Strategy, Intentionality and Success: Four Logics for Explaining Strategic Action

Strategic success is usually associated with having deliberate intentions, prior stated goals and a comprehensively formulated plan for effective execution. This way of thinking is driven by a means–ends logic and underpinned by the cognitivist assumption that conscious thought and consequential reasoning drive effective action: such privileging of thought over action is endemic in strategic theorizing. Our purpose in this paper is to demonstrate the plausibility of other, pre-cognitive logics of strategic action and ‘intention’ as alternative explanatory bases for strategic success. We identify three such logics and their associated forms of intentionality. A ‘logic of practices’ views collectively shared habitus rather than conscious cognition/deliberate intention as the basis of effective strategic action. A ‘logic of situation’ emphasizes how situational momentum, tendencies and affordances themselves contain pre-cognitive ‘in-tensional’ impulses that actively elicit appropriate strategic responses. Finally, a ‘logic of potential’ associated with what Friedrich Nietzsche termed ‘will to power’. It is with this fourth logic, we suggest, that strategic intention becomes most effective. In will to power, strategy entails the relentless expanding of degrees of freedom from environmental constraints without presuming cognitive separation from it.