Given your Purpose, the Landscape, the Climate, and your Doctrine, now you can make an informed decision about which strategy is appropriate for the context and take action against it.

Conditions and Consequences

For most of us, the traditional idea behind strategy is the deployment of people against some objective. “If we do X, then we will achieve Y!” This approach entails a “means-ends” model, which creates only first-order effects and limits leadership to the choice of which objective to pursue.

An alternative approach is to examine the conditions that would make desirable consequences inevitable. Instead of pursuing one particular objective, the cultivation of the inherent potential within the situation to enable second-order effects makes many different desirable outcomes possible. Means-ends thinking is tactical in nature, while conditions-consequences thinking makes a grand-strategic approach possible.

Think of it like tending a garden. What are the conditions that enable life? Success isn’t about putting seeds in the ground. Success is an inevitable outcome when the seeds, soil, lighting, watering, weeding, pruning, pest control, temperature, and seasons are all considered and integrated into a complete picture of what it means to have a garden. Any one of those conditions can threaten the success of the garden if not accounted for.

When you map, think about second-order interventions. Once you get past the basic doctrinal problems, like correcting bias, reducing duplication, focusing on user needs, and making maps in general, you’ll start to reflect your more strategic intentions in the maps themselves (e.g., “We want to accelerate the evolution of this component.”). The least brilliant thing to do at this point, however, is to brute force your way to that outcome.

Instead, study the inherent potential of the context closely. What are the indirect options that create multiple desirable possibilities, of which that outcome is one? See Deciphering Sun Tzu for a more in-depth exploration of these ideas.

Table of Stratagems

Accelerators	Open approaches	Co-operation	Exploiting network effects	Industrial policy
Accelerators	Market enablement
De-accelerators	Exploiting constraint	IPR	Creating constraints
Dealing with toxicity	Pig in a poke	Sweat and Dump	Disposal of liability	Refactoring
Ecosystem	Sensing Engines (ILC)	Two factor markets	Alliances	Channel conflicts & disintermediation
Ecosystem	Co-creation	Co-opting and intercession	Embrace and extend	Tower and moat
User Perception	Fear, uncertainty and doubt	Artificial competition	Brand and marketing	Bundling
User Perception	Confusion of choice	Creating artificial needs	Education	Lobbying / counterplay
Attacking	Centre of gravity	Directed investment	Experimentation	Fool's mate
Attacking	Playing both sides	Press release process	Undermining barriers to entry
Competitor	Ambush	Circling and probing	Fragmentation play	Misdirection
Competitor	Reinforcing competitor inertia	Restriction of movement	Sapping	Talent raid
Defensive	Defensive regulation	Limitation of competition	Managing inertia	Procrastination
Defensive	Raising barriers to entry	Threat acquisition
Markets	Buyer / supplier power	Differentiation	Harvesting	Last man standing
Markets	Pricing policy	Signal distortion	Standards game	Trading
Poison	Designed to fail	Insertion	Licensing play
Positional	Fast follower	First mover	Land grab	Weak signal / horizon

Based on Simon Wardley‘s, On 61 Different Forms of Gameplay, CC BY-SA 4.0.

A Scenario

As an example, where might you focus in the below map if you wanted to increase competition around content? (Based on a scenario shared by Simon Wardley, CC BY-SA 4.0.)

To increase competition in content, the obvious option is to cause the industrialization (evolution) of the creative studios. More competition among studios would result in more, better content, so how could we make that happen?

A naive move might be to launch an independent creative studio or form a strategic partnership to advance one particular studio, but that game can all-too-easily be lost. There are more interesting options in the lower-level constraints (a Fool’s Mate, in the above table).

If there were more competition among production systems, for example, the barrier to entry for new talent and therefore new creative studios would be lowered. An open approach would accelerate that process, indirectly causing increased competition among creative studios and ultimately content.

Chances are, the existing creative studios won’t have the situational awareness to recognize the play for what it is. In fact, they might support it in the name of short-term cost savings. Wild! Read more on this scenario in Simon’s post, Fool’s mate in Business.

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