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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.