The military has a set of planning considerations called the Principles of War. Despite the name, they're not really instructions for fighting. They're prompts for thinking. They help us ask better questions when the environment is uncertain, resources are limited and the consequences of our decisions matter.

Which, unsurprisingly, makes some of them quite useful outside the military too. There are ten:

1. Selection and maintenance of the aim
2. Concentration of force
3. Cooperation
4. Economy of effort
5. Security
6. Offensive action
7. Surprise
8. Flexibility
9. Sustainment
10. Maintenance of morale

The important part is that they're principles, not rules.

We won't maximise all ten at once. Sometimes moving quickly means accepting more risk. Concentrating resources somewhere means taking them away from somewhere else. Protecting what we have can reduce our ability to seize an opportunity.

That's where the thinking starts.

1. Selection and Maintenance of the Aim

What are we actually trying to achieve?

It sounds painfully obvious. Until five departments are working incredibly hard towards five slightly different versions of the same objective.

A clear aim gives people something against which to test decisions. When circumstances change, we don't necessarily need to wait for instructions. We can ask whether the decision still moves us towards the outcome we're trying to achieve.

The challenge isn't only selecting the aim. It's maintaining it when competing priorities inevitably appear.

2. Concentration of Force

Where will our effort make the biggest difference?

We cannot put everything into everything. People, money, time and attention are finite. Strategy therefore requires us to concentrate them somewhere.

This sounds straightforward until we have to decide what receives less. Most organisations can identify ten important initiatives. The harder leadership task is deciding which two deserve disproportionate attention. Concentration isn't about doing more. It's about being deliberate about where we do it

3. Cooperation

Who can do this better with us than we can do alone?

We don't need to own every capability. Sometimes the smartest move is recognising a gap and finding someone who fills it. That requires trust, information sharing and occasionally putting ego aside long enough to let someone else lead because they're better placed to do it.

Good cooperation doesn't remove individual weaknesses. It makes them less important.

4. ECONOMY OF EFFORT

What deserves our resources, and what doesn't?

This is closely related to concentration. If something matters more, something else must usually receive less. That's where prioritisation stops being a PowerPoint exercise and becomes real.

Declaring five strategic priorities is easy. Moving people, money and attention towards them is harder. If our resource allocation hasn't changed, there's a reasonable question about whether our priorities actually have.

5. SECURITY 

What do we need to protect in order to keep operating?

Security isn't simply cyber security or keeping information away from competitors. It might be cash flow. Capability. Reputation. Key people. Intellectual property. Operational redundancy. But there's a tension here too.

We can become so determined to remove risk that we remove opportunity with it. The question isn't how we eliminate risk. It's which risks we need to control and which we're prepared to carry.

6. Offensive Action

Where do we need to stop analysing and act?

Planning matters. Eventually, something has to happen. There are times when maintaining momentum, entering a market, making the decision or pursuing an opportunity matters more than obtaining another five percent of certainty.

A bias for action doesn't mean recklessness. It means recognising that inaction is also a decision, with consequences of its own.

7. Surprise

Where are we becoming predictable?

Doing what everyone expects makes us easier to compete with. Surprise doesn't need to mean secrecy or some elaborate strategic deception. It can simply mean approaching an old problem differently, entering a market from an unexpected direction or developing capability others haven't considered valuable yet.

Sometimes advantage comes from doing something better. Sometimes it comes from doing something nobody expected us to do at all.

8. Flexibility

What happens when the plan stops matching reality?

It will. Conditions change. Information changes. People behave unexpectedly. Opportunities appear that weren't visible when the plan was written.

Flexibility isn't operating without a plan. It's having enough clarity around the intent that people can adapt the plan without losing the outcome. That's why rigid control can become dangerous in uncertain environments. If every unexpected situation has to travel back up the hierarchy for a decision, we're not flexible. We're waiting.

9. SUSTAINMENT 

Can we keep doing this?

This is one of the least glamorous questions in strategy. It's also one of the most useful.

An initiative can be strategically brilliant and still fail because we don't have the people, money, energy or systems to sustain it. We see the same thing during organisational change. The launch gets attention. Month six gets tired.

Good strategy considers not only whether we can start, but whether we can continue once the initial enthusiasm disappears.

Maintenance of Morale

What happens to performance when people stop believing?

Capability matters. So do skills, systems, structures and resources. But anyone who has worked in a genuinely high-performing team knows there is something else going on.

Trust. Shared experience. Identity. Belonging. Confidence in one another. A willingness to carry more when someone else temporarily can't. Morale isn't free pizza and motivational speeches. It's built through what team's experience together and what leaders consistently tolerate, reward and reinforce. And when it's strong, teams become capable of considerably more than their organisational chart suggests.

The Useful Part Is the Tension

None of these principles is particularly revolutionary in isolation. The value comes from considering them together.

• We might want to move quickly. But what does that do to security?
• We might concentrate our best people on the biggest opportunity. But what does that do to sustainment elsewhere?
• We might protect our existing position. But what opportunities disappear while we're doing it?
• We might change the plan to remain flexible. But at what point have we stopped maintaining the aim?

There isn't a neat formula that tells us which principle wins. The circumstances decide that. And sometimes we'll deliberately compromise one important thing to protect something more important.

That's strategy.

Not finding a plan without trade-offs. Working out which trade-offs we're prepared to make.