Tactics ≠ Strategy

Strategy is not just a plan. It is a way of staying in relationship with reality.

Strategy is field-level awareness, while tactics are execution-level moves.

The danger begins when tactical motion is mistaken for strategic clarity. A system can have many tactics and still lack strategy.

People can be busy, responsive, energetic, and well-equipped, while still playing the wrong game and believing they are making strategic progress.

Ontological coordinate in Relational Dynamics™:
Reality = relational dynamics under constraint over time.

When Stability Becomes a Moving Target

When I first came to the UK in September 2013 for my Master’s at the University of Edinburgh, David Cameron was Prime Minister.

I learnt a word called referendum. I had not learnt that word before.

When I came back in January 2016 to begin my PhD, also at the University of Edinburgh, David Cameron was still Prime Minister.

Whatever one thinks politically, there was still a sense of stabilisation in the background.

Then there was another referendum.

What came as a surprise was how rapidly that sense of stability began to change in the following decade.

On a somewhat absurd, and not exactly reassuring, note about institutional stability: because Sino-UK collaboration formed part of the context of my PhD research, I once thought it was sensible to mention a UK government representative in the very first section of my thesis, 1.1 Context and background.

However, the context kept shifting. Over the years, I decided to just keep that section more open rather than constantly modify it. I eventually deleted that line out of a practical concern for relevance. After all, there is usually quite a gap between thesis submission and graduation, and I really did not want one of the first factual things mentioned at the beginning of my years of work to become invalid or irrelevant.

Today, as I post this quote, which I shared on the Strategy Meets Reality podcast last week, I find myself watching another leadership change unfold.

I really do not think I know enough about the executive details of politics, nor do I possess the extravagant vocabulary to discuss much of it.

But I would like to think I know a thing or two about system trajectory, especially the relational-dynamic patterns that repeat across domains.

Perhaps this is not the most precise analogy, but once seen, the structural resonance is hard to unsee.

With the World Cup now taking place in North America, the football analogy feels timely too. As I said on the podcast, tactics can make a system look very busy. Players may keep running, passing, adjusting, and responding, creating the impression that the system is productive. But if all that movement remains trapped in their own half, there may still be no strategic advance.

That is the pattern across domains.

Leadership change can be necessary. But it is not automatically strategy.

A system can have many wonderful tactics and still lack strategy.

Related Work:

Shan, A. J. (2023). Exploring internationalisation of higher education: Chinese postgraduate students’ oral participation in English during their experience at a UK university [PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh]. Edinburgh Research Archive. http://dx.doi.org/10.7488/era/3445

Shan, A. J. (2026). Relational Dynamics™ · Ontology of Relational Dynamics · v0.2 / 关系动力学™ · 关系动力学之本体论立场 · v0.2. ScholarLand Ltd. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20465007

AJS Quotes is a visual archive of original lines by Alice Jing Shan, drawn from Relational Dynamics™, essays, narratives, and field notes. A small way of making recurring patterns more visible, legible, and shareable.

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Capacity does not become judgement by itself. The organisation must create the conditions through which it can enter, act, and develop.

An organization can hire capacity and then remove the conditions through which that capacity becomes judgement.

The problem is not only insufficient trust. Expertise needs context, constraints, authority, interfaces and autonomy to enter the system coherently.

Otherwise, the organization creates dependency and then diagnoses the dependency as a lack of maturity.

Autonomy is not the reward for development. It is one of the conditions through which development becomes possible.

AJS Quotes is a visual archive of original lines by Alice Jing Shan, drawn from Relational Dynamics™, essays, narratives, and field notes. A small way of making recurring patterns more visible, legible, and shareable.

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A path repeated over time becomes pattern.
A pattern stabilised over time becomes structure.
A structure inherited over time becomes constraint.

Path dependence means that in complex systems, history is not background.
History becomes structural conditions for future movement.

Related reading:

Dao: A Path Repeated Over Time Becomes Pattern

How a Path Becomes “The Way”

Dao Models of Mutual Generation

Time Is Not Background

AJS Quotes is a visual archive of original lines by Alice Jing Shan, drawn from Relational Dynamics™, essays, narratives, and field notes. A small way of making recurring patterns more visible, legible, and shareable.

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Some thoughts arrive first as essays. Some return later as a single line.

This section currently works with two recurring visual templates.

The first is the River series. It is used for quieter, more foundational lines, especially those concerned with time, coherence, meaning, system trajectory, and the deeper structure beneath visible events.

For example: Seriousness, after all, does not have to perform itself as heaviness.

The second is the Seven Visual Fields series. This series places quotes within a colour-based thematic structure. Different colours signal different fields of entry across the work:

Power & Organisation
Work & Coordination
Learning & Formation
Relation & Human Development
Language & Interface
Systems & AIR
Time, Meaning & Narrative

These colours are not rigid categories. They are visual orientations.

They help readers enter the work from different angles, without turning the work into a fixed taxonomy.

The River series tends to hold slower, more timeless propositions.

The Seven Visual Fields series tends to hold more explicitly thematic ones.

Over time, this section will become a small visual archive of recurring lines, distilled ideas, and conceptual anchors.

Some will stand alone.

Some will echo larger essays.

Some will return in new forms.

AJS Quotes is not separate from the wider work of Relational Dynamics™, originated and developed by Dr Alice Jing Shan.

It is one way the work folds back into itself.

Sometimes an idea needs an essay.

Sometimes a sentence is enough.

AJS Quotes is a visual archive of original lines by Alice Jing Shan, drawn from Relational Dynamics™, essays, narratives, and field notes. A small way of making recurring patterns more visible, legible, and shareable.

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Seriousness, after all, does not have to perform itself as heaviness.

Across years of working with complexity in human systems, as an academic-practitioner and simply as a living human being, I have found that some of the most important ideas become more accessible, not less, when they are held with clarity, humour, and humanity.

Seriousness does not need to arrive with weight in its hands.

It can arrive with precision, warmth, and a little room to breathe. 🪭

So I’ve begun a small visual archive: AJS Quotes.

These are short visual fragments from my work on Relational Dynamics™: constraint, time, and system trajectory.

Over time, they will unfold across several visual fields, from power and organisation to language, interface, systems, AIR, time, meaning, and human development.

A small way of making recurring patterns more visible, legible, and shareable.

AJS Quotes is a visual archive of original lines by Alice Jing Shan, drawn from Relational Dynamics™, essays, narratives, and field notes. A small way of making recurring patterns more visible, legible, and shareable.

Subscribe now