Understanding Strategic Action

It took me a long time to develop the concept of Strategic Action, and it is taking a lot of effort to adapt it to the exact needs of my different clients.

We can categorize management styles, and indeed any action we take, according to underlying assumptions about two main issues: Life Logic, and Change (aka Life Structure, and hence the Future):

• We may believe that life has a logic we can decipher, that there are actions more appropriate to the situation than others. You could call that Belief in Learning. We may believe we can learn and improve based on knowledge. We may believe otherwise. This is the first axis: Believers in the value of Knowledge (BVKs) to improve results of actions, vs. Unbelievers in the value of Knowledge (UVKs).
• We may also believe life is static or as good as; that even though the players change or at least they may exchange positions, that the rules of any given game do not change. The game may be how you make profit in a given industry, how to look great in a given group, or any other setting you may think of. We may either believe in the dynamism of the situations in which we find ourselves, or in their being static.

Based on the above categorization, we will opt to one of four familiar types of action:

1. Trial and Error. Those who resort to T&E are generally people or institutions that believe in the dynamism of life and the fluidity of the future. They will make errors in the belief that nothing important can go so wrong as to not being remediable. Moreover, they believe that they cannot make out a logic of how things are done, hence the futility of efforts spent in learning the logic of a certain situation. They better try doing something. It will either work or they can do something else later. Penalties, if any, will be negligible in a while. The philosophy behind this approach is that we will achieve better results by trying more than by learning.
2. Strategic Planning. On the exact opposite quadrant, we find SP; here we think that an error will leave traces forever; life is static; records will be kept; not only in people’s minds, but probably also as negative effects of cash flow that may hinder our progress forever comparatively to people who did not make our mistake. Moreover, life has a logic. We can figure out the best way to do something. This best wa, once figured out, will remain the best way since life structure is static. We can plan long term, as far as we wish. We can spend an eternity planning.
3. Inaction. Life is static so if we make an error it will stay forever. Better not take a risk. Better not learn since we cannot figure out what to do no matter what we learned. Better wait and see.
4. Desperate Action. Believing the exact beliefs as the Inactive, but thinking that the situation is so desperate nothing if lost will be worse than the current situation as it is or as it is unraveling, we may resort to desperate action, not because we know what we are doing nor that we believe that we are maximizing rewards, but because we can bear the risk of losing all to chance success rather than waste time waiting for sure demise. This type of action is in the same quadrant as above.

Strategic Action is an approach to management and growth that stems from the lacks of the familiar four action types described above. Strategic Action is an approach that believes that while things are not static, that, in fact, everything is in constant flux, yet we can decipher much of their movements and can to a large extent, while not knowing exactly what will happen, can still prepare for it and learn to act in a way that will have considerable positive result.

The more time-sensitive and risk-tolerant the manager is, the more likely s/he is to be Trial & Error-oriented, and the more quality-sensitive and risk averse s/he is, the more likely they are to be Strategic Planning-oriented. However, many managers have escaped this dilemma, and following the steps of those who studied successful managers and taught us, this blog tries to communicate, and possibly offer a discussion space, to learn how to escape it as well.

There are many keys to escape the trade-off between.

Well, first, it is Action. Second, Strategic. Strategic Action is in reality effective unilateral action.