A Pirate's Take on Strategy vs. Tactics
diogomonica.com
diogomonica.com
My experience is that strategic planning is about the “what”. What should we even be doing? As important, what should we NOT be doing? Given our limited time and resources, what is an efficient approach to winning the game we are playing (or do we even need to identify the game and define winning first)? Question everything. Challenge assumptions.
Mostly ask “what” and “why”, sometimes “who” and “where”.
Tactical planning is about “how”. How can we effectively implement the strategy? Without challenging the assumptions that got us here, and assuming we’re already stuck with the game and the rules our strategy selected, how do we win? No more resources are coming. Too late to ask hard questions (except to use as input for next time we do strategy). Execute to maximize effectiveness; worry about efficiency only secondarily.
Mostly ask “how”, sometimes ask “where” and “who”.
Exactly this. The most common 'cause of death' for a good strategy is when too many bad ideas are tacked onto it. Most organizations have a good plan somewhere. The problem is that they also have bad plans and inadequate means to prune them off.
If you're using recursion, that should be clear. Just call everything a strategy, or everything a tactic.
Fact is this distinction between these terms has never been real in any sense. People vaguely use strategy to mean "big picture" and tactic to mean "particular action", but if you decompose it you'll see more little strategies inside.
This is true in many game-like situations.
More generally, the problem with defining "tactic" and "strategy" smells like a case of false assumptions: they're orthogonal, not opposite.
Indeed it's about high level vs zoomed-in detail.
Strategy is a route to a goal that occurs once in the domain.
A tactic may be repeated multiple times for sub-goals when the same or similar sub-goals reoccur.
A tactic might win a battle but a strategy wins a war. But if you're fighting multiple wars, then the strategies for each war are tactics, because there may be reoccurring elements in each war. It's the repetition and reuse that makes things tactical, practiced, routine.
In a chess match, the opening book is tactics, the mid-game following the combinatorial explosion of potential moves is strategy, and then the end-game is back to tactics, after the board has been reduced to fewer pieces.
In the real world, breaching and clearing a modern urban building is tactics. Part of the squad covers as the remainder moves. Corners are checked before moving around them. Doors are checked before opening. There is still a strategic element, in that any given building will have a unique floor plan, but with sufficiently developed tactics, the strategy portion becomes somewhat unimportant.
Capturing and occupying a specific city is strategic. The tactic of breaching and clearing buildings will be used many times in that strategy, and so too will the tactic of erecting concrete T-wall barriers and creating checkpoints, but the choices of where to start, and in what order to proceed, are all strategic.
It is difficult to separate the terms, because every real-life situation will have some portion that can be matched to a general pattern, and some portion that represents the variance from that pattern.
Tactics are smaller-scale than strategy. Tactics is the implementation details and strategy is the big picture. Tactics are the movements of chess pieces and strategy is the intent of those movements.
In order of scale: Strategy > Tactics > mechanics/micro/control
*micro as in micromanagement, of individual units in your army,
This is often contrasted with "macro", which refers to overall strategy + consistency of your "mechanics" for other actions besides micro-ing army units (training harvesters, building bases, having enough houses, sending out well-timed scouts, etc).
Kidd kept the French sea passes of the Quedagh Merchant, as well as the vessel itself. While the passes were at best a dubious defence of his capture, British admiralty and vice-admiralty courts (especially in North America) heretofore had often winked at privateers' excesses into piracy, and Kidd may have been hoping that the passes would provide the legal fig leaf that would allow him to keep Quedagh Merchant and her cargo. Renaming the seized merchantman Adventure Prize, he set sail for Madagascar.
It's overly long, convoluted, and the central pirate anecdote works only to obscure the core principles.
There is an attempt here to 'ape' the style of similar, more enlightening pieces, but they've really gotten lost along the way.
The style of piece I mean is 'aped' by the article is "What X can teach us about Y". I've read some really good pieces by The Economist in this tradition, that examine historical case studies for modern insights.
Some other examples from HN in that style. I don't think these are particularly brilliant, but I don't think they're fatally flawed. I found that their analogy explained rather than obfuscated.
http://alexkudlick.com/blog/what-the-four-color-theorem-can-...
https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/telecom/security/what-th...
During our pre-planning and sprint planning sessions, our PO usually lays out a plan of our priorities (strategy) occasionally he will suggest implementation plans (tactics) as one is want to do for an engineer turned product owner, but I always try to take a step back and ask him "what sort of system do you want".
It's been a few years since he was a day to day developer, he's not as well versed in the new modules and functionality (tactics) that are now built into the system, often times he'll go into tactical discussion but it'll be off base because the resources we'd use to execute those tactics have changed. By trying to understand his intent and strategy I've been able to deliver what he wants but have the freedom to implement it in my own way.
The 2nd most interesting point: From Captain Kidd's point of view, and looked at objectively, Captain Kidd was an innocent man! He was carrying out a legitimate privateer commission! He had documents supporting this, but the facts and those documents were suppressed by rich and powerful people. In a way, Captain Kidd was killed by fake news, and his reputation to this day is still affected.
1) The already mentioned "what" and "how" distinction
2) Phrase the strategy as an already-completed state of being, that is false now but will be true when met
3) Each strategy can have only ONE supporting tactic (which can be a verby action statement)
4) Each tactic can have 2:n multiple sub-strategies.
5) A sub-strategy can support multiple tactics.
You end up with a DAG.
In engineering in particular, the biggest impediment is that technicians tend to describe tactics when trying to describe strategies. I'm often asking, "Yes, but what objective does that meet?" or some such in response. And sometimes their answer is circular - the objective that it meets is that it eliminates the absence of their favored solution. Some people honestly never understand past that point. You have to pick your battles.
Strategy is like markov chain where each state is a subpart of the problem, and each state transfer to other state a tactic with varying success probability. But since the exact definition is not mathematical it will always be a little ambiguous.
https://www.amazon.com/Strategy-History-Lawrence-Freedman/dp...
It is also important to acknowledge the higher-level concept above strategy -- e.g the vision, mission, or end-goal. Alternatively, this higher level can be framed as a specific, tangible problem that needs to be solved.
Tactics:
https://chesstempo.com/tactical-motifs.html
Strategies: https://chesstempo.com/positional-motifs.html
Strategy is where you want go / do / be and tactics are how you get there.
"Tactics is knowing what to do, when there is something to do. Strategy is knowing what to do, when there is nothing to do."