Reconnaissance Pull Over Central Planning

"One mechanism for achieving this harmony is known as Einsickern in German, “reconnaissance pull” in maneuver warfare, and through analogy by phrases like “exploratory marketing” in business texts.144 The basic idea is to start a number of things going and reinforce the ones that succeed. This seems…"

"In business as in war, we need higher-order concepts that will give us a competitive advantage when things go awry, knowing with certainty that they will. To construct such a device, let’s create a crude model of the planning process. Plans are what we intend to do to get from Now to where we want to be in the Future. To build a specific a plan, we have to make assumptions about what the future will bring. In other words, we have to construct a scenario. We can represent one such plan, with its embedded scenario, as a simple arrow100:   Figure 6—A Single Plan In real life, unpredictable actions by customers and competitors ensure that things don’t often work out exactly according to plan. For example, our original plan, which we’ll call Plan A, might have called for us to develop a certain device in-house."

"It is also possible to have multiple plans operating at the same time, within an overall strategy. You can then reinforce the ones that succeed and cut off the ones that don’t. This is analogous to an important concept in maneuver warfare known as “…"

"Because the future is unpredictable, a strategy can only be built from intentions: Given where you are now and where you think you want to go, now, what can you do, now, to help you get there? A strategy is not a fact, or a forecast, or a schedule, or a roadmap to the future. Is a strategy, then, a type of plan?"