In business, strategy is a high level plan to achieve the organizations goals. It needs to be far reaching and cover a reasonable period of time, that is three, five or even ten years.
To use the words of the popular rock group “The Who”, for me one trait of strategists is they “Can see for miles and miles” That is to say true strategies are both far reaching and visionary.
Lip Service
Too often I observe organizational leaders label their tactical activities as strategic. To be clear tactics are actions in support of the strategy and by their very nature focus on short term objectives which support the longer term and higher level goals which form the underpinning of the strategy. I really like the term strategic direction as it implies the strategy is pointing the way (miles ahead) but does not necessarily deal with the details that come up along the way.
Most Frustrating Usage of Strategic and Tactical Approaches
My biggest pet peeve is when tactical objectives receive strategic treatment and vice-versa . Here’s a hypothetical example of this.
Strategy
– Build highly functional software tools for enabling development the digital games, focus on functionality not quality.
Tactics (in support of the strategy)
– develop and implement methodologies for gathering and translating functional needs of game developers into software products
– since the focus is on functionality build a strong support practice that can respond to and fix deficiencies with the software tools quickly and with minimal impact on the customers.
In this example, during the execution of the tactical activities to gather and translate the requirements of game developers, if discussions begin around whether the efforts should be focused on game developers and things like should the focus be on functionality or quality, then the focus moves away from the tactical imperative – delivery a product in support of the objective.
The reason for separating strategic and tactical plans is so when the work is actually being performed (either developing a strategy or executing the strategy) the teams can focus on their objective (as defined by the strategy). Re-visiting the strategy during tactical execution is not only inefficient, at it’s worst can lead to circular churn with no results and the associated negative impacts.
A Real Life Example
This is a highly summarized version;
In 1997, 3d Realms decided to build on their successful strategy of developing three dimensional action third party shooter games. Tactically it was decided to build the next Duke Nukem game (Duke Nukem Forever) to continue the success of a very popular series. This should take about a year. Unfortunately during the game build the strategies for the kind of game, game engine, underpinning technologies, etc, kept being revisited so much so that a highly anticipated game first announced in 1997 (and planned for delivery in 1998) was still was not completed by 2010 (and so 3D realms went under, but that is another story). This is a great example of what happens when you are not in tactical mode but should be.