Sermon - TLIS - 1.1.2 - Management Planning: Operational, Tactical, Strategic
Luke 14:28-30
Suppose one of you wants to build a tower. Won’t you first sit down and estimate the cost to see if you have enough money to complete it? For if you lay the foundation and are not able to finish it, everyone who sees it will ridicule you, saying, ‘This person began to build and wasn’t able to finish.’
Matthew 13:44
The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. When a man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy went and sold all he had and bought that field.
Proverbs 19:21
Many are the plans in a person’s heart, but it is the Lord’s purpose that prevails.
James 4:13-15
Now listen, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.” Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead, you ought to say, “If it is the Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that.”
Not only in information security but in general business management we have the structure of planning divided into operational, tactical, and strategic levels. This comes to us primarily from the military, as the tactical and strategic designations may imply.
It is often difficult to say where the divisions between the three planning levels lie. Operational planning involves day to day operations. It's hard to say that there is any planning involved. The planning tends to be of the "this is the way that we've always done it" variety. Operational planning involves looking at what is done on a day to day, and possibly even hour to hour, basis. It is the province of the line worker and the hourly employee. The time frame of the planning aspect might be to complete this particular task, or finish this particular product, depending upon the actual tasks to be accomplished. the time frame, in terms of the planning horizon, tends to be the dividing line between the short term operational, medium term tactical, and long term strategic.
Even the division in terms of the time frame and horizon might be dependent upon the actual task being accomplished. For example, in a game of chess, the operational planning may be in terms of seconds, generally less than a minute. The tactical time frame might be minutes, up to perhaps fifteen minutes. The strategic planning involved in such a game might involve a time frame of perhaps two hours. And, depending on what your opponent does, all of this could change quite suddenly.
In a business environment, operational planning might involve the current day, tactical planning might involve up to the coming quarter, and strategic planning may involve years. Long range strategic planning of upwards of one hundred years is not unknown certain cultures.
Once again, I am sure that you are going to ask what this has to do with the Christian life. There are several issues with regard to planning. After all, man plans and God laughs. Planning is something that we do for our life, but do we have to do it in such a structured fashion?
There is the fact that we are not only planning for the short term, that is, our lifetime, but also for eternity. Is the operational, tactical, and strategic breakdown of planning at all relevant to the Christian life?
Whether or not it is directly relevant, it is always a good idea to look at these kinds of concepts and see whether and to what extent they apply to our Christian life.
First of all, let's look at the issue of whether or not to plan anything at all. After all, it is God who will decide whether or not we're going to do something. As Gamaliel pointed out to the Sanhedrin in Acts, if we take too strong an action without consulting and determining whether it is actually God's will, we may find that we are, ourselves, working against God. We don't necessarily want to be on His bad side.
But let's look at one of the passages in scripture that seems to indicate that we shouldn't be planning. There's James, where he says that we shouldn't say we are going to go someplace and conduct business and make money, but then he goes on to say that if the Lord wills, we should go there and do this. That is an important first step. James is not saying that we shouldn't plan, but rather that we should plan with the expectation that our plans may have to be modified or discarded altogether if it becomes clear that this is not God's will for us. If God shows us what his will is, then whatever planning we have done, we should be ready to discard it and start planning what it is that God actually wants. He is not saying that planning is wrong, just that planning, without regard to what God wants, is incorrect.
And, yes, there is some potential value in following the very structured planning horizons. When we pray, we are to pray for our daily bread. Give us this day our daily bread. That is the operational level of planning. We are asking God's help with the operations of our life. We aren't, at that point, asking for the operational aspects to be given to us in perpetuity. This day we need it. Therefore, we will ask for this day what we need for this day.
And the other levels of planning have value as well. Let's look at our strategy. We may not have a detailed strategy, but we should have an objective. Our objective should be to get into heaven, or to get into eternity, or to get into the Kingdom, or to live forever with God, or however you want to put that. That is our objective, and our strategy should bend towards, and be formulated by, that objective.
And then there are the medium-term goals. What shall we plan for a career? Shall we get married? Shall we have a family, or are we dedicating our life solely to God's work? What kind of work should we dedicate our lives to, or at least this portion of it? Possibly we wish, on a strategic level, for our lives to revolve around service to others. What kind of service in the near and medium term? Of the various projects that we could undertake or participate in, which is most suitable, both in terms of our skills and in terms of God's leading, direction, and ultimate plan for us?
In terms of the long-term strategy, those of you who have followed my sermons or know my life story will not be surprised that I don't have an awful lot to say about planning your life out completely in advance. One of the mistakes that young people make is to think that their entire life must be planned out, and that their operational lives, right now, and their tactical plans for the medium term must all be at the service of this long-term strategy. I don't believe that. I think that we do young people a disservice by suggesting that this is even possible. Yes, in terms of making a success of your life, worldly standards of success may require you to have this level of a plan for your life, but that is not always possible. It may not even be desirable, and it certainly is going to be unusual that God will have such a straightforward plan for you to follow, and wish you to pursue a specific path that can be defined easily in advance.
I was thirty-three years old before I got married. That's kind of late in life. What I didn't know was that I had to wait until the woman that God had in mind for me was ready. It was in the same year that we got married that I also found my career, as the world would see it. I started, first as a rather idle interest, and then pursued with more vigour, the area of information security. That became such a major part of my life that I am now writing a series of sermons based on the ideas and concepts of information security itself.
I would not have known earlier in my life anything about this field. It really didn't exist, and if I had followed earlier inclinations and pursued a strict adherence to a different path, I would have missed the books that I have now written, the course that I have prepared and delivered, and even the background for these sermons.
And you will have perhaps noted that I have, a couple of times, mentioned, "as the world sees," that the world sees planning as a good thing. God may wish us to plan in that depth, but it seems that God wishes us to be a little bit more flexible than a strict adherence to a career path might allow us to be.
Perhaps I am mistaken in this thinking, and possibly God has specifically required me to be more flexible in my career and life. I don't know for sure. But it does seem that the indications from Scripture are that a rigid adherence to a predetermined plan is more worldly than required by God.
It may be that planning is, like fire, a good servant but a poor master. Planning, in the immediate situation, and the near term, and in the longer term, can help us, and also assist us with fulfilling what we find that God requires of us. But we must always be ready, if we find that what we are planning, and even doing, conflicts with what God would have of us. Be ready to completely abandon our plans and do what it is that God actually wants.
As they say about holes, when you find you are in one, the first step to take is to stop digging.
Theological Lessons from Information Security
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Sermon - TLIS - 1.1.3 - Functional and Assurance Requirements
Sermon TLIS - 1.1.5 - "Footprints" and key performance indicators/metrics
Sermon - TLIS - 1.1.7 - Security Frameworks
Sermon - TLIS - 1.2.1 / 34 - Edit, Audit, Prophet
Sermon - TLIS - 1.2.6 - Security awareness, training, education
Sermon - TLIS - 1.5.1 - Manage Everything
Sermon - TLIS - 1.7.1 - Organizational Roles and Body Parts
Sermon - TLIS - 9.8.5 / 73 - Muster station, safe and secure
Sermon - TLIS - 10.3.1 - Intellectual Property
Sermon - TLIS - 10.5.1 - Privacy
Sermon TLIS - 10.6.1 / 54 - Liability and Negligence
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