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Why is a strategy important? Having a strategy helps you keep the initiative in your hands, enhance your ability to see opportunities, use your strengths to the best advantage, and minimize your weaknesses.

— from Why Strategy and Tactics?, available here at NewTactics.

Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics

without strategy is the noise before defeat.

— Sun Tzu

What is strategy in relation to tactics? How does the strategist differ from the tactician? Find out some of the steps towards designing a good strategy. Third in a three-part series on moving from activity, to tactics, to strategy.

Defining strategy, and the strategist

What is the difference between a tactic and a strategy? Say your overall goal is to abolish the death penalty in your country. One strategy might be to legislate it out of existence. The strategy implies thinking globally about how to generate enough power for the passage of a national bill. The tactics will relate to specific actions taken on specific terrain, like mass phone-ins around key regional or national legislative projects, flash demonstrations shadowing officials who still support the death sentence, or vigils and blockades at facilities where executions are still being conducted.

How does the strategist differ from the tactician? As one gamer put it: “A tactician is skilled in planning and fighting battles. A strategist is skilled in war and peace.“ It’s the scale where the thinking happens. The tactician thinks contextually, the strategist, more globally. While the tactician focuses on the short- to mid-term, the strategist generally focuses on the mid-term to long-term.

Strategy design steps

Start from the North Star. Complete abolition of torture, nonviolent conflict replacing bloody warfare, worldwide gender justice... While you may never reach these dreams in your lifetime, your overarching purpose provides the guiding light for your compass. Goal-setting, the first step in any good strategy, will be all the more powerful if it aims straight for the general direction of your mission statement (personal or organizational).

Set the big goal. To lift the culture of impunity in Guatemala, to teach tactics of nonviolent struggle through a counter-recruitment campaign, or to end the trokosi practice in Ghana... This is where you give your impossible dream an earthly destination. Your goal should be achievable, yet significant enough to arouse tons of motivation.

Build step-by-step objectives. Break your big goal into objectives. Think of your objectives as the staircase to your goal. Each objective is supported by the previous one, and brings you a step closer to the higher goal. You want to build support in the cities, then mobilization at the state or regional level, to finally reach national influence. Your objectives should be SMART: specific, measurable, activating, realistic and time-specific.

Pick your targets. You want to be able to affect change in the most direct, effective way? Choose your target(s) carefully. Who can give you the decision you want, deliver the goods? That’s your primary target (e.g. the CEO). Once you have your primary target, think of those who can directly influence them (that’s your secondary targets, e.g. members of the Board). As needed, you may also try to impact those who can move those who influence the primary target (third-level targets, e.g. shareholders).

Identify allies and opponents. We have a great tool to help you identify your most dedicated opponents, your most active supporters, and all those in between. The tool is available right here on this site: The Spectrum of Allies.

Select tactics. Next, we enter the tactical domain. Think of how to move your allies and opponents over time, using specific tactics or methods. You can also use tactical mapping to identify pressure points.

Build a campaign. Time to build a framework. You should have all the main pieces by now. Go back to your objectives, keep in mind the landscape, and put everything on a timeline. Give your campaign a catchy name and an inspirational, achievable tone.

Now get to work. You may succeed beyond your wildest expectations.

— Philippe Duhamel, interTactica.org

Questions:

What is strategy to you? Is strategy more of an art form or a science? What are some of the tools you use (or have seen used)? How can we help teach strategy? Please share in the comments.