Vision, Strategy, and Tactics

One of the things that's been bugging me in my professional life for some time are the ideas of vision, strategy, and tactics. At my work, I'm often involved in discussions about strategy in particular, with large organizations that don't really know how it's done, or even really how to think about the problem. It's such a common problem though (and not one that's specific to large organizations, but even to individuals who are trying to plan different aspects of their life) that I thought I'd throw out a few observations about it.

First, what are things anyway? Vision, strategy, and tactics are not hopelessly blurry Dilbertesque buzzwords subject to random interpretation. The terms do actually mean something. "Vision" is a statement of some hypothetical future; it's what you aspire to or hope to accomplish. It is not an action, but a description of some future state. A good vision should be specific and unambiguous. Anyone should be able to look at the state of affairs and determine whether that vision has been accomplished or not. A great example of a short and sweet vision statement is, "Wind power cheaper than coal power by 2020." It's a good vision statement because it's specific, audacious, and easy to evaluate. Examples of lousy and meaningless vision statements include things like

• "To deliver differentiated value to our clients",
• "To provide best-in-class service to a broad range of sectors over time"
• "Improve capabilities and gain stakeholder buy-in"

Notice that these bad examples are open-ended (no dates or milestones), and fuzzy. It's not too surprising that they sound Dilbertesque. Acceptance of a vision like this is concrete evidence of groupthink, and participants who are more invested in paying lip service to the process of strategic thinking, and less invested in the process of actually improving anything.

Once you have a vision, you need a strategy. Yes, in that order. Without a vision, even the most brilliant strategist won't get you very far. The reason this is true boils down to the old chestnut that "without knowing where you're going, any road will do". The purpose of the strategy is to outline the plans that will be used to achieve the vision. Good strategies are:

• Plans that articulate the what, not the how. A strategy should say what you are going to do (e.g. "build wind farms in locations in the midwest", or "invest in research to make wind power more efficient") and not the exact method that will be used;
• Plans that are complete; if all of the plans in the strategy are followed, it should be clear that the vision will be accomplished. Bad strategies have gaps, where it isn't clear how the vision will emerge, even after all plans have been successfully executed.

OK, let's assume there's a good strategy in place. Then and only then do you worry about tactics which go into specific actions, methods, and schedules that you will use to accomplish your goals. Tactics is where it pays to get specific, and to deal with all of the messy aspects of getting things done in the real world. Your strategy might be to invest in wind power research to make it more efficient, your tactics would involve which projects to fund and why. Tactical considerations would include where to put the windmills, what material to make them out of, how much of the budget to spend on building windmills vs. on research, and so on.

Tactics are heavily affected by the expediency of the moment, and the environment where you're operating. They should be fluid and subject to change. Strategy needs to be more firm, a guiding set of plans that help you coordinate tactical moves. Finally, the vision needs to be very firm. A vision should only change in response to a monumental shift in the real world.

A rapidly changing vision will render your strategy toothless (because the strategy will very quickly be heading in the wrong direction). A rapidly changing strategy leaves you nowhere with respect to tactics, because your tacticians and planners won't know where they're going, or why. On the other hand, tactics can change every day, while their strategic end remains the same. There is no inherent conflict there.

The problem with this constellation of considerations is that they require too many different styles of thinking, and too many talents at the same time. People who are good at vision and strategy tend to be lousy at tactics, and vice versa. Tactics are taught in any undergraduate college education in the form of the things that you need to do to accomplish a task. Almost no one learns strategy and vision in any formal education. The best that you can hope for is that they are exposed to someone who is really talented, and can pick up some of their chops.

No one learns strategy and vision in school, because school always starts with the end purposes "baked in". If you're a doctor, the purpose is to heal the patient. If you're a programmer, the purpose is to write a program. If you're an advertising major, the purpose is to create a TV ad. Strategy and vision are all about how to choose what you want when you are in an open environment and where your end is not pre-identified. Most people in school are already pursuing some purpose, and so they aren't exposed to the open-endedness that hones visionary and strategic thinking.

Even worse, when you cobble together teams that consist of folks with all of those necessary skills, they rarely get along. While not universally true, typically such teams have such different personalities, each group ends up thinking that the other groups just don't get it.

If all that wasn't enough, then there are the consultants. Most large organizations at least at some level realize that vision and strategy isn't their primary skill, so they call in consultants to help. Consultants are great for vetting existing ideas, helping to structure the discussion, or refining an idea. More often though instead of serving in that capacity, the organization abdicates their responsibility and assigns the consultants the task of coming up with the vision and strategy for them. No matter how smart the consultant, they are unable to come up with the right vision and strategy, because they aren't members of the organization. They don't have to live with the consequences of the decisions, they aren't as familiar with the operating environment. They simply aren't invested in the same way.

Look at it from the consultant's point of view. If you are being hired as an external consultant to write a company's vision and strategy, it's because your client doesn't know where they want to go, or what they want to do. What possible hope do you have of getting it right? How likely do you think it is that the company will follow that strategy if there's no way for them to know that the strategy reflects what they want to do (because they don't know)?

All of this just goes to show that even large organizations struggle with the question, "what do I want to be when I grow up?" Like people in their personal life, there is no objectively correct answer, only a huge number of options that you're left to sort through by yourself. Even if you concede that it can't ever be done perfectly, experience suggests that having a bad vision or strategy is better than having no vision or strategy. When the tacticians are running the nuthouse, it's pure chaos.