairs