What do you do if Strategy Doesn't Exist?

Tom and Corissa have built a strategy consultancy and they're here to tell you that strategy doesn't exist.

At least, not in the way everyone sells it — and probably not in the way you've been trying to do it.

This one was sparked by a recent episode from friends-of-Tentacles Kyle and Jen on Notes from the Swamp. We start with domino rallies and end up somewhere genuinely uncomfortable: what if the thing you're planning isn't real, the thing that worked was partly luck, and everyone who sells strategy is either in on the joke or still under the spell?

• Why "if you just set the dominoes up right" is a fantasy ... and why we all keep buying it anyway
• Deliberate vs emergent strategy is a taxonomy that sounds useful ... until Corissa neatly dismantles it
• The project pattern that's almost too perfect to be true: everything that succeeded ended up nothing like anyone could have expected at the start; everything that failed stuck to the vision
• Henry Mintzberg, retrospective coherence, and the stories we love to tell ourselves about how we got somewhere good
• Can your immune system be strategic? (Tom thinks yes. Corissa is not convinced and does not enjoy the question)
• Why Dave Snowden can sell the messy, hard version ... and why most people can't (at least not yet)
• The Trojan horse question: do you know what's inside your horse? (Is it another, smaller horse?)

For anyone who's ever suspected that "strategy" is a collective polite fiction and is curious about what to do with that suspicion.

References

• Kyle Godbey and Jen Briselli's Field Notes from the Swamp podcast https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TELdIQUd8nM
• Henry Mintzberg — strategist, referenced for his empirical work on how strategy actually plays out
• JP Castlin's Strategy in Praxis substack; referenced for a four-part taxonomy of strategy types https://strategyinpraxis.substack.com/
• Michael Porter and classic strategy doctrine. Tom accidentally said he came up with the seven S's framework, that's actually McKinsey; Porter is associated with Five Forces and competitive positioning.
• Dave Snowden and the Cynefin Company, referenced for practitioner-level rigour and the paradox of "meet people where they are" vs "don't dumb it down"
• Jacinda Ardern, New Zealand Prime Minister during COVID; referenced as an example of deliberate strategic choice
• Taylor Pearson's expansion of John Salvatier's point that "reality has a surprising amount of detail" https://taylorpearson.me/interestingtimes/reality-has-a-surprising-amount-of-detail/
• The OODA loop / John Boyd https://thecynefin.co/a-lamb-in-wolves-clothing/
• Crossing the Chasm (Geoffrey Moore), referenced implicitly via "early majority / late laggard" diffusion diagram
• SWOT analysis, referenced as a "late laggard" strategy tool
• Deliberate vs emergent strategy taxonomy (via JP Castlin's Mintzberg review series)
• "The three Is" https://thecynefin.co/anthro-complexity-1-3

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