If you fail to identify and analyze the obstacles, you don’t have a strategy. Instead, you have either a stretch goal, a budget, or a list of things you wish would happen.

Here, as in so many situations, the required actions were not mysterious. The impediment was the hope that the pain of those actions could, somehow, be avoided. Indeed, we always hope that a brilliant insight or very clever design will allow us to accomplish several apparently conflicting objectives with a single stroke, and occasionally we are vouchsafed this kind of deliverance.

A strategy coordinates action to address a specific challenge.

To generate a strategy, one must put aside the comfort and security of pure deduction and launch into the murkier waters of induction, analogy, judgment, and insight.

Facing a complex situation like this makes most people uncomfortable. The more seriously you take it, the more you will see it as a real and difficult challenge that requires a coherent response. And that realization will, in turn, make you even more uncomfortable.