Too many people, too often, seem to think the future is all about strategy. People often shun the everyday needs of tactics for the glory of being strategic. However, this is often a mistake, there is usually more work to be done with tactics than with the strategic.

The Art of War
The terms Strategic and Tactical can be traced back to Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War”, written about 2500 years ago. Szu Tzu writes “Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” This comment neatly defines the need for the right balance between the two.

I am working on a new insights/MR scenario project with a time horizon of five years from now. One of the first steps in the scenario-creating process is to gather together the key factors and premises.

The Premises are things that are likely to be important and which, for the purposes of this project, we are going to assume will be predictable during the timespan of the project. The Factors are items which are also important, but where there are two or more plausible forms they might take during the timeframe we are considering.

Here is my current list of Factors and Premise