Doing nothing is a choice

And often the strategist's best choice

What if you don't have a good option in front of you?

You stand in a moment when you recognize the requirement to respond, but without a good road to ride out on.

Some council what's been called "strategic patience." A few years back, that was the magic word combination when it came to dealings with North Korea. At many levels of government, when it came to North Korea, at some point you'd hear someone utter "our policy is strategic patience."

There's good reason to give that phrase a side-eye. It suggests a simple play-for-time, a hope and a prayer and a wish that the problem will go away over time.

But I'll stick up for the approach. It is, in part, a play-for-time. It is a hope that the environmental circumstances that gave rise to the problem will move along. It is to calculate that a bad environment will shift in the same way a bad storm eventually subsides. That's not unrealistic at all, considering the constancy of change in our lives.

The adversary may also change. The inside baseball, the bad-guy machinery in front of you—something may bend the way the adversary approaches the world, and in turn, your ongoing competition with them.

Your position of relative strength may change. Note the word "relative." That term is fit for purpose here. You may not suddenly inject some substance into your organization's arm to turn into the Hulk, but relative to your adversary your position may improve meaningfully. You may stay as "strong" individually, but you then may reposition to occupy the high ground compared to your competitor. And to be patient enough to wait for that moment when you can ascend...well, that seems like a good idea.

And finally there are such things as deus ex machina. The intended Mongol invasion of Japan nearly ten centuries ago was wiped aside by what I've heard Japanese colleagues refer to as a "divine wind" (where we get the term "kamikaze").

As we can see, to play for time isn't always desperation. Sometimes it is. That's certain. Sometimes you get a panicked approach that when choice comes, when it comes time to "fight or flight," a leader or strategist does neither. They stand put and don't move.

This isn't the same as a deliberate choice to do nothing. A deliberate decision to do nothing is a recognition that, to act, ideally you should have a sense about how your actions will impact the world. The reality is that this choice is difficult at best.

If we're honest with ourselves, we act most of the time without any reasonable or realistic knowledge of how those actions will play out.

Unless we have some knowledge and some confidence to predict what we expect to happen, and a plan for what might come of it, we shouldn't act.

To act without useful understanding of how our actions will play out is high risk with high potential costs, like swinging for the fences with a high-probability of striking out. While to postpone action, instead, is lower risk and no cost in the near term, leaving us, of course, with status quo (which may be irksome but potentially less bad than mucking everything up with a mistaken action).

No choice can be the best choice. As long as it's a thoughtful one.