Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.
Sun Tzu, “The Art of War”
With the country in pandemic mode, sales of chess sets and sign-ups for online chess matches took off in the early fall and continued to explode thanks to the release of the Netflix hit “The Queen’s Gambit.”
As all of these chess newbies eventually master how each piece works — knights move in the shape of an uppercase L, the queen can glide as she chooses in a straight or diagonal path — they gain confidence that they now know how to play chess.
Except they don’t.
What they know are the tactics of the game. A true master forms a strategy and executes tactics to fulfill the strategy to win. The chess pieces are just the tactics; if you don’t have a strategy to deploy tactics and use them together for a win, you’re just moving pieces around.
It’s the same for advocacy and communications. If you don’t understand how each tactic of your campaign complements the others, then the effort of using lobbying, coalition building, data, media relations, digital and social media in isolation of each other can quickly lead nowhere.
The first step in building a strategy is to understand what the win needs to be — gaining passage of legislation, preventing a specific policy from being implemented, a fundraising target for a specific cause — and what would have had to happen during your campaign to achieve the goal.
If you start at the end and reason your campaign backward, it is easier to see the highly specific, measurable characteristics (key demographics, coalitions, public support) needed for success.
After the first step, plan forward by tethering the tactics to achieving the objectives, and rule out any tactic that isn’t needed to execute the strategy.
Too often campaigns are well skilled at execution, perfectly doing each tactic, only to find they have lost.
As Sun Tzu stated in “The Art of War,” putting tactics before strategy is the noise before defeat.
There is a reason this ancient advice has endured. Strategy before tactics is equally important for causes, high-stakes campaigns or even games like chess.
