Strategy

by Lawrence Freedman

  What about the criticisms of Tilly and Kahneman that our dependence on stories leads us to exaggerate the importance of human agency, to assume that effects flow from the deliberate acts of the central characters in our stories (often ourselves) rather than large impersonal forces or chance events or questions of timing and happenstance that could never be part of the starting narrative? The answer is that ignoring these factors certainly makes for bad history but not necessarily bad strategy. When we seek to understand the present it is unwise to assume that things are the way they are solely because strong actors wished them to be thus, but when we look forward to the future we have little choice but to identify a way forward dependent upon human agency which might lead to a good outcome. It is as well to avoid illusions of control, but in the end all we can do is act as if we can influence events. To do otherwise is to succumb to fatalism.

  Moreover, the unexpected and the accidental can be managed if provision is made from the start to accommodate them. A strategic plan, relating available means to desired ends through a series of steps which if followed carefully and in sequence produces the desired outcome, suggests a predictable world, with cause and effect known in advance. One large conclusion of this book is that such plans struggle to survive their encounters with an awkward reality. A script may share with a plan an anticipated sequence of events, but as it moves from System 1 to System 2, from a subconscious assumption to a deliberate composition, it can incorporate the possibility of chance events and anticipate the interaction of a number of players over an extended period of time. This requires an unfinished quality. The script must leave considerable scope for improvisation. There is only one action that can be anticipated with any degree of certainty, and that is the first move of the central player for whom the strategy has been devised. Whether the plot will unfold as intended will then depend on not only the acuity of the starting assumptions but also whether other players follow the script or deviate significantly from it.

  Scripts: Strategic and Dramatic

  Once strategies are considered as narratives a close relationship with drama becomes evident. David Barry and Michael Elmes consider strategy, “one of the most prominent, influential and costly stories told in organizations.” It carries elements of “theatrical drama, the historical novel, futurist fantasy, and autobiography,” with “parts” prescribed for different characters. “Its traditional emphasis on forecasting aligns it with visionary novels having a prospective, forward-looking focus.”25 If this is the case then there might be guidance for strategists in the methods by which dramatists work out their plots and write their scripts.

  A good place to begin is Robert McKee’s guide to the art of storytelling for movies.26 The starting point is exactly the same as with strategy. The story, like the strategy, moves forward with conflict. Scripts fail, he warns, when they are marked by “either a glut of meaningless and absurdly violent conflict, or a vacancy of meaningful and honestly expressed conflict.” This means recognizing that even within an apparently harmonious organization there is always some conflict. There is never enough space, time, or resources to go round, leaving aside the forms of conflict that result from discordant personalities and a clash of egos (which a successful organizational politician will also need to understand). Conflict does not necessarily lead to violence and mayhem. The conflict may be within the main character, which is reflected in the strategist’s need to choose. As McKee observes, the interesting and challenging choices are not those between good and evil but those between irreconcilable goods or two evils. The challenge of choice, however, is to know what can be done to achieve the preferred outcome, so that aiming for one does not lead to the other. This is the role of the plot, so that when “confronted by a dozen branching possibilities” the correct path is chosen. The plot will contain its own internal laws of probability. The choices faced by the protagonists must emerge naturally out of the world as described. The plot represents the dramatist’s “choice of events and their design in time.” The strategist must also stick closely to what McKee calls the “archplot,” in which “motivated actions cause effects that in turn become the causes of yet other effects, thereby interlinking the various levels of conflict in a chain reaction of episodes to the story climax, expressing the interconnectedness of reality.”

  In drama, plots provide the structure that holds stories together and gives meaning to particular events. Aristotle in his Poetics described a plot as an “arrangement of incidents” that should have an inner unity. The story should not contain anything of irrelevance and it must maintain its credibility throughout. This required that the key players stay in character. Aristotle insisted that cause and effect should be explicable within the terms of the story rather than as the result of some artificial, external intervention. The “function of the poet” was in relating not what had happened but what could happen, to show what was possible “according to the law of probability or necessity.”27

  The features of a good plot are therefore shared between drama and strategy: conflict, convincing characters and credible interactions, sensitivity to the impact of chance, and a whole set of factors that no plan can anticipate or accommodate in advance. In both, the line between fiction and nonfiction can be blurred. A dramatist may attempt to reconstruct real events by showing what might have happened, while the strategist opens with a current reality but must then imagine how it could be changed. In neither case is there value in a wonderful and compelling narrative that falls flat and fails to engage its intended audience. A story that is too clever, convoluted, experimental, or shocking may fail to connect, produce an appalled counterreaction, or convey the wrong set of messages. In strategy as in drama, a poor plot can result from incredible characters, too much disparate activity, too many discordant points of view, events moving too slowly or too fast, confusing links, or obvious gaps.

  There are, however, important differences between the dramatist and strategist. These can be illustrated by an example. In 1921, secretary of the interior Albert Fall took bribes from oil executives to hand over leases to drill for oil under the Teapot Dome rock formation in Wyoming. The press picked up the story because of rumblings from those within the oil industry denied the opportunity to bid for the reserves, although one newspaper used evidence to blackmail rather than reveal. Fall refused to answer any questions, and the government tried to prevent progress. Ultimately, a Congressional panel concluded that the leases “were executed under circumstances indicating fraud and corruption.” This was determined through tedious investigations, depending on a keen understanding of institutional processes.28 One anti-corruption fighter in the Senate was Burton Wheeler of Montana, a lawyer who had made his name fighting for workers’ rights and against corruption and had acted as prosecutor for another Congressional investigation into corruption at the Department of Justice. An unsuccessful attempt was made to discredit him through allegations that he had accepted a fee from a client to help secure government oil concessions.29

  Wheeler was said to be the model for Jefferson Smith, the hero of Frank Capra’s movie, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. In the movie, Smith, the head of the state’s Boy Rangers, is naïve and idealistic. He is sent by the boss of the local political machine (James Taylor), to go to Washington as a replacement for a recently deceased Senator in the mistaken belief that he will be easy to manipulate. The state’s other Senator, Joseph Paine—once a good friend of Smith’s father and a fellow idealist—has been corrupted by power. Smith proposes a bill to create a boys’ camp in his home state, but the chosen site is one Taylor has found for a corrupt dam-building scheme. Taylor, therefore, forces a reluctant Paine to denounce Smith as planning to profit from the bill at the expense of the boys he claims to champion. The plan almost works. A disconsolate Smith almost gives up until his previously skeptical aide, Clarissa Saunders, persuades him to take a stand. As Paine is about to call for a vote to expel Smith from the Senate, Smith begins to filibuster, hoping to get the message about co
rruption to the people of his state. Though Smith stays on his feet, Taylor is able to use strong-arm tactics to prevent the message getting out. Paine prepares the final blow by bringing in to the Senate hundreds of letters and telegrams demanding Smith’s expulsion. Before collapsing exhausted, Smith insists that he will continue fighting “even if this room gets filled with lies like these, and the Taylors and all their armies come marching into this place. Somebody’ll listen to me.” Paine is shocked. He tries to shoot himself and then exclaims that he is the one who should be expelled. He confesses all. Smith is now a hero and his Senate career is assured.

  The movie contrasted the manipulative business trusts who put themselves beyond democratic accountability, through their control of party machines and a supine media, with the decent aspirations of ordinary folk. It conveyed distaste for Machiavellian political methods, wiles and ruses, pretense and deception, while applauding those who were straightforward, principled, and brave. It demonstrated how a good man could defeat evil lurking in the body politic. Although Capra was a Republican, the script was written by a communist, Sidney Buchman. Capra had found it expedient to play down Buchman’s role, and he appears to have been happy with the movie as a simple morality tale, with the good rewarded and the bad punished. Buchman believed that his script was a challenge to dictatorship and emphasized “the spirit of vigilance which is necessary if one believes in democracy the refusal to surrender even before small things.”30

  Joseph Breen, the enforcer of the movie industry’s Production Code Administration,31 was at first hostile to the Senate’s portrayal as “if not deliberately crooked … completely controlled by lobbyists with special interests.” Aware that he needed to avoid the impression of political censorship, Breen accepted it as a “grand yarn” so long as most Senators were shown to be “fine, upstanding, citizens who labor long and tirelessly for the best interests of the nation.”32 Nonetheless, when first screened, senators (including Wheeler) and journalists were outraged. State Department officials feared that U.S. institutions were made to look ridiculous. The public—abroad as well as in the United States—was caught up in the brilliance of Capra’s storytelling and accepted his claim that the movie idealized American democracy.33 Ronald Reagan almost modeled himself on Jefferson Smith, even as president quoting the line about fighting for lost causes.34

  For Capra’s purposes, Smith appeared as idealistic and a-strategic. His strategic advice came from Saunders, first mischievously and then lovingly. In a key scene, she finds Smith alone at the Lincoln Memorial, bemoaning the discrepancy between the “fancy words … carved in stone” and the lies he faced. She urges him not to quit. All the “good in the world” comes from “fools with faith.” In the original screenplay she appeals to “a little fellow called David [who] walked out with only a sling-shot—but he had the truth on his side.”35 In the final version she has a strategy: “A forty foot dive into a tub of water, but I think you can do it.” This strategy works for an underdog who must survive the stronger side’s push for a quick victory. Paine, a master of the rulebook, is surprised by the filibuster. Smith knows enough not to yield the floor and so was not caught by Paine’s request for him to do just that. The second part of Saunders’s plan fails. As Smith speaks to encourage people in his state to “kick Mister Taylor’s machine to kingdom come,” Taylor observes: “He won’t get started! I’ll make public opinion out there in five hours. I’ve done it all my life!” He is even able to suppress the brave effort by the Boy Rangers to distribute their own paper. What actually makes the difference is the comparative fragility of the coalitions. That between Taylor and Paine breaks as the senator is reminded of his lost idealism. For his part, Smith is helped by a kindly vice president, who lets Smith get started on his filibuster and offers friendly smiles as he becomes weary.36 The features of a strategy are therefore all present, even if not always explicit. They have to be to give the plot some credibility and to show that Smith was able, to a degree, to shape his own success. Where the drama takes over is in the compression of events, the lack of boring processes (such as the painstaking investigations of the Teapot Dome scandal), and a satisfactory conclusion dependent upon a sudden change of heart coming at the very last moment when it might have made a difference.

  The dramatist controls the plot, manipulating the behavior of all parties and introducing elements of chance and coincidence to move the story to a predetermined conclusion. She sets boundaries to reduce the numbers of tangents and loose ends. All the main characters are under her control. She can decide how they meet and their interactions, which can be complicated through misunderstanding at crucial moments and then transformed by freak accidents or serendipitous encounters. She knows when there is going to be a surprising twist, a shocking revelation that presents a character in a completely new light, an accident that interferes with an apparently perfect plan, or an extraordinary opportunity that allows the hero to escape a terrible fate in the nick of time. She can introduce minor characters to make a point with complete confidence that they need never be seen again. She can hint at things to come, knowing that an attentive reader will pick up the clues or appreciate their relevance. By sustaining suspense to the end, she can ensure a thrilling denouement. Audiences expect a proper conclusion, which pulls together the distinct strands of the story, explains puzzles, and brings the suspense to an end. There may be a moral lesson, as evil characters get their comeuppance while the good are rewarded, or else deliberate moral ambiguity, confirming a sense of disappointment and injustice.

  The strategist faces quite different challenges. The most important is that the stakes are for real. The dramatist may allow the “baddies” to win as a statement about the human condition; the strategist knows this will have real and possibly dire consequences. The dramatist can ensure that the plot unfolds as intended; the strategist has to cope with the choices of others while remaining relatively ignorant of what they might be. The dramatist can use these choices to reveal the true character of key players; the strategist must make a starting assumption about character when anticipating what choices may be made under intense forms of pressure. The strategist must avoid the standard plot lines of literature shaping expectations. It is unlikely that everything will come together in some sudden, thrilling climax. In drama, the most satisfactory foes appear as truly monstrous, malign, and egocentric. It might be tempting to denounce actual opponents in these terms but it is also dangerous if taken too seriously. An otherwise resolvable conflict might turn into a confrontation between the forces of light and darkness. Caricature depictions of opponents, along with glowing portrayals of friends, add to the risks of being caught by surprise by actual behavior. It must be understood that strategies that depend on others to act out of character, beyond their competence, or against their declared interests and preferences, are gambles. Rather than play out assigned roles that will leave them frustrated, contained, ambushed, or suppressed, they will write their own scripts. The challenge for the strategist—indeed, the essence of strategy—is to force or persuade those who are hostile or unsympathetic to act differently than their current intentions. The risk is always that the conclusions will be messier and less satisfactory than anticipated. There may not even be a proper conclusion. The plot may just peter out. The original story line may lead nowhere and be overtaken by a different story.

  Both the dramatist and strategist must think about their audiences, but the problem of multiple audiences is more challenging for the strategist. If those who need to follow the plot are confused, they will be unable to play their parts. At the same time there may be others who are best kept in the dark, following false trails and deliberately ambiguous signals. The dramatist can reduce the demands on her audience. There is no need to show results being eked out through hard grind and close attention to detail over an expanded period. She also has the option of a thrilling climax. Here there can be complete closure, with absolute and irreversible change achieved. The strategist may face similar
temptations: anxiety to bring matters to a swift conclusion, impatience at the thought of wearing opponents down over time or engaging potential allies in extended negotiations. A determination to seek a quick and decisive result is a frequent cause of failure. Unlike the dramatist, the strategist cannot rely on last-minute escapes from certain doom, in which chance, a sharp eye, a sudden revelation, or a uniquely cool head makes all the difference. The challenge is to identify moves that will require other players to follow the script out of the logic of the developing situation. The opening bid in negotiations, a feint on a battlefield, and a bellicose statement at a time of crisis may all assume a likely response by the other side. If that is not forthcoming, the improvisation will start early.

  The strategist has to accept that even when there is an obvious climax (a battle or an election), the story line will still be open-ended—what McKee calls a “miniplot”—leaving a number of issues to be resolved later. Even when the desired endpoint is reached, it is not really the end. The enemy may have surrendered, the election won, the target company taken over, the revolutionary opportunity seized, but that just means that there is now an occupied country to run, a new government to be formed, a whole new revolutionary order to be established, or distinctive sets of corporate activity to be merged. Here the dramatist can leave the next stage to the reader’s imagination or pick up the story again after the passage of time, perhaps even with many new characters. Strategists have no such luxury. The transition is immediate and may well be conditional on how the original endpoint was reached. This takes us back to the observation that much strategy is about getting to the next stage rather than some ultimate destination. Rather than think of strategy as a three-act play, it is better to think of it as a soap opera with a continuing cast of characters and plot lines that unfold over a series of episodes. Each of these episodes will be self-contained and set up the subsequent episode. Unlike a play with a definite ending, there is no need for a soap opera to ever reach a conclusion, even though the central characters and their circumstances change.