Strategy for a Complex Age: To Frame or Solve?

Introduction

What is the purpose of strategists? We know why we have leaders since decisions have to be made. We also know – though under-appreciate – why we have officials and operators, as those decisions need to be implemented. But what role do strategists play – why does Machiavelli get to have the ear of the Prince?

This question is at the heart of a challenge issued by two scholars, Jules Gaspard and M.L. Smith in their recent piece, ‘The Problem with Strategy as Problem Solving’. In their assessment, the role of strategists is to frame problems not to solve them:

Viewing strategy as problem-framing provides a pathway toward more flexible and context-sensitive approaches in modern strategic thought. Unlike problem-solving, which seeks definitive answers, problem-framing fosters critical thinking and exploration, encouraging analysts to remain open to new insights and adaptive solutions.[i]

In this reply article – as an advocate of strategy as problem solving – I want to build on their compelling piece.[ii] In section one, I begin by highlighting their many areas of overlap as part of an emerging problem-based approach to strategy. Gaspard and Smith also identify a shortfall in my own formulation, having insufficiently given weight to the need to sequence and synchronise problem solving efforts.

Rather than see these as contrasting approaches, I believe they are complementary. Problem-solving gains its pathways through problem framing, and problem framing gains its significance and relevance within problem solving. Each requires the other. In section two I develop this argument by looking upriver from the work involved in framing problems to the necessary interaction between strategy and politics. Strategists must be informed by and ideally participate in political conversations which identify and prioritize which problems are worth framing. In section three I then look downriver from framing to the realm of operations and tactics and argue that only through action and the feedback generated by practitioners can strategists know whether their problem frames are meaningful, and then adapt these frames to discover what actually works.

In the final section, I argue that strategy cannot isolate itself as a purely intellectual endeavour. Framing is an essential and under-appreciated task. Yet the sole value of a good problem frame is its contribution to helping our societies or organisations make meaningful progress in solving those problems. As the late Colin S. Gray rightly put it, ‘strategic theory may appear to be strategic philosophy, but …its sole purpose – is to fuel understanding for practical benefit’.[iii] In a world as beset by problems as ours in the mid-2020s, we should aim at nothing less.

An Emerging Problem-Based Strategy Literature?

There are three vital points of overlap, and one useful correction between Strategy as Problem Solving and Gaspard and Smith’s proposed Problem Framing approach.

First, what is particularly valuable about Gaspard and Smith’s work is their emphasis on viewing strategy as fundamentally about dealing with problems. Problem-based approaches start their analysis not with the interests and long-term goals of actors, but rather the specific ‘complex’ problems of our world. [iv] Strategy is then a tool for understanding and finding ways of addressing those problems. Although there are differences in how various contributors from academia (Gaspard and Smith, Carr, Meiser), business (Rumelt) and military practice (Beagle Jr & Gaines) approach this framework, together they represent an emerging strategic school.[v] In the conclusion, I highlight some research puzzles which need to be worked through for this approach to develop further.

Second, there is a unity between Problem Framing and Strategy as Problem Solving approaches in drawing on complexity science to help think about strategy. Neither seeks to apply a rigid set of formal scientific methods as earlier generations such as the formal strategists fell prey to.[vi] Rather, both use complexity as a conceptual framework for understanding strategic environments and how to operate within them. The overlap between complexity and strategy has been long appreciated. In the early 1990s, Alan Beyerchen argued that Carl von Clausewitz, writing some two centuries before complexity science emerged, understood its core notions in a ‘profoundly unconfused way’.[vii] Clausewitz attacked the linear models of other strategists, his trinity is a complex adaptive system, and his notion of friction embodies modern concepts of feedback. In the 2020s, B.A Friedman has re-iterated this overlap, arguing for the establishment of ‘complex war studies’ to pursue it further.[viii]

Third and finally Gaspard and Smith are absolutely correct on the significance of framing strategic problems. While I don’t think it should be the singular focus of strategists – as discussed below – good diagnosis is essential for good strategy. In a ‘complex’ environment, problems must be interrogated, probed and made sense of before we can make progress on them. [ix] There are no instruction manuals here, and while expertise and historical experience matter a great deal, each strategic situation will be unique. Hence the vital importance of framing and diagnosing what exactly is going on, rather than rushing for a solution.

Along with these three points of overlap, Gaspard and Smith correct a shortfall in my own Strategy as Problem Solving framework. When discussing how we may solve a problem, I insufficiently considered the risks and unintended consequences of a desire for results. Gaspard and Smith are right to insight that it is no good ‘solving’ one strategic problem at the cost of making other challenges much worse.[x] Nor should we commit to major capability decisions based on a single problem set, given the timeframes and costs involved. In the original piece, I observed that ‘Effective strategy is a sustained process of confronting the problems that impede organizational or national thriving’, but didn’t suggest how that should occur.[xi] Thankfully a much better strategic thinker has already done some of the heavy lifting here: ‘Strategy…links together the series of acts which are to lead to the final decision, that is to say it makes the plans for the separate campaigns and regulates the combats to be fought in each’.[xii] This sequencing and synchronising role is vital, and I thank Gaspard and Smith for emphasising it.

Yet as much as there is overlap – in focusing on problems, the role of complexity, the importance of framing and the need to sequence our efforts – I believe the problem framing approach alone is too narrow. It risks confusing the product of strategists – what they do – with the purpose of strategists – why this role exists. I now make this argument by looking at how the work of strategists begins upriver, long before the framing of problems and then continues downriver as action is undertaken and adaptions made.

Looking upriver: Problem identification

To effectively frame problems, strategists need to work ‘upriver’ in the political context that determines which problems merit attention. This upriver engagement achieves three critical functions that Gaspard and Smith’s framework overlooks: identifying which problems are truly strategic, securing political support for addressing them, and ensuring coordination across multiple actors. Engaging with this dialogue is necessary to fulfil the strategist’s bridging role.[xiii]

Take for example US responses to China’s grey zone operations in the South China Sea. A purely problem-framing approach might excellently diagnose Chinese salami-slicing tactics and the historical, legal, and cultural contexts, but without proceeding to problem solving, US allies and partners in the region will remain vulnerable. Arguably, such analysis-by-paralysis occurred during the 2010s. An effective approach requires not just framing the problem but engaging political leaders from across the region to understand their own problem frames, testing potential courses of action to learn more about the nature of the problem – as discussed below – and adapting our frames and actions as Chinese forces respond. Without this comprehensive cycle at work, even the most sophisticated frame remains merely analytical, likely to lack political buy-in and soon to be outdated.

Engaging in political dialogues makes some strategists uncomfortable. Many experts prefer to avoid this – witness the effort by military thinkers in the late 20th century to develop the Operational Level as a zone free of politics.[xiv] As Beyerchen has argued, too many treat Clausewitz’s famous dictum that ‘war is merely the continuation of policy by other means’ as a temporal distinction—’first politics sets goals, then war occurs’—rather than understanding the continuous feedback between them. “Feedback loops from violence to power and from power to violence are an intrinsic feature of war” Beyerchen observes.[xv] Strategy cannot be reduced to problem framing as an independent effort, since without regular engagement upriver with political judgements, it will fail Clausewitz’s essential insight.

Politics is essential to problem framing as what counts as a problem is not self-evident. US leaders spent decades debating the nature of the Soviet threat and today face similar disagreements over understanding China’s intentions. Identifying problems is partly a question of military and intelligence analysis, but it also involves personalities, values, risk appetite, and popular will. It can also rapidly shift following elections. For example, in 2025 the Trump Administration established very different policy priorities for the war in Ukraine compared to its predecessors. Thus, fundamentally changing the problems which US strategists need to frame.

Strategists should also seek to bring problems to the attention of the political level. From the late 1940s to 1980s American nuclear strategists such as Bernard Brodie, Albert Wohlstetter, Herman Kahn and Thomas Schelling identified problems in US nuclear force posture and strategy which an adversary could exploit, enabling pre-emptive policy responses.[xvi] Inspired by Andrew Marshall’s approach, strategists should also seek to work through the political level to generate problems for adversary nations.[xvii] Identifying and exploiting adversaries’ weaknesses—as the Reagan Administration did with competitive strategies—remains a powerful and under-appreciated tool.

Though politicians have an essential role in identifying, prioritizing and resourcing strategic problems, we should not presume this occurs in an idealised fashion. Policymakers will often have pre-conceived frames for problems, or be uninterested in framing, given a desire for particular solutions. Strategists who cannot translate frames into viable courses of action will find themselves sidelined in political discussions where outcomes, however imperfect, are valued over analytical sophistication. Dealing with politics can be uncomfortable, and sometimes disheartening, but it is no less important to consider within any genuine theory of strategy.

Finally, Gaspard and Smith’s important correction – that problems must be sequenced and synchronised in their resolution – is inherently a political conversation. To cite one heavily studied example, during the Second World War there was immense political pressure for the Allies to invade Europe in 1942 and 1943, and American officials proposed various schemes to this effect.[xviii] Yet, these were ultimately rejected because any successful landing first required sequencing and synchronised several other major strategic problems. Merchant shipping had to be secured to build capacity in England, the skies above England and Western Europe had to be won, and amphibious landing skills had to be developed.[xix] Successfully returning to Europe required a robust strategic-political dialogue among the Allies to determine the priority problems, sequence of actions, and allocation of resources.[xx] As Paul Kennedy observes in his brilliant study of the ‘problem solvers who turned the tide in the Second World War’, this critical strategic work was not only upriver from the challenge of framing each problem, but equally downriver, with feedback and inspiration from operators equally vital to its ultimate success.[xxi]

Downriver: Feedback and Adaption in a complex world

Looking ‘downriver’ from problem framing to implementation reveals why a broader approach is essential to an effective strategy. Putting frames into practice generates feedback which serves three vital functions: testing whether our frames accurately capture reality, creating opportunities for adaptation, and ensuring our solutions remain relevant as conditions change. As Mike Tyson famously put it, ‘everyone has a strategy until they get punched in the mouth’.[xxii]

Just as strategists sometimes avoid politics upriver, they can neglect implementation downriver too. In the 1960s RAND analysts joked that most reports had a ‘missing chapter’ on implementation.[xxiii] Much more recently Lawrence Freedman has cautioned that ‘when strategy is seen to be a higher calling, to be developed by specialist staffs, there is a risk that the practicalities of implementation will be neglected in favor of the elegance of the design’.[xxiv] So too, while many academics still value policy relevance when studying strategy, some are quite indifferent to the real-world utility or implications of their views.[xxv]

Feedback is a well-known concept – Clausewitz called a version of it ‘friction’ – but it deserves far more prominence in most analyses of strategy. Feedback is one of the distinguishing themes of a complex system, driving its non-linear dynamics and contributing directly to processes of adaption, self-organisation and emergence.[xxvi] As the systems scientist Jay W. Forrester observed ‘everything we do as individuals, as an industry, or as a society is done in the context of an information-feedback system’.[xxvii]

In complex systems saturated with feedback, strategic thinking and action must be simultaneous and iterative, not sequential or independent.[xxviii] As Jennifer Garvey Berger and Keith Johnston distinguish in their acclaimed book Simple Habits for Complex Times,

In a complicated case, you have distinct times for diagnosing the problem, coming up with the solution and then implementing that solution. In a complex setting, the problem definition, data collection, and experimentation are all part of a continually repeating cycle, each piece of which is meant to lead to learning.[xxix]

There is as such a contradiction in Gaspard and Smith’s desire to treat problem framing as a response to complexity, and as a distinctive intellectual process on its own separate from acting on those problems. In complex environments, problem frames develop through an iterative process of identification, diagnosis and action with each leading to adaptions in the other stages as a cyclical process that may be repeated many times over. At the risk of invoking Clausewitz too often – akin to some line judge for contemporary disputes – ‘strategy must go with the army to the field…and to make the modifications in the general plan which incessantly becomes necessary in war. Strategy can therefore never take its hand from the work for a moment’.[xxx]

It’s also worth highlighting that Berger and Johnston speak comfortably of ‘solutions’ and trying to solve problems, in line with the literature on complexity as applied to human society.[xxxi] This literature emphasises new approaches to problem-solving – which often include better problem framing – but does not see complexity as a reason why we should not attempt to solve problems at all.

The importance of feedback to strategy is only going to grow. The period from 1945-2000 was the ‘Age of Interconnection’ as Jonathan Sperber titles his masterful history of the period.[xxxii] Our world has grown ever more connected since. In the 2020s every war, such as in Ukraine, Sudan and Gaza can obtain global significance as hourly updates of their horrors beep and vibrate through the phones in our pockets. Paradoxically, this greater complexity requires more action designed to elicit feedback rather than more efforts to insulate ourselves from it. It also requires institutions and processes purposefully designed to process and use that vast flow of information.

One literature which has embraced the role of feedback and can help us think about these questions is the study of military innovation and adaption. This burgeoning field emphasizes the value of institutions that are receptive to and process real-world feedback and drive adaptation for improving military technology or tactics. [xxxiii] Feedback is partly about the adversary’s response, but it’s equally about listening to what officials and operators on our side are saying about what works and how it could be improved.

Downriver engagement fundamentally challenges Gaspard and Smith’s separation of framing from solving. In complex environments, the validity of our frames can only be tested through implementation, generating feedback that refines both our understanding and actions. Just as strategists must venture upriver to help identify which problems should be framed, they must venture downriver to test whether those frames are viable and work with practitioners to adapt these frames over time. The product of strategists is to frame, but that task is meaningful and effective only within a broader conversation at both the political and practitioner levels.

What does it mean to Solve a Problem?

At the heart of Gaspard and Smith’s advocacy for problem framing over problem solving is a discomfort with the idea that strategic problems can be solved at all. As they state, ‘The problem-solving model assumes that with the right strategy and resources, any issue can be resolved’.[xxxiv] This, they believe leads to a naïve and ultimately counterproductive approach, where strategists impose solutions onto problems that may not lend themselves to resolution.

While this concern has merit—strategists shouldn’t overpromise or reduce complex issues to mere technical puzzles—the main risk lies in the quality and regularity of problem framing, not the desire for resolution. Take the two examples Gaspard and Smith provide. They write that George Kennan’s problem frame of containment:

‘undoubtedly helped shape the Cold War and deter Soviet expansion. Yet it also created long term consequences…for example containment led to U.S. involvement in conflicts like the Vietnam War’.[xxxv]

They also state that Andrew Marshall’s competitive strategies, though having ‘arguably contributed to the Soviet Union’s eventual collapse…also set the stage for new challenges in US-Russia relations’. [xxxvi] Both criticisms do a disservice to these strategists and over state their influence.

Kennan was an outspoken critic of the war in Vietnam.[xxxvii] By the 1960s he had seen the flaw in how policymakers applied containment, but his inability to work constructively upriver with the political level doomed any influence to redress it. Marshall meanwhile was certainly hawkish on Russia, but by the 1990s his attention had moved onto the Revolution in Military Affairs and potential risks from China.[xxxviii] The Clinton Administration did not pursue a competitive strategy approach to Russia in the post-Cold War era.

At a broader level, there will always be unintended consequences and future problems to address.[xxxix] The search for solutions is not one for salvation. The better line of enquiry is not if there are downsides to a potential strategy, but whether the inevitable downsides are worth the potential benefit – in these two cases, directly helping the US to avoid a nuclear conflict and successfully conclude the Cold War. I’ll leave it to readers to make their own decisions on that score.

Though I strongly agree with Gaspard and Smith that we should foster ‘critical thinking and exploration, encouraging analysts to remain open to new insights and adaptive solutions’, this cannot be an injunction not to act at all.[xl] In complex adaptive systems, characterized by emergence, self-organization, and non-linearity, we cannot frame at a distance but only gain the necessary information through our interactions with the system. We frame and then act to gain feedback, and this feedback helps us improve our frame. In such environments, understanding and action must proceed simultaneously and iteratively. This suggests not the primacy of framing over solving, but their necessary integration, the former nestled within the latter in any effective strategic approach.

Further research is clearly needed to build on these productive discussions. Several notable questions for other scholars to contribute to are evident. First, the literature so far is very US-centric and concentrates on post-1945 history. How do different cultures around the world and over time approach strategic problems? Second, with the Western intelligence community moving towards more team-based and transparent models of analysis, how should modern strategic work within institutions be organised, resourced and structured? Third, how can we build and expand the use of problem-based learning, and related pedagogies such as the Case Method, among future strategists in military and civilian education institutions?[xli] Fourth and finally, how can we retain the best of the earlier generation of goal-based approaches – such as Ends, Ways and Means and Grand Strategy with their emphasis on goals, vision and long-term planning – and fit these practices into a problem-based strategic framework?

A final point remains. As compelling as I find Gaspard and Smith’s emphasis on problem framing, I do not think it can ethically or politically suffice at this particular moment in the mid-2020s. Ours is a world that needs more and better problem frames, but it also needs meaningful resolution of the problems as well. The risk of great power conflict, the return of nuclear brinkmanship, economic and technological warfare, and climate instability are problems that require us to respond. And if strategists are unwilling to engage in solving these problems—if they choose to remain in the realm of analysis alone—then others will step into this gap. This is why the strategist’s role must go beyond problem framing.

So, why do we need strategists? While leaders choose directions and operators navigate immediate obstacles, strategists contribute by charting pathways through complexity, linking understanding with action. Strategists help bridge political imperatives with operational realities, ensuring analysis and action remain in sync. Frames without solutions are mere analysis; solutions without frames are mere reactions. Ultimately, the strategist’s role is purposeful problem-solving— helping their societies or organisations, through an ongoing cycle of identification, framing and feedback to make meaningful progress on the core problems they face.