About
The Work
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Strategy is one of the most misunderstood phenomena in the universe.
Not because strategy is unimportant, but because we have mistaken its most familiar human settings — business, war, politics, and planning — for the phenomenon itself.
Strategy is not something business invented, let alone perfected. Nor is it something humans invented. It is a universal phenomenon, closely related to evolution and natural selection, appearing wherever adaptive systems must persist under uncertainty, scarcity, competition, constraint, and change.
My work begins by abandoning the pseudo-scientific tradition that has made strategy into a packaged product and a saleable service. Instead, I study strategy as a naturally occurring phenomenon: one that must be understood through complex-systems science, information science, physics, thermodynamics, evolutionary theory, and the study of adaptive systems.
For too long, strategy has been made small enough to sell.
It is time to make it serious enough to study.
The Research
Questions at the Heart of the Research
More than a decade of original theoretical research lies behind What Strategy Is: The 18 Fundamental Laws of Strategy. The book introduces the central principles to practitioners. Principia Strategica develops their foundations and connects them to a wider account of strategic actors, their relations, their organisation across levels and generations, and the games they construct and change.
The questions below organise that inquiry. They begin with the conditions that make strategy necessary and proceed through the phenomenon itself, the systems capable of sustaining it, and the ways those systems shape one another’s futures. An extension into moral philosophy is forthcoming.
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Foundations
What are the conditions that necessitate strategy?
An actor must act in a world that supplies information about what has happened while requiring decisions about what has not.
That gap is the starting point.
A firm receives orders, prices, accounts and customer responses. An organism encounters chemical signals, movement, temperature and remembered consequences. An institution receives reports, representations, applications and complaints. However sophisticated its instruments, the system works through causally available traces. The consequences toward which it acts have yet to occur.
Prospective action therefore requires constructed futures: representations of what might happen, how action might influence it, and why one possibility should be preferred to another.
Those constructions depend upon what the system can detect, retain and make of the information available. A signal may arrive late. A distinction may go unnoticed. A model may preserve the wrong detail. An inherited assumption may continue to organise decisions after the conditions that once justified it have disappeared. Some bounded problems permit exact prediction; the strategic difficulty concerns unresolved information and change that matter to the choice being made.
Meanwhile, the system must maintain the capacity to do anything at all.
Machines wear. Organised activity consumes usable energy and materials. Memory, communication, coordination and repair require implemented means. Capabilities can deteriorate while their owner deliberates. The world continues to change while the system attempts to understand it.
Its means are finite. It cannot investigate every possibility, retain every distinction, pursue every opportunity or preserve every freedom. Attention, capacity, material inputs, financing and time impose different constraints. Committing one of them can change what remains possible elsewhere.
The problem becomes sharper because action itself changes subsequent conditions. A contract creates obligations. An investment consumes resources and establishes capabilities. A threat changes another actor’s expectations. A successful intervention can remove the circumstances that made it successful. The next decision inherits a world partly altered by the previous one.
The foundations of the theory concern this conjunction: incomplete retrospective information, prospective action, entropic drift and finite means.
These conditions establish the problem to which strategy responds. Further capacities are required for a system to respond strategically: it must construct possibilities, evaluate them, act, retain consequences and revise its subsequent conduct.
The inquiry begins by explaining why that work is required.
Biography
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About Clayton
Prof Clayton Fraser Williams is the author of What Strategy Is: The 18 Fundamental Laws of Strategy. He is a strategist, former Chief Executive Officer, board-level adviser, and multidisciplinary theorist whose work seeks to build a rigorous scientific and philosophical foundation for strategy. His professional career spans executive leadership, corporate transformation, tier-one banking, investment strategy, and strategic advisory to the board of a European public investment institution.
