- Strategy without Design: The Silent Efficacy of Indirect Action
- The Evolving Operating System of Philanthropy
- Strategy: A History
- On Grand Strategy
- The Art of War
The slide image is NOT a Strategy!
A strategy is not an operational plan, like the one you might put together for a grant using a logic model. Instead, a strategy is a way to deal with two unavoidable realities:
- The inherent unpredictability of the future
- The universal scarcity of resources for what we wish to do
The further we attempt to see into the future, the more uncertainty we face, and the more our decisions to commit resources will be wrong. We try in various ways to work around this reality.
One way is to reduce the scope of the changes we try to make, using such tools as logic models.
When we create an outcome that is easy to measure, we are contracting the possibilities of change, and undermining our ability to create change that is truly strategic, that won’t be washed out by changes and trends in the larger system.
Another way is to describe in some detail the changes we want to seek over the short term while using delusional thinking to describe the ones we hope for further into the future.
A third way is to ignore some or all the larger forces we already know are out there, but which we can’t quantify or parse effectively, or that we believe we can’t change.
And there are many more non-strategic assumptions we make to help us get through our day-to-day life.
