Obama’s Strategic shift did not just occur in the South China Sea, it also has apparently begun in his attack to keep his job.
.” But it got really interesting when the conversation turned to what the president considers the biggest mistake of his first term. It was, he said, “thinking that this job was just about getting the policy right.”
If you replace the word “policy” with process, then what this statement is saying is: “I have gone strategic.”
Policy builds and maintains the process inside a OODA loop. Strategy creates a moment of inertia to by-pass the policy.
Strategy is, as diagrammed, by the way of the Double Freytag Triangle, in the book Tempo, by Venkatesh Rao, narrative decision-making.
“The nature of this office,” he said, “is also to tell a story to the American people that gives them a sense of unity and purpose and optimism, especially during tough times.”
Obama has “found” strategy and he is using it to continue the narrative (“story”-telling) that is the USA.
I wish him luck on this, because all strategy is flawed, and the worst environment to try and maintain strategy is one in which everyone puts the “bad breath” on you and your narrative. Ill-will puts the focus on your flaws, which is a distraction that keeps your “story” from becoming transparent.
The good news is: it does’t take much to hide/expose the narrative, because of the nature of complexity.
The environment that strategy runs in is so complex, in its policy, that the “tipping point” between a successful and failed strategy is very close in either direction. Policy is created to make sure the process is both accurate and precise, it is both of these (accuracy and precision) that “target” the “tipping point”, in any process.
In other words, strategy has just as much chance of success as failure despite the complexity, but it demands that you get the “story” out, which is an uncertain process.
The only thing that is certain, when using strategy instead of process, all strategy is flawed, in at least one point in the narrative. As Venkatesh Rao shows in the Double Freytag Triangle, all strategy starts out as a “Cheap Trick”, but, before the story ends, it changes into a more powerful form of the “Cheap Trick”. If it doesn’t change, then the “flaw” absorbs the strategy into the “story”, and the narrative continues, or not.
I think it is getting close to the time when we will be able to tell if Obama has found that flaw and is able to take advantage of the situation. Perhaps the “Cheap Trick” can be found inside the Constitution, and the story will move on to another “peak”.
As this article leads me to believe that Obama has bet his presidency on strategy, one has to admit that it took some guts and a whole lot of faith, in the process, which he built his strategy on, to change.
via Arianna Huffington: Is Storytelling the Secret Weapon of the 2012 Race?.
The Image 