If you are busy as you can be and still not making any progress, then you may have been lured into the tactics trap. Many a times tactics are confused for strategy to opposing outcomes. This distraction can push divisions and firms into a tailspin. It is best if the signs are recognised early and acted upon.
The word ‘tactics’, comes from Greek word taktikós, meaning "art of arrangement”. It is an action or a series of actions to achieve a particular goal. The word strategy comes from the Greek word stratēgia, meaning "art of troop leader" and is a “plan to achieve a goal”. A roadmap, if you will.
Resources are a finite. Successful organisations ensure their optimal use to reach goals. This requires a plan, a road map. There can be multiple routes to a destination. The choice of the path is dependent on a multitude of factors that are both internal, and external to the organisation. These could include resources at hand, resources that could be marshalled, competencies, skills, nature of competition, buyer needs, supplier ecosystem, distribution channels and so on. Managers must create a roadmap from a wide serving of choices. This also means they must make intelligent trade-offs.
Choices once made, are then stitched together loosely so they provide a direction. Change is imminent, and both strategy and tactics must evolve in response to maintain the correct trajectory. When hit by turbulence, an aircraft must tactically alter its course, speed, and altitude in minor tweaks, keeping the general direction and destination the same. It is the same with organisations. However, if the course itself is an unknown, then tactics are only an illusion, actions, a pretense. Actions appear directed and purposeful, but without a clear course, the firm goes nowhere. Destination remains elusive.
Consider a firm looking at improving profits. In the scenario, the firm can choose to grow revenue or improve productivity. Each of these paths, further fork out into two. Firms looking at growing revenue can look at new customers, new markets, or look at selling more to the existing customers. Firms looking at improving productivity may look at unit economics or better asset utilisation for improved profitability.
These are legitimate paths that lead to profitability. Each path contains within itself, a diverse set of tactics that would keep the firm within the defined latitudes of the chosen strategy. Tactics deployed to drive a customer intimacy (sell more to existing customers) are very different from those intended to improve asset utilisation. They both can improve profitability and yet may be at divergence to each other. Customer intimacy requires well thought out investments in R&D, data analytics, loyalty programs, staff training and more while asset utilisation is about extracting more juice from the same resources.
In the absence of a clear strategy, managers will adopt tactics they understand best. There is likely to be short term, but limited success as there is initial energy and momentum to drive the agenda. Minor incremental improvements are easy to achieve. However, in the absence of a clear alignment amongst the diverse groups within the organisation on the common path ahead, each groups own priorities, objectives and understanding of the business can lead to non-collaborative actions that eventually fail, leading to the next set of tactics or experiments.
Tactics have a level of energy around them. They are visible, create noise and keep teams busy, but not always in a productive way.
Tactics without strategy are an attractive distraction that take a firm further away from its goals.
Tactics in the absence of strategy is a disaster in waiting. Some of the red flags that one can be mindful of include frequent change of initiatives, frequent failures, more time spent in meetings on ‘learnings’ that don't apply to the next set of initiatives, actions that appear as islands v/s coordinated initiatives that support and amplify action.
Many a large corporation continue to flounder in translating goals into specific strategies and tactics. The more surprising part is that they also fall prey to the part where there is a goalpost but no clear strategy to get there. Divisions, teams then indulge in mindless tactics and meet failure constantly. For the teams, this is death by a thousand cuts and must be avoided at all costs.
In the words of Sun Tzu, military strategist and philosopher -
"Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat"If you are not making progress in spite of your best efforts, then take a pause and assess your situation dispassionately. The biggest give away is when you notice noise versus symphony. Symphony is only possible when systems, process, initiatives and activities, all come together and collaborate to reach a common goal. If actions appear as islands, then it is a lure, tactics is masquerading as strategy. Draw up your road map immediately.