One of the major mistakes in business, which can turn out to be quite expensive, is to confuse strategy with tactics, or even worse, grand strategy for strategy.
Indeed, understanding context is the most valuable skill for a human being and, better yet, for a group of humans operating in the real world.
Context is like the territory. It’s like you are on a minefield, but you believe it’s a greenfield.
Understanding the territory is critical as it helps you discover the “rules of the game” you’re part of.
A territory, its shape, and its direction will be quite structural. It doesn’t matter how hard you try; it’ll be bigger than you.
Thus, just like a giant wave that is coming, understanding the territory enables you to position yourself to ride that or avoid to be wrecked by it.
Unless you believe you can shape the wave, and only a few really can.
The reason is that many of the massive changes that come, especially in the tech world, are part of what I’ve defined as “fundamental or foundational shifts.”
These are often the result of a tech convergence, where a few technologies become fully viable at once, accelerating the speed of progress in a much broader industry.
Thus, going back to grand strategy, that is what it means to understand the territory.
It will inform you of the real-world dynamics within which you can operate in the first place.
Reading that structure and understanding the underlying territory is a grand strategy.
From there, you need a map.
Or a way to navigate that territory once you’ve understood it, even intuitively.
That’s what strategy is, it’s the temporary map, which you have drafted, as a result of having understood the territory, its dynamics, the way it’s shaped.
But also the way it’s changing or has changed.
That is why, without grand strategy, there is no strategy.
The map follows the territory.
You can formulate tactics once you have mapped the context based on the underlying territory.
Tactics are all the possible routes to move on that map based on the territory.
Once again, there is no single route; many are possible, and a few will lead in the right direction on the map.
Each will bring you closer to the territory where you can achieve the most as a person or business.
Thus, from here, it is derived that there’s no effective strategy without a grand strategy. And not good routes without the map, thus the strategy.
Keep that in mind!
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Grand Strategy = Territory (Structural/Contextual)
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Strategy = Map (Navigational/Directional)
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Tactic = Routes (Operational/Executional/Optional)
