Why Strategic Cognition Works

Since every situation on the chaotic, front lines of competition is unique and changes from moment to moment, making good decisions is always a challenge. Even the smallest decisions in the chaotic world of competition can have huge implications—in terms of payoffs or costs—in the future. While everyone's front-line decisions address the immediate issues at hand, most people make those decisions without a working perspective on the big picture. The results are that, instead of making consistent progress, we meander around, losing as many battles as we win.

A better choice than flying by the seat of your pants is developing the proven perspective of classical strategy, which has worked for over 2,500 years. Once you master the perspective and skills taught by classical strategy, the critical elements of a situation simple "pop" out at you. This isn't magic, but a way to retrain your The study of front-line strategy arose from military confrontations, where every battle clearly demonstrated the limits of control. Sun Tzu saw that losers clung to their plans like an excuse, but winners were always those who know that they must respond appropriately to the dynamic nature of the situation.

Classical front-line strategy provides a simple model for complex dynamic environments to identify the opportunities hidden within them. Instead of focusing on a series of planned steps, the toolkits of strategy concern themselves with identifying relative competitive positions, the opportunities and ways to innovate that allow you to advance positions, and the types of responses to specific challenges that work most frequently. In the science of strategy we call decision-making in these three areas positional strategic cognition, expansion strategic cognition, and situational strategic cognition.

The power of strategic cognition is not deterministic. In other words, it isn't a mechanical system whose processes assure you a certain result. In other words, this isn't another form of planning. The tools and skills of rapid strategic cognition is stochastic. They simple improves the odds of success. The more skills you learn, the more perspective you develop and the more flashes of insight you will have. Each area of strategic cognition that you master broadens your capabilities.

Positional strategic cognition teaches that competitive situations are defined by the relationship among alternative positions. While every situation is unique, the key strategic factors—mission, climate, ground, command, and methods—define every position within a competitive arena. Each of these factors consists of known elements. Those elements are like chemicals. They can be combined in endless ways, but they have known properties and react in predictable ways in certain combinations. Again, positions are complex, but this simple model allows you to quickly recognize what is critical in a specific situation.

Expansion strategic cognition focuses on understanding how positions are improved over time.  Instead of a series of predefined steps, expansion strategic cognition teaches a recursive cycle that works toward the general goal of advancing a position. That cycle of listen, aim, move, claim is a form of the scientific method. Instead of expecting a specific result, this strategic cognitive method explores competitive environments to uncover the opportunities hidden within them. A specialized version of this cycle also generates innovative ideas from the situation. These ideas allow you to leverage the competitive position. Expansion strategic cognition does not care about the specific nature of the opportunity or the innovation as long as it  advances a position in the direction of the mission.

Situational strategic cognition teaches specific  responses based on certain characteristics of the immediate situation. Though each situation is unique, they each consist of certain predictable components. Situational strategic cognition trains people to see the form of the terrain, distances, dangers, obstacles, and identify nine common competitive arrangements to quickly see the best response.

Nothing in rapid strategic cognition is deterministic.  You still cannot predict your success in any given situation. Rather, as a stochastic process, its succeeds over time by consistently producing more successes than failures and by ensuring that all decisions take you in the desired direction. In other words, it provide people with more insight into their situation than they can get from traditional process and planning oriented frameworks.

Before you can successfully use strategic cognition, you must understand clearly where and when you use its methods. Read on...