Deep Thinking and Strategy

One Step At a Time to The Peak

The Police of the Land of Strategia was losing its sleep over "it". The number of angry protests in Strategia had been on the rise. The mobs were not violent yet, but definitely very inflamed and determined, and it was becoming difficult for the Police for them to contain those mobs. They were under a strict directive to find an effective way to control the mob and dissipating the volatility of such situations easily.

Like any other police department, the Police of Strategia had its own constraints. They couldn't use excessive force unless really needed. They couldn't injure the protesters under normal circumstances. They couldn't do anything that would escalate the situation and enrage the mob any further. Electrifying the barricades, using spikes, etc were among the "obvious" suggestions they had been receiving, but these were surely not something they could go for.

They clearly needed a new kind of barricade to stop the mobs from marching forward - without causing any physical injury to the protesters.

What kind of a barricade do they need to devise ?

Strategy - Peeking Beyond the "Obvious"

The "obvious" nature of our thoughts would suggest that the larger the mob, the easier it will be for them to topple a barricade. Hence, the "obvious" ways to contain an unruly that revolve around over-use of power. The barricade, flimsy in comparison to the unruly crowd, cannot stop the crowd on its own - so it needs to be imbued with extraordinary powers - shocks, spikes - something that will deter the crowd with force and compel them to back out.

It's the intrinsic nature of the process of "obvious", "common-sense"-based thinking to lead us to a situation where we find a situation intractable or impossible to conquer and give up on it too soon.

The "Obvious", "Common-Sense" based approaches could only lead us to "Obvious", "Common-Sense" accomplishments.

The ability to handle complex situations require us to look beyond what feels obvious or common-sense. We need the ability to break down a complex situation into a large number of distinct phases, each leading to the other.

The process of breaking down the path to a complex destination through a sequence of small steps, each leading to the other, could often be the deciding factor of whether or one can reach to the goal. That's why Strategic Thinking is an absolute necessity for every professional in the process of achieving any target.

The Relevance of Strategy

We have heard the phrase too often - "May the best team win". Should this be interpreted to mean that the lesser of the two teams playing a sport should contain themselves to play to lose ?

We all play to win. Irrespective of the resources available to us and our opponents - the resource includes "competence" as well - no matter what situations we are in, we aspire and strive to win.

A Strategic Thinker is the one who looks for a win no matter what.

A Strategic Thinker doesn't get stopped by constraints and limitations. To a Strategic Thinker, any constraint or limitation is just a parameter of the problem statement that needs to be accounted for. Rather than thinking "I cannot win because I only have X resources", a Strategic Thinker would reframe it as an exploratory question : "How do I win with X resources ?".

A Strategic Thinker doesn't give in to the conventional methods of evaluation which rates a given individual or a team higher than the others based on certain assumptions. It ends up creating a false sense of "deservability" and "entitlement". When things do not go the way as predicted by these delusionary methods of evaluation, we decry the unfairness of the world.

Even if I may not be the most intelligent, hard-working, committed, disciplined individual around - I deserve the right to aspire to win ...

That's where Strategy sets in. Strategic Thinking provides us an opening towards victory irrespective of all the odds against us. It makes us sit up and take a deep look at the resources available or unavailable to us, and optimize their utilization to create a winning combination. Strategic Thinking may not always guarantee a win, but a Strategic Thinker definitely ends up putting a very intense fight, making any game they play in their lives worth playing.

Turning the number against itself

The most striking example of applying Strategy is seen in the unbelievable story about the Battle of Cannae in 2nd century BC, where the Cathiganians, led by Hannibal, won over a massive Roman army, several times their size. Any onlooker of the situation could see that with equitable skills, training and equipment, an army that massively outnumbered the other in that era had a clear-cut advantage, and Hannibal was rightly advised by many to give in and surrender to the Romans without a fight.

Strategy begins to evolve when we begin to question the "obvious".

At the outset, number may seem to be a strength, but it's not always the case. Number is strength only when the strength of each individual functions at its best, and the strength of all the individuals in the team can be summed up. Of course, with proper syncronization between the individual fighters, this effect could even be multiplied.

Number may not be an advantage all the time. For example, a very large number of people packed in a small space would feel cramped and suffocated with no room for maneouvre. The number, in that case, becomes cancerous. They not only fail to perform their individual best, they end up choking the manouvers of their peers too.

A duel between two groups of 10 and 2 fighters respectively, with reasonably equal skills is one-sided in the favour of 10, only if all the 10 could fight the 2 at the same time. If the side with 2 fighters can ensure that only one of the 10 get to fight at a given time, then these 10 do not fight as a single team, and there is no "number" advantage for them.

A Strategic Thinker looks at these opportunities -

(a) how to convert an apparent opponent strength into a weakness ?

(b) how to leverage one's own strengths, without getting trapped by one's weaknesses ?

Hannibal is remembered for having taken down the Roman and allied troops that numbered 86,000 with an army roughly half the size and a fraction of casualties. While only 15,000 Romans are estimated to have escaped death in the battle, Hannibal lost only 8000 of his troops.

How did he accomplish this ?

Clearly, he found a way to reverse the Roman's biggest strength (their number) to weakness, and his weakness (again, the number) to strength. He managed his offense and defense formations well, in addition to managing the perception he gave to the Roman army. As a result, he ended up entrapping them to make false attacks, and finally suffocated them by their own numbers.

What strategy did Hannibal use to win a tough battle so decisively, with very little casualties to his side ?

Fractured Eggs

Ted Crawford, the character played by Anthony Hopkins in the movie Fracture summed it beautifully when he narrates his childhood experience of "candling eggs" at his uncle's farm. He tells the investigating officer : "I used to candle eggs at his farm. Do you know what that is? You hold an egg up to the light of a candle and you look for imperfections. The first time I did it he told me to put all the eggs that were cracked or flawed into a bucket for the bakery. And he came back an hour later, and there were 300 eggs in the bakery bucket. He asked me what the hell I was doing. I found a flaw in every single one of them - you know, thin places in the shell; fine, hairline cracks. You look closely enough, you'll find that everything has a weak spot where it can break, sooner or later."

Movie clip : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1dq7ZHPMG8

That's what Strategic Thinking requires. A Strategic Thinker looks closely to find the weak spots which can be broken sooner or later.

Deep Thinking and Strategy

When we look close and hard, every egg shell would have its spots of weaknesses - thin places in the shell; fine, hairline cracks, and so on ...

Strategy is often mistaken with "getting bright ideas". More often than not, Strategy is also used to refer to bright ideas that are conniving in nature.

However, Strategic Thinking is far more than this.

Strategic Thinking is the finest application of Deep Thinking.

To start with, Strategy begins with an intense determination to win, no matter what. It is not uncommon for us to look at a complex situation as a monolith and approach it with a binary outcome - we believe we can either accomplish it or not accomplish it.

Strategic thinking prompts us to look at a situation as a series of multiple steps of much smaller granularity, which enables us to manouvre our way around it to find a crack or a weak spot through which we could barge our way through.

Strategic Thinking begins with a clear-cut goal which has to be reached even though there is no directly visible route to the target. Strategy involves knowing your terrain inside out - knowing it well enough that makes navigating through the most intricate and the toughest parts possible. More often than not, it would require discovering not a "single, straight path to the goal", but often a disjointed connection of several sub-paths.

Clearly, it requires us to back off a bit, and look at the whole terrain ahead of us with an amplified micro-focus - till we discover a trail, howsoever, miniscule - that could potentially take us to the desired destination.

Strategic Thinking is essentially about "Deconstructing".

As discussed elaborately in The Science of Deep Thinking, when we sufficiently deconstruct a given situation, it leads us to "insights", which enables us to go ahead and "Reconstruct" the rest of the solution.

In our article on Lateral and Longitudinal Thinking, we looked at how deconstruction provided a "guiding principle" for the solution to the Unfair Pebble Puzzle. The guiding principle (strategy) in that case was for the girl to "turn everyone's attention away from the pebble that is picked and draw their attention to the pebble that is left over in the bag". With that guiding principle in sight, one could generate a variety of solutions that held good in different conditions in which the story transpired.

Every successful strategy works as a guiding principle, that emerges from a well deconstructed problem situation.

Hence, mastery of Deconstruction automatically leads to a great escalation in one's skills at Strategic Thinking.

An expert at Deconstruction doesn't get intimidated by the enormosity or the complexity of a situtation, as he is well equipped to break down any situation into small manageable pieces and then stitch them together in the manner most favourable to them.

Regardless of how far one's destination is and how unknown or complex the terrain that leads to it is, Strategic Thinking leads to success with a high degree of confidence, because it empowers an individual to divide the path into a large number of smaller steps, taking one step at a time, leading to the next step as one is done.

The New Barricade

Complex situations require us to change the questions we are asking of ourselves.

The Police of the Land of Strategia need to begin by questioning the obvious assumption that a larger crowd would make toppling of the barricade easier.

They need to begin asking -

"How could an increase in the number of people increase the difficulty of toppling the barricade ?"

This becomes a simple guiding principle to take them to the design of the new barricade - they need to find a way to ensure that the presence of every additional person in the mob makes it a little more difficult for the barricade to tumble.

The new barricade should make every individual fight against his own strength.

There could be many ways of getting to it, and this could be one of them :

The new barricade should use the weight of every protester present to make it difficult for the barricade to be toppled.

What do you think the new barricade should look like ?

We would discuss this as well as Hannibal's strategy in our forthcoming articles.

Articles :

The Science of Deep Thinking

Lateral vs Longitudinal Thinking

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