Strategic And Tactical Are Not Antonyms

In the mumbo-jumbo of corporate management-ese (at least on the IT side of the house), we often treat strategy and tactics as antonyms.

As in: "My project doesn't have time to wait for the strategic corporate solution, so I'm going to implement a throw-away tactical hack and replace it in the next release."

This sort of thinking and planning does disservice to both ends of the spectrum:

• Strategy: if our corporate strategies are not tied to real, urgent project deliverables they'll never get done or will never be usable
• Tactics: everyone knows (grin-grin, wink-wink) that this tactical solution is going to live beyond the next release, and will probably become a core engine of the application.

We've taken the terms strategic and tactical so far out of their original contexts that they no longer have useful meanings.

In military terms, tactics are the on-the-ground techniques, manuevers, and skills that are critical to winning specific battles and taking individual hills. Strategy is the overall plan for making sure that the battles we're winning and the hills we're taking actually lead to defeating the enemy.

We need for another approach that blends the two: outstanding execution of incremental, tactical software delivery, coupled with a lightweight strategic view of what we're trying to accomplish overall.

To help foster that, we need a good, strong way to express the fact that the tactics aren't things we do when we don't have time for the strategy, the tactics are the steps we take (and techniques we use) to achieve the strategy. Perhaps this doesn't justify the introduction of a new term (like StraTactics?) but simply some better definitions and models for how to use the existing ones. -- BillBarnett

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It would seem to me that there is no clear boundary, but rather that aspects of planning and execution can be described as "more strategic" or "more tactical" in broad contexts.

"To take over the world" is actually a goal, and the planning that describes it in the most general terms is a "more strategic" discussion, while the monthly/weekly/daily activities supporting this in increasingly granular fashion moves toward increasingly "more tactical" activities.

Strategies describe more "anchored" sub-goals ("to take over Europe" or "to take over Africa") while the expression of how to infiltrate European banking would be (in the greater scheme) tactical, while it is clear that taking over European banking involves some strategic elements itself.

It would seem that context is important to permit classification as strategy or tactics.

The more something is a "rule" the more strategic value it has; the more something is a solution to the problem before you the more tactical value it has.

-- GarryHamilton