Strategy, Operations, Tactics, and Doctrine

by Derek LeBlond

Version 12 - Create Date: 2022-02-18, Last Update: 2022-08-26

Do you try and answer who, what, why, how, and when for every project? Stop! Segment your work into Strategy, Operations, Tactics, and Doctrine to build trust with your stakeholders, focus on the important stuff, and make decisions faster.

The separation of Strategy, Operations, and Tactics is an old military model. This is evident in the Three Levels of War excerpt by United States Air Force (USAF) College of Aerospace Doctrine, Research and Education (CADRE). Given the military's success to motivate people against unsurmountable odds, it makes sense to look for things we can borrow in business. Translation to business models is a substitution of terms such as field of battle or conflict for terms such as markets or competition.

The idea of Doctrine came to me from the Strategy, Tactics, Operations and Doctrine: A decision-language tutorial blog by Venkatesh Rao. He makes a strong case for the addition of Doctrine. It is no surprise it is a consequence of a conversation with a United States Navy friend.

Enough about sources, what are the concepts?

• Strategy - The what, why, and when of an objective. These are where you set and measure boundaries and goals for the rest of the pursuit.
• Operations - Who commits to the strategy. It could be as simple as a Responsible, Accountable, Consult, and Inform (RACI) chart. It could be as complex as workforce management and training ramp.
• Tactics - The how of the strategy. This is a constantly iterative state, ready to change course because of new, valid information.
• Doctrine - A set of implicit or explicit assumptions. These could include items like vision statements, institutional knowledge, industry standards, and more.

How does this build trust? Micromanagement isn't necessary in this model. Create a solid strategy with ways to measure success. Use that to convince your coworkers, team, company, or investors for the operations to complete your objective. Trust your operations to develop and deliver on the tactics. Check your success metrics for opportunities to help operations, or stay out of the way.

How does this help focus? Each of these segments separate the work and roles necessary. Is this a strategic conversation? Hammer the what, why, when, and measures of success hard. Don't worry about who gets it done or how they do it. Is this a tactical conversation? Hopefully the what, why, and when are sound. It is time to just focus on how the job gets done.

How do you make decisions faster? First, you can delegate these responsibilities. That provides immediate scale. This is also where Doctrine helps. Doctrine replaces the need to make decisions or provides the mechanisms for how they get done. Operations can also help define who makes the decisions.

It is important to remember it is highly unlikely there are clean alignments between roles and these concepts. A CEO has tactical decisions to make as much as a mail clerk has strategies to define. That said, the ability to compartmentalize their foci provides flexibility to specialization.

I hope you find these concepts useful in your own work. You will find me reference them often throughout this blog as a shorthand for certain activities.

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Program ManagementProduct ManagementProject ManagementProcess Management

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