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Its Purpose

Its Purpose Overview
Where Planning Works
Where Instant Insight Is Needed
Why Strategic Cognition Works
Competition and Production
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Competition and Production

Both planning and front-line strategic cognition are necessary to be successful. Planning is the method of producing results. Front-line strategic cognition is competitive insight. Productive and competition are complementary opposites. Every organization must do both: produce and compete.

Production and competition work together. Planning production makes the most of what you can control. Competitive strategic cognition makes the most of the situations that you cannot control.

Strangely enough, planning is the best way to learn strategic cognition. Though you can learn some elements of strategic cognition through trial and error, planning to train in front-line strategy is much less costly and painful than learning strategic cognition from experience. This is the particular magic of Sun Tzu's The Art of War because it offers a system for learning strategic cognition. Since Napoleon, we have known the concepts in this book can produce people who have the "power of the glance".

The secret is knowing when to use the methods of planning and the methods of strategic cognition. We go into this in more detail in our training, but the chart below offers a quick summary.

The Critical Differences
Competitive Cognition	Productive Planning
Exploring and experimenting	Designing and organizing
External, chaotic environments	Internal, controlled environments
People competing	People cooperating
Anonymous, unattained resources	Known, available resources
Event-based responses	Predetermined steps
Factors details into larger picture	Breaks processes into finer details
Unique, custom solutions	Duplicate, standard products
Adjusts to environment as a whole	Controls part of environment
General improvement in position	Well-specified end result

Productive and competitive methods create the resources for each other in a constant cycle. The better our strategic cognition, the more resources we capture to use internally. The better our planning, the better our production of tools to use in external competition. Competition and production are closely tied to each other, but they require different skill sets. In the science of strategy, they are defined as "complementary opposites." Both are necessary. They work together. But you must understand how they are different.

The problem in recent decades is that our knowledge of planning and production has greatly overshadowed our knowledge of strategic cognition and competition. Fortunately, recent studies are connecting the science of rapid cognition with classical front-line strategy. People plan for external results because they are not familiar with the concepts of rapid cognition and how they can be developed from classical strategy even though Sun Tzu's methods have been around for 2,500 years.

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