This Is Strategy: Make Better Plans (Create a Strategy to Elevate Your Career, Community & Life)

Systems have nodes (buildings) and connections (roads). Those roads have conventions that we all need to understand to stay safe. Buildings (and people) get replaced all the time. Roadways (and the rules of systems) fight like crazy to stay the way they are.

Systems are everywhere humans engage to fill a need. Sometimes they persist longer than we’d like. Sometimes they move in directions we don’t appreciate. Often, they’re cultural, invisible, and hard to notice. But systems define our lives.

Time, games, empathy and systems. They’re everywhere we look, and easy to ignore. Each supports and is supported by the other three. Throughout this project, we’ll be shifting from one to the other, building up to a fuller, actionable understanding of how strategy works. Time, because strategy plays out over time in the way a garden grows. Games, b

The Wildcard in Every Feedback Loop is the Delay We avoid putting a hand on a hot stove. That’s largely because the pain feedback comes almost instantly. On the other hand, hundreds of millions of people smoke cigarettes. The response from their lungs can take decades, and the delay in feedback means that people may, in short-term apparent self-int

The two most chosen jobs in the United States are truck driver and real estate broker. Both are part of very well-established systems, and technology and the law are turning those systems upside down. The first change agent for truck drivers is data—shippers now have far more knowledge of the supply chain and the conditions of transport. Add to thi

Instead, each person in the system imagines what actions are likely to lead to the most useful responses. Useful for them. Useful today.

The maintainer and the optimizer: People who work within organizations often fit into these two roles. The maintainer has a job to do and does it.

It might be helpful to imagine that we can choose a persona for our project and our work. Each is appropriate in some circumstances—the trap lies in wearing one of these hats and then hoping for the result that comes from a different one.

We have been indoctrinated to seek certainty, go back to normal, celebrate the end of change, seek the right answer and the peace of mind that comes with it. To find a useful blueprint—an effective strategy—we must seek out analogies. Understanding an analogy requires we understand the system that makes it relevant. Once we see the system, we can d

Build something that fills a square, and it becomes yours to defend.