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From Flickr Cre­ative Commons

There’s a com­ment that gets made about mil­i­tary strat­egy that goes some­thing like: when the war starts the first thing to go out of the win­dow is the plan.

While in mar­ket­ing no one is gen­er­ally in dan­ger of dying (at least not in the kind I do), the prin­ci­ple is a pretty sound one. If, like me, you’ve sat in any num­ber of plan­ning and strat­egy ses­sions, you can quickly get the idea that the future is being mapped in front of your eyes. First this will hap­pen, then that, then that… It’s quite seductive.

But, of course, the world doesn’t work that way. As soon as you do X, your com­peti­tors will simul­ta­ne­ously do Y and the whole damn mar­ket will do Z. At around this point, all that future-gazing slide­ware doesn’t look quite so cer­tain anymore.

Of course, this is a prob­lem the mil­i­tary had to over­come some time back (pri­mar­ily in the wake of the car­nage dur­ing World War I). The result was an approach that spent a long time deter­min­ing the over­all objec­tives (the ‘commander’s intent’) and which left pre­cise tac­tics to offi­cers in the field who were empow­ered to adapt to chang­ing cir­cum­stances as long as they kept mov­ing towards that over­all intent.

The approach was then fur­ther refined (pri­mar­ily by US Air Force Colonel John Boyd) to focus on the abil­ity to make very fast, very adapt­able deci­sions (within a ‘deci­sion loop’) that would out­ma­noeu­vre the opposition.

It’s a prin­ci­ple that, I believe, is crit­i­cal for today’s mar­keters. You will never be in pos­ses­sion of per­fect vis­i­bil­ity. Events will never pan out exactly how you envis­age them. That’s just life.

The key is to have a robust, defen­si­ble ‘commander’s intent’ and to look at strat­egy more from the per­spec­tive of if X then Y rather than first X then Y. And finally, to never be wed­ded to any one set of tac­tics – if tra­di­tional media isn’t work­ing, shift to social media, if that isn’t work­ing try face-to-face. Bet­ter still try mul­ti­ple approaches in a low-cost way and let the fittest sur­vive and thrive. In doing so, you can cre­ate a liv­ing strat­egy that can react and adapt to chang­ing cir­cum­stances while they are chang­ing and while there is time to make a dif­fer­ence in the market.

Related posts:

1. Happy Sol­stice
2. Nav­i­gat­ing Mar­ket­ing 2.0 (part 3): open source