Strategy: From Ancient War Rooms to the Age of Algorithms

Some words transcend time. They change sides, attire, and language, but never lose their power. Strategy is one of them. Born on the rugged terrain of ancient battlefields, the term originally belonged to the strategos, the Greek general who led not only by command, but by thought. To think was to anticipate. And to anticipate was to win without fighting.

A wooden horse placed before the gates of Troy. A silent night. The fall of a city. Not through brute force, but through intelligence. Through cunning. Through foresight. This isn’t merely mythology, it’s a blueprint. A way of thinking about action and the future. It is strategy.

Today, strategy has distanced itself from warfare without ever forgetting it. It has permeated boardrooms, political speeches, marketing campaigns, sports competitions, and even personal relationships. It emerges wherever there is a goal to define, an opposing move to anticipate, or resources to coordinate. In essence, strategic thinking is already a form of action.

But where does this need for strategy come from? And how did a concept once draped in a general’s armor come to wear the suit of a CEO, or adorn a consultant’s LinkedIn profile?

Strategy: A long history of metamorphosis

At its root, strategy means “the art of leading an army”, strategos in ancient Greek. But the general was more than a man of war. He was a speaker, a thinker, a master of logistics. He had to understand not only his forces but also the terrain, the weather, the alliances. He had to foresee.

Chinese philosopher Sun Tzu wrote: “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.” That captures it all: calculation, cunning, patience, and situational intelligence. Ancient strategy was not merely about strength, it was about reading the terrain, sensing the timing, mastering the art of silence. In Xenophon or Thucydides, strategy is never brute force, it is deliberate, calculated. It calls for mètis: a fluid, crafty, adaptive intelligence. Ulysses over Achilles. To be a strategist is to see what others do not yet see. To plan one step ahead. To project mentally into the uncertain.

Later, strategy became codified. As military science, it acquired structure. With thinkers like Jomini and Clausewitz, it evolved into planning, hierarchy, discipline. It distinguished itself from tactics: the long-term over the short-term, the vision over the immediate.

Above all, strategy became a model. A model for action. A model for organization. A model for rationalizing uncertainty.

Strategy as a response to the unknown

Why strategize? To win? Perhaps. But more deeply, to avoid being lost. To avoid passivity. Humans anticipate because they fear. Because they sense that the future is open, and therefore threatening. Strategy becomes a psychological tool. It transforms the unknown into a mapped territory. It soothes.

This is what Clausewitz’s theory implicitly reveals. For him, war is a fog. A chaos. But it can be channeled, through doctrine, through planning. Strategy serves as a filter. It helps make chaos bearable.

Cognitive science confirms this. Albert Bandura speaks of self-efficacy, the sense of control that fosters action. Strategy, even if imperfect, offers the feeling of doing something. It calms anxiety.

To strategize is to act upon oneself. It creates a symbolic mediation between the blurry present and an imagined future. The strategic plan turns words and numbers into reassuring projections. It becomes a foundation of meaning.

Indeed, fear, or more broadly, anxiety in the face of the unknown, plays a role in this anticipatory impulse. However, reducing strategy to a response to fear would be reductive. Intellectual curiosity, the desire to master one’s environment, personal or collective ambition, and creativity are equally powerful drivers. These forces shape strategies that are not just defensive, but innovative, offensive, even visionary.

The manager as modern strategist

In the 20th century, strategy migrated, from the battlefield to the boardroom.

By the 1960s, Igor Ansoff introduced a method: analyze, plan, deploy. Michael Porter followed with the framework of competitive strategy: position, differentiate, dominate through cost or innovation.

Business became a battlefield of its own. Competitors were monitored, opportunities mapped, actions scripted. The strategic plan emerged as a kind of collective talisman. It reassured leaders and mobilized teams. It became narrative. A unifying fiction.

And it worked. Because humans need such narratives. They act as transitional objects, in the sense proposed by psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, objects that are half-symbolic, half-real, helping us to cross thresholds and manage uncertainty. Whether it’s a five-year plan, a roadmap, or an agile sprint chart, the function remains the same.

Anticipating, modeling, and taming the other

Embedded in the concept of strategy is a subtle obsession: predicting the other. Whether adversary, client, or partner, it’s no longer just about acting, it’s about foreseeing reactions, counter-reactions, and even how one’s own moves will be interpreted.

This is the foundation of game theory, pioneered by John von Neumann. Every actor calculates, anticipates, simulates. Strategy becomes a cognitive superstructure. It involves scenario-building and the detection of weak signals. The strategist becomes a modern oracle.

However, such hyper-vigilance comes at a cost. It increases cognitive load. It can lead to paralysis. To burnout.

Fortunately, cognitive psychology offers tools. Recognizing our biases, anchoring, confirmation, overconfidence, enables more lucid strategizing. Strategic thinking, but with perspective.

Attention: The new battleground

Today, the battlefields are invisible. They’re digital. They reside in our newsfeeds, our clicks, our pauses. The new strategists are data analysts. Algorithms. They monitor our attention, slice it, steer it.

No longer is it just about selling a product. It’s about designing an experience. A journey. An immersion. Strategy becomes behavioral design. It draws on neuroscience, attentional psychology, and persuasion science.

What was once called cunning or tactics is now branded UX strategy, growth hacking, persuasive design. Routines are engineered, reward loops crafted, cognitive anchors embedded.

And the goal remains unchanged: to make the unpredictable, predictable.

Strategy: The art of belief

Strategy is to reason what a fetish is to the sacred, a constructed object, wrapped in imaginary power.

It enables action. It prevents collapse. It helps us withstand time. Because at its core, to strategize is to shape the future in order to bear the present.

Perhaps, as Henry Mintzberg once wrote, strategy is merely “a pattern in a stream of decisions”, a framework that preserves us. That gives structure. That reassures.

It’s no coincidence that every great civilization produced strategists. Any enduring community must believe it can influence the course of time.

So yes, strategy is a science. But it’s also a belief. A faith in possibility. A formalization of doubt.

And perhaps that alone is enough to explain its enduring symbolic power.

References

Albert Bandura (1977). « Self-Efficacy: Toward a Unifying Theory of Behavioral Change », Psychological Review, 84(2), 191–215.

Antoine-Henri Jomini (1838). Précis de l’art de la guerre. Duncker & Humblot.

Carl von Clausewitz (1832). De la guerre. Payot (éd. 1952).

Donald W. Winnicott (1971). Playing and Reality. Tavistock Publications.

Igor Ansoff (1965). Corporate Strategy. McGraw-Hill.

John von Neumann & Oskar Morgenstern (1944). Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. Princeton University Press.

Michael E. Porter (1980). Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors. Free Press.

Mintzberg, H. [1994]. The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning, p. 23).

Sun Tzu (2007 [VIIe s. av. J.-C.]). L’Art de la guerre. Flammarion.

Thucydide (1985 [Ve s. av. J.-C.]). Histoire de la guerre du Péloponnèse. GF Flammarion.

Xénophon (1914 [Ve s. av. J.-C.]). Constitution des Lacédémoniens. Les Belles Lettres.