How to Create Strategic Momentum
"If you're coasting, you're either losing momentum or else you're headed downhill." Joan Welsh
Our positions depend upon how others judge us. We can talk about the judgments people make at a single instant in time, but every contest and decision takes time. Our success depends more on what happens over time than anything that happens at one point in time. Abraham Lincoln is perhaps the most famous case of someone who lost every political contest in his life until he was elected president. He continually lost, but he lost upward, continually making strategic progress.
How does this happen?
The answer is “momentum.” Momentum is a critical precondition for getting our progress recognized and rewarded. In everyday usage, we use the word "momentum" to mean any forward progress, but, strategically, it requires more than that. In physics, momentum is simply mass times velocity. A small object that is moving really fast has the same momentum as a large object moving slowly. And like physical momentum, psychological momentum has two components. But in physics, a body maintains its momentum only if nothing changes. In competitive psychology, we can maintain our momentum only when something unexpected happens.
Standard Methods and Surprise
In most lessons on practical strategy, we discuss “standard strategic methods,” that is, the common responses to common situations. For example, back in this article on responding to challenges, we covered the nine common situations that often mark the development of a competitive campaign. Using standard responses is important. It establishes expectations in people’s minds. When we generally respond in a good way to the challenges we face, people develop a good opinion of us. However, this doesn’t give us competitive momentum. Or, to add a little more hokum lingo, we can survive on standard methods, but we cannot thrive.
Standard practices are the skills that people expect us to know if we are good in our competitive arena. They are what people often call “best practices.” Returning to our analogy from physics, our skills in standard competitive practices give our positions their "mass." For example, a solid professional sports team is one that has mastered all the basics of their sport. Those practices work and allow us to advance, but our advance is always seen as expected and unremarkable. Standard practices allow us to do a good job, but we don't get momentum from simply doing well. Sports teams that are nothing more than “solid” don’t win championships.
Competitive momentum comes from introducing a little chaos into people’s expectations. In other words, it requires surprise. To extend our analogy with physics, “continual innovation” gives our positions their velocity. However, unlike physics, this velocity requires a change from what is expected. Continuing as expected is easily ignored. A surprise works in a way that people don't expect. It introduces chaos to the situation. When does momentum change in a game of sports? When one team does something that their opponent doesn’t expect. Such moves undermine the confidence of opponents and inspire supporters. This changes the psychological basis of the competition.
Without being based on existing standards, our surprises cannot work consistently. Existing methods are what have been proven to work. Completely new methods can work, but they cannot be made to do so economically. To get them to work, too much testing must be done. A sports team that never masters the basics cannot innovate. More importantly from a psychological perspective, people have a hard time trusting those who do not demonstrate a working knowledge of the common practice. We can invent new methods, but we cannot completely change the minds of those we want to support us. We must always lead with standard practices and follow up with innovation.
Creating Strategic Momentum
Strategic momentum comes only from combining standard strategies with strategic surprises. To create momentum in the minds of others, we cannot use proven practices alone. Nor can we use surprise alone. This system works best when it is a well-time flow of surprises, each one taking us a little furthers from the mainstream. This is the power of continuous innovation.
Innovation interrupts standard practices at the right time to create surprise.
The predictability of standard methods makes the innovative surprise possible. We want to introduce a surprise when people’s expectations are the most fixed. If it is used too soon, the people haven’t formed an expectation about us that we can interrupt. This is true both for those who support us and for those against whom we are competing. Used too late and the decision has progressed too far to redirect. Used at the right time, surprise seizes the competitive initiative, forming a new basis for competition. For example, in American football, a team doesn’t change momentum when they fake a punt when everyone knows they are desperate. A fake punt is more likely to succeed and create surprise when no one expects it. Even if it doesn’t succeed, the attempt creates uncertainty in people’s minds about what is coming,
The psychological power of momentum is temporary.
Surprise resets people’s expectations. It increases people's expectations of our continued success, but only for a limited time. When we have momentum, others tend to support us more readily and our competitors are more warry about us. We tend to act with more confidence and persistence while our opponents tend to act with uncertainty and frustration. We must take advantage of this temporary situation while it lasts.
The momentum of innovation opens up entirely new competitive territories. Momentum is necessary to break down the physical and psychological barriers that confine us to a given set of positions. It makes people reevaluate their opinions about our potential. This allows us to open up new possibilities as the basis of comparison and competition.
Conclusions
Saying “we must be innovative” or “we must surprise people” is easy, but how do we do it? Strategic surprise is not simply coming up with a good idea whenever one is needed. That would require prayer or magic. What if we are not particularly creative? Not everyone is. But everyone can practice constant innovation. Practical strategy offers a practical system for doing just that. And, not surprisingly, that is the topic of the next article.