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The more objectives someone has, the harder it is for them to focus on what really matters and the more their freedom of action is constrained.
In their later publication, The Strategy Focused Organization, they go further still, recommending the creation of a “strategy map,” which lays out the causal relationships between all the measures in their four categories (financial, customer, internal, and learning) so as to produce a one-page “map” of the strategy itself.51
people do not always behave in the way required. However, they usually do behave rationally from the point of view of the subsystem of the organization to which they belong. If we examine the goals, resources, and constraints of the subsystem, we can understand why they behave as they do and can take steps to change the subsystem itself in order to produce the behavior we want.
Strategy is unitary and binding, and tactics are standardized and binding. So unless we create a third level, we have tied everybody’s hands. Unless we place limits around that level, we invite chaos into the organization instead of keeping it outside, where it belongs. We are further hampered by our language because we often refer to “tactics” and “operations” interchangeably.
1 We are finite beings with limited knowledge and independent wills. 2 The business environment is unpredictable and uncertain, so we should expect the unexpected and should not plan beyond the circumstances we can foresee. 3 Within the constraints of our limited knowledge we should strive to identify the essentials of a situation and make choices about what it is most important to achieve. 4 To allow people to take effective action, we must make sure they understand what they are to achieve and why. 5 They should then explain what they are going to do as a result, define the implied tasks,
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