Question
How do you combine tactics to form a strategy?
Answer
There are a few different ways of resolving the semantic confusion between the two words and none of them is entirely satisfying. Most are terrible and cause fatal confusions. This question reflects one such fatal confusion.
I spend several pages in my book, Tempo http://tempobook.com, analyzing the confusion and resolving them with precise definitions, but those definitions are in terms of a somewhat specialized jargon I had to invent for the book.
So the best answer I can give without getting into all that is via a coarse analogy: tactics are like the vocabulary of a language. Strategy is like the main Aha! moment in the thinking of the hero of a story you tell with that language. Like when Neo realizes what's going on in The Matrix.
My definitions are loosely similar to Clausewitz.
Your question is somewhat meaningless within my conceptual framework. Words can be combined into sentences, sentences into paragraphs, and so on all the way up to chapters and entire books. This is bottom-up assembly.
Tactics, when they combine, lead to decision patterns, decision-epochs and complete enactments (the equivalent of complete books). They don't assemble into a strategy, because strategy is not a structural notion that emerges out of assembly. It is a feature that may or may not be present in an enactment just as an Aha! moment like Neo's may or may not be present in a story. In general, they are not very good stories.
So a more meaningful question is something like, "is this complete sequence of tactics driven by a strategic insight?"
I spend several pages in my book, Tempo http://tempobook.com, analyzing the confusion and resolving them with precise definitions, but those definitions are in terms of a somewhat specialized jargon I had to invent for the book.
So the best answer I can give without getting into all that is via a coarse analogy: tactics are like the vocabulary of a language. Strategy is like the main Aha! moment in the thinking of the hero of a story you tell with that language. Like when Neo realizes what's going on in The Matrix.
My definitions are loosely similar to Clausewitz.
Your question is somewhat meaningless within my conceptual framework. Words can be combined into sentences, sentences into paragraphs, and so on all the way up to chapters and entire books. This is bottom-up assembly.
Tactics, when they combine, lead to decision patterns, decision-epochs and complete enactments (the equivalent of complete books). They don't assemble into a strategy, because strategy is not a structural notion that emerges out of assembly. It is a feature that may or may not be present in an enactment just as an Aha! moment like Neo's may or may not be present in a story. In general, they are not very good stories.
So a more meaningful question is something like, "is this complete sequence of tactics driven by a strategic insight?"