Design of Coordinated Action II

he faced a challenge and he designed  a novel response.

It is often said that a strategy is a choice of a decision.  The words "choice' and "decision" evoke an image of someone considering a list of alternatives and then selecting one of them.  There is, in fact, a formal theory of decisions that specifies exactly how to make a choice by identifying alternative actions, valuing outcomes, and appraising probabilities of events.  The problem with this view, and the reason it barley lightens a leader's burden, is that you are rarely handed a clear set of alternatives.

In the case at hand, Hannibal was certainly not briefed by a staff presenting four options arranged on a PowerPoint slide.  Rather, he faced a challenge and he designed  a novel response.  Today, as then, many effective strategies are more designs than decisions--are more constructed than chosen.  In these cases, doing strategy is more like designing a high-performance aircraft than deciding which forklift truck to buy or how large to build a new factory.  

ACTION POINT: When someone says "Managers are decision makers," they are not talking about master strategists, for a master strategist is a designer.