79253 - Transcription  of Podcast With Us #78: Target, Task, Vision, Grand Strategy

N. Lygeros

We all know the notion of the target in strategy. But the problem is the choice of the target. We have to consider that the target is not a part of the strategy. In fact it’s a metastrategic object.  So to choose the target is useless to use strategy. We need metastrategy and of course its vision. We can consider that the target is in fact the application of the vision of metastrategy and after that we use and we create a strategy to do this. So this is a task. Imagine that you have a target which seems to be a part of a strategy but in fact it is the realization of the task of the vision of the metastrategy. So to think that in a more efficient way, we have to realize that the target is a part of the metastrategy and not of the strategy. So it’s very difficult to have a target which is a strategic choice. When we do this error and we think that is obvious that the target is a strategic choice, in fact we can have a very good strategy to do this but we can have also a wrong target. The idea for a system, for a factory, for a country or even for Humanity is to think that the target should be the task of a strategy. To do this we need to have a vision, we need to choose the vision in the metastrategic level which in fact can be considered  also as the Grand Strategy. When we have the vision and we know what are our capacities and our abilities to do something we have to choose a target. This target as we have already said should be the task of this vision and not a big target which is considered as independent of the system and its strategy. So when we see the target as a task we can imagine the project. The project is in fact the trace of the vision. With the project we can also imagine the place that should take the target as a task. With this matter we are able to find the target, to find its place in a frame which is in fact a project and this frame belongs to the vision. With this manner we create a tower and the target is of course the highest point but before we need the foundation. The foundation of the tower is its force, is its power. So we need to think that if we want to go high, we need to go deep. And the target should be a deep task and not just a target even if it is a high target. Because with the high target you need a deep task, you need a vision, you need metastrategy to think all that in the frame work of Grand Strategy.