The Trap of Tactics

I was a few paragraphs into “How David Beats Goliath” before I looked up at the author and recognized Malcom Gladwell’s name. The article is classic Gladwell, throwing a lot of seemingly unrelated ideas into a story with a strong central narrative and creating a mind bending milkshake.
It’s a great read, especially for those of us that love the game of basketball on a philosophical level. More importantly for that, as I sat at the computer last night reading it, it helped me come to terms with what I thought had been a meeting gone wrong.
The short story is that I had gathered a group, and started to talk about the plan. I had thought through the tactics and how to best push things along. Heck, I even had a Excel spreadsheet and a homework assignment.
The meeting went badly, because everyone kind of ignored that part of it. They wanted to know about the strategy. They wanted to know about the conclusions I had made in my head, and why we were doing what we were doing.
I had looked at the landscape of the organization and made a lot of decisions based on just getting the project done, and I jumped right there with the group. The problem is that I didn’t bring them along. I didn’t engage their thinking, and their perceptions of what needed to be done and who needed to do it.
What reading Gladwell (and a great phone call from a friend) helped me realize was that it is the way of thinking that matters. I didn’t the groups agreement on how to think about this project, and I didn’t respect how they viewed the problems this project would solve. So, when I jumped in with tactics they jumped back. They wanted answers to a lot of questions I didn’t have.
Today, I’m ready to take a little different tack and look at the problem and try to come up with new solutions, rather than just dive in with tactics. I think that is the challenge for most us in almost all parts of our life. We are rewarded for completed tasks, but much of the time it is the thinking, analysis, and problem solving that truly leads to innovation and ultimately makes our lives more fulfilling.
I can’t think of an area of life where this doesn’t apply. Even in my relationship with Christ, I can go about the tasks of teaching a Sunday School class or writing a tithing check, but Christ is clearly more interested in our thinking our or intent in those things. At work, I can go about the tactics, but what is personally rewarding and best for the organization is that I think about the problems in a long view which solves them in the long term, not just the short term. In my family, I can focus on getting everyone where they need to go without stopping to ask if we are going to the right places.