Strategy (111 page)

Developments in cognitive psychology mean that we now know much more than before about how human beings cope with uncertain situations. They
encourage the view that strategic thinking can and often does start in the subconscious before it breaks into conscious thought. It can originate as apparently intuitive judgments, reflecting what can now be labeled System 1 thinking. System 1 strategies draw on an ability to read situations and see possibilities that less-strategic intelligences would miss. This form of strategic reasoning has been appreciated since classical times. It was manifested as m
ē
tis, exemplified by Odysseus, who was resourceful, coped with ambiguity, and used artful language to lead the in-group and disorient the out-group. Napoleon spoke of the
coup d'œil
as the “gift of being able to see at a glance the possibilities offered by the terrain.” It was at the heart of Clausewitz's belief in military genius, a “highly developed mental aptitude” that allowed the great general to pick the right moment and place for attack. Jon Sumida described Clausewitz's concept of genius as involving “a combination of rational intelligence and subrational intellectual and emotional faculties that make up intuition.” It was the only basis of decision in the “face of difficult circumstances such as inadequate information, great complexity, high levels of contingency, and severe negative consequences in the event of failure.”
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Napoleon described this as an inborn talent, but Clausewitz saw that it could also be developed through experience and education.

In one of his last published articles, the philosopher Isaiah Berlin spoke up for instinct and flair, challenging the idea that good judgment in politics could be scientific and founded on “indubitable knowledge”.
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“In the realm of political action,” Berlin concluded, “laws are far and few indeed: skills are everything.” The key skill was the ability to grasp what made a situation unique. Great political figures were able to “understand the character of a particular movement, of a particular individual, of a unique state of affairs, of a unique atmosphere, of some particular combination of economic, political, personal factors.” This grasp of the interplay of human beings and impersonal forces, sense of the specific over the general, and capacity to anticipate the consequential “tremors” of actions involved a special sort of judgment. This was, he averred, “semi-instinctive.” He described a form of political intelligence, closely resembling m
ē
tis and capturing the best of System 1 thinking:

… a capacity for integrating a vast amalgam of constantly changing, multicolored, evanescent, perpetually overlapping data, too many, too swift, too intermingled to be caught and pinned down and labeled like so many individual butterflies. To integrate in this sense is to see the data (those identified by scientific knowledge as well as by direct perception) as elements in a single pattern, with their implications,
to see them as symptoms of past and future possibilities, to see them pragmatically—that is, in terms of what you or others can or will do to them, and what they can or will do to others or to you.

It was a capacity that could be lost by a focus on formal methodologies and a determination to squeeze out the intuition and stress the analytical. “Many of the strategists I have examined,” observed Bruce Kuklick of contributors to postwar American security policy, “were essentially apolitical, in that they lacked what I must call for want of a better phrase
elementary political sense
. It is almost as if they sought to learn in a seminar room or from cogitation what only instinct, experience and savvy could teach.”
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The quality that often comes with political judgment is the ability to persuade others to follow a particular course. Indeed, for those who are not Napoleons, who cannot expect orders to be accepted without question, shrewd judgment is of little value unless it is coupled with an ability to express its meaning to those who must follow its imperatives. It is at this point that strategy moves from intuition to deliberation, from knowing that a particular course is the right one to finding the arguments to explain why this must be so. So system 2 thinking is needed for those situations that are too complex and unique for System 1. Such circumstances require that alternative arguments be weighed and measured against each other to identify a credible course of action. Thus, for the most part, strategy must be in the realm of System 2, but that may only be in terms of turning what are essentially System 1 judgments into persuasive arguments.

The reason this book has returned so often to questions of language and communication is because strategy is meaningless without them. Not only does strategy need to be put into words so that others can follow, but it works through affecting the behavior of others. Thus it is always about persuasion, whether convincing others to work with you or explaining to adversaries the consequences if they do not. Pericles gained authority for his ability to make a reasoned case in a democratic setting; Machiavelli urged princes to develop compelling arguments; Churchill's speeches gave the British people a sense of purpose in war. Brute force or economic inducements may play their part, but their impact may be lost without clarity about what must be done to avoid punishment or gain reward. “Power is actualized only where word and deed have not parted company,” observed Hannah Arendt, “where words are not empty and deeds not brutal, where words are not used to veil intentions but to disclose realities, and deeds are not used to violate and destroy but to establish relations and create new realities.”
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The greatest power is that which achieves its effects without notice. This comes about when established structures appear settled and uncontentious, part of the natural and generally benign order of things, even to those who might be supposed to be disadvantaged.
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The ability of elites to render essentially sectional interests as a general good so that their satisfaction is taken for granted and put beyond challenge has been a source of intense frustration to radicals. The limited revolutionary zeal of the masses has been explained by grand stories—labeled as formulas, myths, ideologies, paradigms, and eventually narratives—which assumed that since people could not grasp objective reality they must depend on interpretative constructs, and those best placed to influence those constructs could acquire enormous power. The radicals sought to develop strategies promoting alternative, healthier forms of consciousness, contradicting any suggestion that the existing scheme of things must be accepted without question as natural and enduring rather than constructed and contingent. This question of how best to affect the attitudes of others has come to be seen to be relevant to all aspects of strategy and not just efforts to turn the existing order upside down. Partisan politicians have worked to set agendas and frame issues, offering damaging stories about opponents while portraying a party's own candidates in the best possible light. This “narrative turn” has also been evident in the military and business arenas, reflected in calls for sensitivity to “hearts and minds” in counterinsurgency, corporate lobbyists challenging regulatory restraints, or managers trying to convince employees that they will benefit from drastic organizational changes. Not only are stories instruments of strategy, they also give form to strategy. Reinforced by cognitive theories and the role of interpretative constructs and scripts in organizing attitudes and behavior, narratives have moved to the fore in the contemporary strategic literature in military, politics, and business. In order to come to terms with recent trends in thinking about strategy we need to come to terms with stories.

In his essay “The Trouble with Stories,” Charles Tilly considered the persistent human tendency to seek explanations in terms of stories about individuals, along with collectives such as churches or states and even abstractions such as classes or regions. These stories would tell of deliberate, conscious, and often successful acts to achieve definite goals. They satisfied their audience, including social scientists, far too easily. All that seemed to be required was a degree of plausibility, recognition of the constraints of time and circumstance,
and a match with cultural expectations. Yet, Tilly warned, stories had limited explanatory power. The most significant cause-effect relations tended to be “indirect, incremental, interactive, unintended, collective, or mediated by the nonhuman environment rather than being direct, willed consequences of individual action.” The demand for stories encouraged analysis in terms of actors making deliberate choices among well-defined alternatives, when actual decision-making was likely to be far less calculating and deliberate, more improvised, often quite wobbly. Social scientists had a responsibility to seek something better. Tilly was not optimistic. Brains, he noted, would “store, retrieve and manipulate information about social processes” in terms of standard stories, thereby encouraging accounts of complex events in terms of the “interactions of self-motivated objects.” If this was the case, Tilly at least hoped for superior stories, doing justice to the impersonal and collective forces at work as well as the human, and making the appropriate connections with time, places, actors, and actions outside their purview. Better still, we should tell stories about stories, giving stories context and considering how they were generated.
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Business historians have come to warn of accepting at face value narratives, such as Sloan's
My Life with General Motors
, that suggest that challenging decisions were matters of purely rational choice. Whether or not such narratives exaggerate the role of senior managers they leave the impression of inevitability, understating the possibility of different decisions leading to alternative outcomes.
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Daniel Raff advocates recreating the choices of the past, looking at historical events as “sequences of challenges to be addressed rather than as initiatives which have already happened.” This would mean recognizing the alternatives that were available in the past and how actors made sense of them.
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Kahneman has also observed that although good stories “provide a simple and coherent account of people's actions and intentions,” this encourages a readiness to “interpret behavior as a manifestation of general propensities and personality traits—causes that you can readily match to effects.” As an example he cites analyses of corporate success. The numerous management books full of these stories “consistently exaggerate the impact of leadership style and management practices.” He suggests that luck is as important a factor if not more so. The result of these biases is that when it comes to “explaining the past and in predicting the future, we focus on the causal role of skill and neglect the role of luck. We are therefore prone to an illusion of control.” He further notes the paradox that it “is easier to construct a coherent story when you know little, when there are fewer pieces to fit into the puzzle.” This reinforces the tendency to neglect factors about which little is known, thereby encouraging overconfidence.
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These flawed stories of the past shape our predictions of the future. In this he draws attention to the work of Nassim Taleb, who stresses the importance of unexpected and random events (which he calls “black swans”) for which inadequate provision has been made because they are so out of line with past experience. Yet Taleb also acknowledges a contradiction in his method, for although he points to forms of narrative fallacy he also uses stories “to illustrate our gullibility about stories and our preference for the dangerous compression of narratives.” This is because metaphors and stories are “far more potent (alas) than ideas; they are also easier to remember and more fun to read.” As a result: “You need a story to displace a story.”
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We have seen in this book how familiar stories with a strong message turn out on closer examination to be either fabricated or subject to alternative interpretations offering different lessons. David and Goliath is now understood to be about what an underdog might achieve, but it was originally about the importance of belief in God. Odysseus began as a celebration of a shrewd and crafty intelligence, but as he morphed into the Roman Ulysses he came to exemplify treachery and trickery. Plato outdid the sophists at their own game, making his claim for a pure discipline of philosophy by recasting those who came before him as caring more for money than truth. Milton sought to make sense of the Creation by constructing a Machiavellian Satan who many came to find a more compelling character than his worthy God. Clausewitz looked at Napoleon's ill-fated Russian campaign as flawed strategy; Tolstoy saw it as proof that there could be no such thing as strategy. Liddell Hart collected stories of battle and then gave them his own twist to validate his indirect approach. John Boyd and his acolytes took the idea of the blitzkrieg—as exemplified by the German success in Europe in 1940—stripped it of context by ignoring its failure in the East, and turned it into a model for future warfare. Marx complained about the persistent influence of the French Revolution but could not quite escape from it himself. As his predictions about the development of capitalism turned out to be flawed, his followers contorted themselves to prove that this was still scientific history and so bound to be vindicated. The traditional teaching of business strategy depended on stories known as case histories. The management gurus, from Frederick Taylor to Tom Peters, knew that they could make their points with a good tale that could illustrate their essential points. The very human temptation to seize on some specific incident to make a general point—demonstrated by the uses of anecdotes about Honda—led invariably to overstated conclusions that were far more contingent than their tellers would allow.