The strategy is bound by the view
Strategy isn't what you conclude from your analysis. It's what you create from your vision.
Strategy · Part II · CEO-Strategy.nl
In the first article we established that Sun Tzu's "view" is an act of perception, not calculation. The general sees the situation whole before he begins to think about it. That perception — clear, present-tense, free of the last battle's assumptions — is the foundation. Everything else rests on it.
Now the second stage: plan. And this is where most organisations make their second mistake, compounding the first.
Having substituted analysis for vision, they then treat plan as the logical output of that analysis. The spreadsheet points somewhere. The framework suggests a direction. The plan is written to match. It looks like strategy. It reads like strategy. But it was derived, not created. And there's a profound difference between the two.
May 1945. Germany has surrendered. The allies now face a question that has no precedent: what do you do with a nation that industrialised mass murder?
Henry Morgenthau, U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, had an answer. His plan was analytically airtight. Germany industrialised. Germany made war. Germany used that industrial capacity to attempt genocide. Therefore: remove the industry. Dismantle the factories. Flood the mines. Return Germany to a pastoral, agrarian state. No industrial base, no war machine. The logic was clean, the derivation direct. Analysis in, plan out.
It was almost implemented. And it would have been a catastrophe.
"The victors of the last war plant the seeds of the next one when they make their peace from fear rather than from vision."
What stopped it was a different kind of thinking. George Marshall, Dean Acheson, and the architects of what became the European Recovery Programme didn't ask "how do we prevent what happened?" They asked something harder: "what do we want to exist?" That's a creative question, not an analytical one. And it produced a creative answer.
Here's what makes the Marshall Plan the perfect illustration of Sun Tzu's plan stage: the underlying vision never changed.
From 1943 onward the allies shared a single clear view — eliminate Nazi ideology and make sure it could never take hold again. That was the perception. Firm, shared, non-negotiable. But the plan — the creative act of giving that vision a form in the world — evolved dramatically as circumstances clarified.
The Morgenthau approach, 1944 Derived directly from analysis of cause and effect. Destroy the industrial base that enabled Nazi power. Analytically coherent. Backward-looking. Built to prevent the past.
The Marshall Plan, 1948 A creative act built toward a future that didn't yet exist. Rebuild Germany into a prosperous democracy, integrate it into a European economic community, make war materially irrational. Forward-looking. Built to create something new.
The outcome, 1950s onward Germany became an economic superpower. Nazi ideology was dismantled not by prohibition alone but by replacing it with a working alternative. The vision was fulfilled by a plan that no analysis could have generated.
Morgenthau's plan failed before it started because it was a conclusion. Marshall's plan succeeded because it was a creation. One looked at what had happened and tried to make it impossible. The other looked at what the vision required and built toward it.
When plan is treated as the output of analysis, it is always, structurally, a response to the past. The data describes what was. The framework was built to interpret what has been seen before. The conclusion fits the last situation with high fidelity and the next one poorly.
| Derived strategy | Creative strategy |
|---|---|
| Starts from: what does the data tell us? | Starts from: what do we want to exist? |
| Looks backward to justify forward direction | Looks forward from the vision |
| Changes only when the analysis changes | Evolves as the creation develops |
| Locks the organisation to its last successful model | Frees the organisation to invent new forms |
| Treats deviation from the plan as failure | Treats revision as craft, not defeat |
The Marshall planners revised their approach continuously between 1947 and 1952 as they understood more about what was actually needed. Each revision was in service of the same vision. None of them required going back to re-do the analysis. The vision held. The creation evolved. That's not strategic failure — that's a creative process working exactly as it should.
Most strategic planning processes in organisations are Morgenthau processes wearing Marshall clothes. There's a vision statement on the wall. There's a values deck. There's a purpose. And then the room fills with slides about market share, competitive positioning, and growth rates — and the "strategy" that emerges is a conclusion from those slides, not a creation in service of the vision.
You can tell which kind of room you're in by listening to the questions. A derived-strategy room asks: "what does the market data suggest we should do?" A creative-strategy room asks: "given what we see, what are we going to build?" The first question produces a reaction. The second produces a strategy.
The creative act of plan doesn't mean ignoring reality. Marshall didn't ignore the ruins of Europe — he used them. The condition of Germany wasn't an obstacle to the vision, it was the raw material the creation worked with. Creative strategy is ruthlessly realistic about the present and completely free in imagining the future.
Sun Tzu's general, having seen the situation clearly, doesn't derive a course of action. He makes one. The plan is a commitment — a choice to bring a specific future into existence rather than another. That's an act of creative will, and it carries risk in a way that a derived conclusion deliberately avoids.
Derived strategy hedges. It covers multiple scenarios. It produces options rather than choices. It's defensible in the post-mortem. Creative strategy bets. It picks the shape the future should take and moves toward it, knowing that the creation will need to be remade as it meets reality.
The allies bet on Germany. They bet that a prosperous, educated, democratically governed Germany was achievable — not because the analysis supported it, but because the vision demanded it. Seventy years on, that bet looks self-evident. At the time it looked audacious.
That's what plan looks like when it follows from vision rather than analysis. Not a document. Not a roadmap. A creative act that stakes a claim on the future — and begins the work of making it real before a single action is taken.