While
mastering Sun Tzu's strategic perspective helps create very inventive plans,
strategic planning but its primary focus is on creating situations awareness to deal with events that cannot be planned. Strategic
planning is most valuable within the organization. Strategic reflexes are most
valuable on the front lines, making everyday decisions in the competitive
environment.
Planning follows a series
of steps to produce a well-defined result. Such planning requires control over the
events that create that result.
Planning
within controlled environments is not
only useful but necessary.
It
would be nice to think that every event can be planned, but in a fast-changing
competitive world, many critical events fall outside our control. These events
cannot be planned.
Real strategic understanding starts with the
humble acceptance that the larger world is
outside our control.
Outside our control, events are much less predictable. People
compete. Critical resources are contested. Competing plans collide,
producing results that no one plans. In this environment, most of our
decisions are not planned. We have to make decisions appropriate to changing
conditions.
Sun Tzu saw
that losers clung to their
plans like an excuse while winners responded to the dynamics of their situation. Instead of a series
of planned steps, we develop a perspective
that allows us to respond to competitive situations. While
These three areas of study are called position awareness, opportunity development, and situation response.
Both strategic planning and
strategic reflexes are necessary. Together, they create the resources and need for each
other. The control of advanced planning and the competitive maneuvers from
strategic reflexes
both require human creativity, but they require different methods to apply that
creativity. The problem is that our knowledge of planned production has overshadowed
our understanding of competitive strategy.
