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John Braddock
"Strategy starts when you look forward. Which requires imagination... people do the first part of strategy all the time. It's the next part that's more difficult."
"The next part of strategy is reasoning backward... It's the key to a good startegy."
JLJ - Braddock often writes with a clever, attention-and-suspense-holding, clipped, story-filled, sermon-style, one-sentence-per-paragraph delivery that might be better formatted, and I have taken some liberties with text formatting in presenting the quotes below.
Distilling Braddock's thoughts from a high level, good strategy comes from knowing the game you are playing and being able to play it at any time, in any place, in any fashion, with any available resources, and with any change, subtle or large-scale. It involves having a system and a scheme which is sophisticated and filled with experienced wisdom, yet can be executed with ease, and involves reading the cues that are present and being able to use the time available wisely, because opportunities arise unexpectedly and often close forever.
Strategy is about playing the game better than that of your opponent, and about having a prepared response (and a developed capacity) ready for use for everything that can be selected. When the future arrives, whatever it is, it will likely be in your favor, because you have schemed, invested, trained, postured, prepared, and planned for it. Because you have acquired a portfolio of tricks that (often) work, and know how to select among them, in a predicament of sorts. Because you know how to take your opponent out of their game plan, and into yours. Because you know how to play the game.
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p.24-25 Strategy starts when you look forward. Which requires imagination. Imagination is easy for most people. It's easy to imagine a future. To imagine a place. To imagine people in it. The things in it. Which means people do the first part of strategy all the time. It's the next part that's more difficult.
p.25-26 The next part of strategy is reasoning backward... Reasoning backward is more difficult because we usually do things forward... reasoning backward is important. It's the key to a good strategy. It's how you build strategies. It's how you plan when you are a spy.
p.26-27 When you are a spy, source meetings are everything... Meetings are where you get intelligence... The most important part of a meeting is that it happens... To make sure meetings happen, you spend a lot of time planning... When you're planning, you don't start where you are today... You plan backwards... You start in the future. And reason backward.
p.28-29 Reasoning backward ties together imagination and action. Without reasoning backward, you're shooting in the dark. You're imagining and acting along a path that may not make sense... Without reasoning backward, you'll end up with a bad strategy.
p.39 You assume the enemy will do what advances their strategy.
[JLJ - A strategy is an intelligent means of maneuver to an end, where it is understood that the future involves complex driving forces and is not entirely foreseeable in advance. Sometimes a strategy is not needed - as in picking a piece of fruit off a tree that is hanging right in front of you. The tree will not resist your efforts, so you can just do it. Strategy is properly looked at as a means to an end, and is wisely selected in a contested environment, in order to intelligently manage a predicament. A strategy in itself is useless unless it can be intelligently applied, in order to 'go on.' An opponent will do what advances his agenda, or his short or long term objectives. He will develop and execute a strategy to do that.]
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