Communication technology profoundly changes the nature of the relationship between strategic decision makers and the subject of those decisions, typically people, and it’s probably worth taking a few minutes to define those things with more accuracy.
An operational decision maker uses facts to makes decisions - a strategic decision maker makes decisions based on imperfect usually generalised and abstracted information.
- An operational decision maker maybe asked: “What’s two and three?” which they’ll happily decide is: five.
- A strategic decision maker maybe asked: “What’s one or two or three and two or three or four?” which causes a problem.
The strategic decision maker’s question cannot be answered accurately.
The strategic decision maker makes an assessment and decides: it’s possible to estimate the answer using an average so the question is: one and two and three, divided by three, and two and three and four, divided by three. They’ll glance at their watch, bill you another fifteen minutes, and answer: “five”.
The problem strategic decision makers have, however, is that the actual answer could be anywhere between three and seven, and, if, this variance represents the volume of food refugees get a day - it’s the difference between sustenance and starvation.
Another characteristic of strategic decision makers is that they are isolated from the impacts of their decisions. A bureaucrat working for the Red Cross in Geneva is a long way away from the distribution centre handing out food in Darfur.
(Not to give too much away, yet, but things begin to get tricky when you realise part of the reason strategic decision makers have imperfect information is their distance from the effects of the decision in the first place).
War, huh, yeah. What is it good for?
The classic case of the strategic decisions alienation from the effects of those decisions is the Great War, World War I, in which strategic decisions makers in Europe decided to send millions of people “over the top” to fruitless deaths.
Fortunately for us: the rise of independent mass media, particularly television, in the latter half of the 20th Century, opened up a channel which exposed strategic decision makers to the emotional effect of their decisions using the electoral process.
This channel, full of the brutal images of war, effectively ended US military operations in Vietnam and made the “administration” aware of the importance of opinion polls as well as elections in making strategic decisions.
Television, however, is a low bandwidth media and the content has a high importance threshold, so only the most critical content makes it onto tv. This is fine for subjects such as war whose images continue to haunt our nightly news, but doesn’t work so well for less significant strategic decisions, such as early childhood education.
Social media WTF?
Social media in this context, has limitless bandwidth and massively lowers the threshold to the feedback mechanism to strategic decision makers. This has profound implications particularly for political strategic decisions within the context of a modern western democracy.