The Case of The Nose that Froze: An Exploration of Strategy vs Tactics

The Nose that Froze

It was a curious sensation. To be quite so bone-achingly cold, and still to have a nose that felt as if it were on fire. Burning, itching, and surely just one final rub away from snapping off like an icicle. The frost on the inside of the windows was a grim visual testament to this horrifying state of affairs.

It was too cold.

When Jacob’s marriage had turned sour, he knew things would be rough, but he’d never expected anything quite like this. Kicked out of the family home, his only shelter now was the unheated RV trailer at the bottom of the garden. It kept the rain and snow off his head, for the most part, but it did little to stop the wind whistling in through the cracks in the door. It certainly was useless against the slowly creeping cold that held Jacob in a bitter reflection of the lovers’ embrace he’d left behind.

Jacob’s internal seasons had already drifted, from the golden summer of his apparently happy family to the dark, cold winter of a more lonely existence. Now the fiery ice cube where his nose had once been and the creaking of the frozen pipes were telling him that the seasons outside were changing too.

This is how it is. Seasons change in our lives, inside and out.

The conclusion was simple, even if it took a while to admit to himself. This was no way to live. Accepting the world as it was, was no longer an option. Jacob had had enough. Something had to change and he was the only one who could change it.

Strategy vs Tactics

Often conflated, understanding the difference between strategy and tactics, and knowing when to use each, is one of the most effective aspects of achieving personal and professional goals.

Of course, strategies and tactics are only relevant if you want to change something about the way the world is. Otherwise, they can be pointless, even counterproductive.

We have helped clients who have invented, invested in, and built out solutions to problems that don’t even exist.

We’ve even been guilty of this ourselves.

It is fascinating how many problem-solving and solution-building projects are brought to a halt by the apparently simple question: “what problem is this solution intended to solve?”

Now, the time for strategy and tactics has arrived. In broad brush strokes, strategy is about ‘WHAT you do’ while tactics is about ‘HOW you do it’.

To illustrate this more clearly, let us return to Jacob, who by now has probably lost his frozen nose as well as a few fingers and toes in the blistering cold.

Strategy and Tactics in Practice

Jacob decides there is a problem. There is something about being frozen that he does not see as perfect and wishes to change.

Now he has decisions to make, which brings him into a discourse on STRATEGY.

The Gap arises between warm - what he wants - and cold - what he is. The obstacle in this scenario, he decides, is “inadequate shelter.” The rickety old RV trailer to which he has been exiled is not enough to survive the cold. To note, someone else might pick a different obstacle in this same scenario and focus on the wife, clothing, or something else.

Before he arrived at this point he had already made some unwitting strategic decisions. There were at least 2 strategic pathways available to him as he was freezing. He could have changed something about himself (eg. Get mental and physical training so that he was more resilient to the cold); or, he could have changed something about the environment (eg. Get himself fancier clothing, move to a warmer country, or change the type of shelter he had.) As he has not changed these things about himself or some aspects of his environment (where he lives or his clothing), he has already made (perhaps unconsciously), the higher-level strategic decisions of what needs to change. Jacob determines that what he wishes to fix is his ‘inadequate shelter.’ And he decides that what he will do about this is ‘improve his shelter.’

Further strategic decisions at this point might be around whether to move to an underground cave or to a house. And with each decision he drills down to more practical but equally strategic aspects of his circumstance.

He chooses to live in a house. Should he own or rent?

He chooses to own. Should he buy or build?

He chooses to build.

Each of these levels is strategic - still answering the WHAT that needs to be changed.

But at some point, tactical decisions become more important. Jacob needs to balance strategy and tactics, and start thinking about the HOW.

How does he build this house? Does he do the work himself, or hire a general contractor?

Choosing when to make the switch between strategic and tactical considerations is not easy as you clearly need both. However, often, when we believe we are at the tactical level and ready to answer the HOW because we perceive a gap, there are a series of important questions that we have missed out on asking ourselves.

We are seeking to help you make the presuppositions embedded in the lower-level, more dependent questions explicit, to give you more choice and more agency in your decisions.

You are now probably becoming aware of the occasions and situations when you sped ahead with tactical questions and answers when more important strategic questions went unanswered.

We’ll use a business case as an example, something that will ring true for many of you.

You’ve probably thought about buying paid Google Ads for your business. When considering this course of action, you probably analyzed the outcomes and decided it would mean more hits, more sales, higher revenue, higher EBITDA, and an increased operating cash flow.

But paying for Google Ads is an extremely tactical solution for a low-level ‘gap’ of not having enough website traffic.

If you go through the full process of strategic thinking, starting with ‘is there a problem?’ through analyzing the gap and identifying the obstacles, you might come to the conclusion that Google Ads are not the critical path to fixing your business. And might not be the greatest ‘how’ to fix the ‘what’ if the ‘what’ were decreased operating cash flow.

You know your business better than us. And perhaps ads are the way forward. But we would suggest that taking this route to problem-solving is rarely the most effective or efficient path to genuinely fixing your business’s problems.

Business is a contact sport, both physical and intellectual. Our intention in this article is to increase your sphere of awareness of the multiple levels of high-level strategic decision-making that is all too often left off the table, off your potential menu, when you gravitate to the easier, tactical, HOW questions rather than the sometimes harder, strategic, WHAT ones.

That you have made it this far, we are grateful that you are willing to invest in your thinking, in your, and your business’s growth.

Until the next perfect time.

With gratitude,

Amit and Kumar Ramlall