Nothing is personal, everything is personal

How humanity and strategy interact

Before I kick off for the day, I want to introduce you to Boiling the Ocean, a great bi-weekly read on all things strategy consulting and business. It’s just getting off the ground but has already struck a nerve with some established voices, one of which called it “a great newsletter” for up-and-coming consultants. So if that’s your game, consider checking out Boiling the Ocean. (I have to admit, I love the choice of name.)

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I had a mentor once who used to say "strategy is a morally neutral endeavor." He meant that strategy is a tool for the wicked and the wise equally, and so it is often used in many ways that would make a priest frown. (Kind of like the internet.)

It follows that strategy is initially cooked up in a kitchen that does not concern itself much with grand issues of good or bad, but far more with success and failure. When a strategist sits and ponders how to achieve success in a given competition, they have to start with what might work. Nothing is personal.

And at that point, nothing is personal. It's all in one person's head, an imprecise blend of art and science designed to move toward some goal. A mental "If, Then" statement—if we do X, then we (may) achieve Y.

This thought pattern is necessarily idealized. You have to think of people as perfect pawns to get the calculation to come out right in early stage thinking. Even if you acknowledge that you cannot predict a person's future actions with precisions—you must nonetheless believe that you can anticipate their general response and direction.

The strategy in the mind is never personal. Nothing has happened yet.

The first step forward in execution of a newborn strategy is when everything becomes personal. Human beings are full of biases that condition them to respond to external actions upon them as negative and personal (through the self-serving bias, fundamental attribution error, and spotlight effect, among other observed psychological phenomena). People tend to code action-upon-them as evil, or think of themselves as the Target of a Malevolent Force in the Universe. (This negativity impulse is likely connected to our evolutionary past, which favored speedy defensive response for survival in a dangerous world.) Of course, sometimes you really are the Target of a Malevolent Force...the main point is that whether you are or you just think you are, we tend to react to someone else's new strategy negatively.

To see this in action, let's think through the war in Ukraine. Imagine you are Mr. Putin, sitting in the Kremlin in late-2021 or early-winter 2022, contemplating invasion. Nothing's personal. We just want Ukraine as part of our Russian world ("Russkiy mir"). We'll drop some paratroopers near Kyiv, quickly seize the capital, it'll be all over before much of anyone gets hurt.

But then the strategy starts, the bullets start piercing flesh, well—then you get Ukrainian units adopting mottos and sporting patches that say "Ukraine or death" (and they mean it).

The instances involving business, athletics, and life feature slightly lower stakes but the personal impact is nonetheless high. At war the risk is a life, whereas in other competitions—it's livelihoods that are at stake, which to some can feel like a form of death.

Some takeaways from this dichotomy. First, when gaming a strategy out in your head, always recognize that people are unpredictable when threatened. Plan for a range of response, all the way from fight to flight. Second, build hedges into your strategy to account for this range. Keep options open for down-road course change. And third, never stop assessing your strategy. Never ever.

Because it's all just logic until the tears, sweat, and blood. There's a reason everyone has a plan until they get punched (in the immoral words of Mike Tyson).