> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.mastersinpublicaffairs.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Good Strategy Bad Strategy - URL: https://www.mastersinpublicaffairs.com/episodes/good-strategy-bad-strategy/ - Published: 2026-05-06T08:00:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-11T18:48:55.000Z - Description: A strategy is a coherent response to an important challenge. - Author: Joseph Lavoie - Tags: Good Strategy Bad Strategy, Richard Rumelt, 2017, 60 min, #episode, #ai-4 ## Why This Book Matters Almost every public affairs leader — including me — has produced what Rumelt would call bad strategy. The strategy session runs. The deck grows. By the end, the document lists eight strategic objectives, twenty-three priority actions, and a stakeholder map covering forty entities. The internal political problem has been solved. The strategy problem has been avoided. Strategy, in Rumelt’s framing, is scarcity’s child. Without the constraint of having to choose, there is no strategy — only a list of things the organisation hopes will happen. The diagnostic test Rumelt offers is the kernel. Any real strategy has three irreducible parts: - A diagnosis of what’s actually going on - A guiding policy for how to deal with it - A set of coherent actions that carry the policy forward Pull one out and the strategy stops being a strategy. The piece most often missing is the first, because diagnosing means choosing — saying that one factor matters more than another, knowing the second factor has a constituency in the room who’ll be disappointed. Diagnosing creates losers. The room is full of people who don’t want to lose. If your organisation isn’t producing good strategy, the first place to look isn’t the team or the framework. It’s the leader. Strategy work can be delegated. Choice cannot. Choice creates losers in the room, and only the leader has the political authority to absorb that cost. The leader’s job is to refuse the document everyone can sign and send it back. To inflict the pain the team will not inflict on itself. The audiences we’re trying to influence — ministers, deputy ministers, regulators, board members — are drowning in information and short on time. Clarity is in short supply, and simplicity is the biggest gift you can give. The wall of appendices is what you produce when you want to be seen to have done the work. Simplicity is what you produce when you’ve actually done it. ## What We Cover in the Episode - **The core idea** — *a strategy is a coherent response to an important challenge* — and why every word in that sentence is doing exclusionary work. - **The kernel as the minimum-viable shape of any real strategy**: diagnosis, guiding policy, coherent actions. The kernel works as a structural test. Take any document calling itself a strategy and ask: where’s the diagnosis, where’s the guiding policy, where are the actions? If you can’t find all three, you don’t have a strategy. You have something else with the wrong label on it. - **The four mechanisms that translate most directly to public affairs work:** the kernel itself, concentration and the threshold effect, the proximate objective (and Rumelt’s counter-intuitive case for *shorter* planning horizons under high uncertainty), and the asymmetry move — Andy Marshall and James Roche’s 1976 Pentagon memo and how it applies to industry-vs-NGO regulatory fights today. - **Four mental models:** the kernel, the pivot point, the long clock, and the dog’s dinner. - **Four common misreadings of the book** — the most consequential being the assumption that bad strategy is a failure of effort. - **Four modern applications**, including the consultant’s dog’s dinner, pulsing in regulatory work, proximate objectives in the legislative cycle, and the asymmetry move under the long clock. ## Bonus: Ideas that didn’t make the episode ### 1\. Petraeus replaced goals with strategy In 2003, the United States invaded Iraq with a lot of high-sounding goals — freedom, democracy, reconstruction, security — and no coherent strategy for dealing with the insurgency that emerged. Individual military units fell back on running search-and-destroy missions from secure bases, the same approach that had failed in Vietnam. In 2007, General David Petraeus arrived with something different. Not more goals. A diagnosis. He argued that you could combat an insurgency as long as a large preponderance of civilians supported a legitimate government. From the diagnosis came a guiding policy: shift the military’s focus from making patrols to protecting the population. From the guiding policy came coherent actions: a population that wasn’t living in fear of insurgent retaliation would provide the information necessary to isolate and combat the insurgent minority. > For practitioners: when a long-running file isn’t moving, the question to ask first isn’t whether you need more resources. It’s whether you have a diagnosis underneath. The change wasn’t more troops or better tactics. It was replacing amorphous goals with a problem-solving strategy. The kernel made an enormous difference in the results. ### 2\. Pierre Wack on why scenario planning misses the actual risk In 1981, Rumelt spent a week with Pierre Wack — the strategist who built scenario planning at Royal Dutch Shell — at a planning retreat in Runnymede, England. Wack told him something that I circled a few times: > The point is that the typical three-line scenario exercise gives the appearance of having grappled with uncertainty without actually grappling with it. > “If you do standard scenario forecasting, you wind up with a graph with three lines labelled high, medium, and low. Everyone looks at it and believes that they have paid attention to the uncertainty. They then plan on the medium, but they are missing the risk. The risk is not that the price of oil may be high or low. The risk is that it will go high, suckering you into a major investment, and then turn and dive low, leaving you with useless assets.” Most scenario planning in public affairs is similar. Three plausible futures, mapped, rated, and shelved. The exercise produces a deck. The deck doesn’t change anyone’s plan. Wargaming — actually running the dynamics, with someone playing the regulator and someone playing the opposing coalition — produces information the static exercise can’t. ### 3\. Chain-link systems and the weakest link Some systems perform only as well as their weakest sub-component. Rumelt calls these chain-link systems, and he uses the *Challenger* disaster as a vivid example. The Space Shuttle’s booster engines were a marvel of engineering. They had one weak component — a solid rubber O-ring. On January 28, 1986, the O-ring failed. The shuttle exploded. The strength of every other part of the system meant nothing. > The diagnostic question for coalition leaders: which workstream, if it underperforms, breaks the whole? Concentrate resources there before adding capability anywhere else. The chain-link logic shows up in coalitions. A multi-stakeholder advocacy effort can have brilliant communications, deep regulatory expertise, strong relationships with the public service, and a single under-resourced workstream — say, member education or grassroots mobilisation. If that one workstream fails, the whole thing fails. Improving the strong workstreams further doesn’t help. The weak link constrains the system. ### 4\. Inertia and entropy in organisations Even with engines in hard reverse, a supertanker can take a mile to come to a stop. Rumelt uses this image to describe organisational inertia — the unwillingness or inability to adapt to changing circumstances. Even with change programmes running at full throttle, it can take many years to alter a large organisation’s basic functioning. The companion force is entropy. Where inertia keeps organisations doing what they’ve been doing, entropy slowly degrades the organisation’s purpose, form, and methods even when nothing visible has changed. Both forces are silent. Both compound. > The leader’s job is the steady return to the work, long after the announcement was supposed to make change real. For public affairs leaders, there are to considerations: First, when you’re trying to move a regulator or a department, the inertia you’re working against is far stronger than the consultant’s deck implies. Long-running engagements aren’t a failure of your strategy; they’re a feature of the system you’re working in. Second, when you’re inside an organization that needs to change its approach to public affairs — the way it engages government, the way it builds coalitions, the way it tells its story — assume the change will take longer and require more sustained pressure than the change-management deck suggests. Entropy will quietly undo every bit of culture change that isn’t actively maintained.