The ability to understand the difference between strategy and tactics — and to bring both together — is the key to long-term success in business and in life. Foresight outperforms short-sightedness. Slow thinking outperforms fast thinking.
What is a strategy?
In business, a strategy always relates to the long-term orientation of a company’s activities. Strategies define an appropriate decision-making framework for achieving overarching goals, from which everything else is derived.
With a strategy, a company determines where it wants to develop in the medium and long term and how this can be achieved.
The task of a strategy is to
- create clarity and trust among all stakeholders
- increase the available options for action and thus enhance flexibility in the present moment
- define a focus that directs available resources toward the most effective leverage point in order to achieve the long-term goal
Important side note: Every person and every company pursues a strategy — whether consciously or not. The decisive question, however, is how deliberate and well thought-out it is.
Dancing with uncertainty
No one knows what the future will look like, and only the implementation of a strategy will reveal whether our assumptions were truly correct. Strategy work therefore requires courage, empathy, and foresight in equal measure in order to engage with uncertainty.
What are tactics?
If strategies define the long-term and overarching direction of entrepreneurial action, then tactics are measures aimed at short-term success.
Tactics serve to make strategies successful. They are usually much more short-lived and easier to replace than the strategy itself.
Let’s take the team sport of soccer as an example: The coach’s strategy might be that the team controls the tempo of the game and does not let the opponent dictate it.
He can support this strategy through various tactics. For example, he might instruct his players to play quick counterattacks, maintain a high tempo through short passes, and rely on a dependable playmaker who distributes the ball quickly from the center to other areas of the field.
Alternatively, he might slow the game down by encouraging players to frequently play sideways passes in their own penalty area and push the defense deep into their own half.
Different tactics support the overall strategy so that the team can control the tempo of the game.
Sustainable development and long-term success require a successful interplay of strategy and tactics
Without a meaningful combination of strategy and tactics, it is left to chance whether we do meaningful things and achieve long-term goals — or descend into chaos. Neither perspective should be missing if implementation is to succeed:
- Strategy without tactics leads to “paralysis by analysis.”
- Tactics without strategy leads to the “bright shiny object syndrome.”
You therefore need both a strategy and appropriate tactics to achieve a long-term goal. The strategy must come first and determines which tactics should be used to successfully implement it.
Both strategy and tactics should be reviewed regularly and continuously developed in order to adapt to changing conditions, identify risks early, and seize opportunities.
What about you?
- Do you have a strategy that helps you make meaningful decisions with your long-term goals in mind?
- Have you already found the right tactics to make this strategy successful?
