---
type: claim
domain: grand-strategy
description: "Strategy fails not from choosing wrong options but from treating a design challenge as a multiple-choice test -- coherent configuration beats optimal selection"
confidence: likely
source: "Rumelt 'Good Strategy Bad Strategy' (2011), Porter 'What is Strategy?' (1996), Alexander 'A Pattern Language' (1977)"
created: 2026-04-21
secondary_domains: [mechanisms]
related_claims:
  - "riding-waves-of-change-requires-anticipating-the-attractor-state-and-positioning-before-incumbents-respond-through-their-predictable-inertia"
  - "three-types-of-organizational-inertia-routine-cultural-and-proxy-each-resist-adaptation-through-different-mechanisms-and-require-different-remedies"
  - "the-more-uncertain-the-environment-the-more-proximate-the-objective-must-be-because-you-cannot-plan-a-detailed-path-through-fog"
---

# Strategy is a design problem not a decision problem because value comes from constructing a coherent configuration where parts interact and reinforce each other

Most strategic planning treats strategy as a decision problem: choose from options A, B, or C. This framing is wrong. Strategy is a design problem: construct a configuration of activities, resources, and choices that creates more value through their interaction than any would produce independently.

The distinction matters because decision problems have solutions (pick the best option) while design problems have satisficing configurations (find a set of choices that work well together). Porter's activity system maps (1996) show this: Southwest Airlines' advantage comes not from any single decision (no meals, no assigned seats, point-to-point routes) but from the fact that every decision reinforces every other. No-meals enables fast turnaround. Fast turnaround enables high utilization. High utilization enables low prices. Low prices fill planes. Full planes enable point-to-point. The system has no single key decision -- the configuration is the strategy.

Rumelt formalizes this as the "kernel of strategy": a diagnosis that identifies the critical challenge, a guiding policy that addresses it, and coherent actions that implement the policy. The word "coherent" is load-bearing -- actions must work as a system, not as a list. Bad strategy is a list of goals. Good strategy is a design where each element creates the conditions for the next.

The implication for complex organizations: you cannot find good strategy by evaluating options independently. You must evaluate configurations -- which is combinatorially harder and requires the kind of holistic judgment that resists decomposition into metrics. This is why strategy consulting that reduces to "pick from these options" systematically underperforms strategy work that starts from "what is the actual problem and what configuration of responses would address it?"

## Evidence
- Porter (1996) -- activity system maps for Southwest, IKEA, Vanguard showing value from configuration, not individual choices
- Rumelt (2011) -- diagnosis/guiding-policy/coherent-action kernel; NASA Voyager Grand Tour as configuration design
- Apple under Jobs -- product line simplification (4 products), retail integration, ecosystem lock-in work as a system; each decision alone is suboptimal (fewer products = less revenue per line)
- Toyota Production System -- pull manufacturing, jidoka, kaizen work as integrated system; attempts to copy individual practices fail

## Challenges
- Design thinking can rationalize anything post-hoc -- coherence is easy to narrate and hard to verify prospectively
- Some strategic contexts genuinely are decision problems (binary go/no-go choices, resource allocation under constraint)
