With content in the air (it’s #Confab2022 time!) and a fresh bundle of client deliverables nearly ready to gift-wrap, the @autogram_is gang has been chewing on the lines between tactics, strategy, and (drum roll) doctrine.
Our communites have spent a lot of time talking about the distinctions between content strategy (“we publish educational content to build trust and authority”) and tactics (“we have a weekly podcast”). That’s good! But certain important ideas don’t fit cleanly in those buckets.
In military jargon, “doctrine” is the set of principles you have about how particular tools and capabilities will be used in all the circumstances you can anticipate. It’s a “when and how” bridge between the “why” of strategy and the “what” of tactics.
Soviet military doctrine held that artillery was for flattening targets that could then be secured by infantry. That doesn’t help you with any particular geopolitical decisions, and it doesn’t clarify which hill you should take. But it codifies what each tool is for.
Returning to the podcast example, “Realtime media attracts interest that is converted into trust via consistent, highly accurate tutorials” would be doctrine. It doesn’t say you need a podcast, but it tells you why you would
One of the interesting things about ~doctrine~ in this sense is that it codifies beliefs about how things ought to be done without tying you to specific implementations or even specific goals.
That doctrinal statement about realtime media might tell you that you don’t need a podcast, or that your podcast needs to focus on fun personality and “helping people recognize problems” rather than in-depth solutions. That’s a job for tutorials, after all.
Or, you might decide after two years that your organization’s strategic goals are the same but you need to alter your doctrinal assumptions because the business ecosystem is changing enough that your old perspective is no longer effective.
Because it captures beliefs about what different tools are good at and how they work together, doctrine exerts pressure on strategy — shaping the perception of what goals are easy vs hard given the current tools and resources.
Doctrine also shapes investment in new tools and the training of staff to use them: Given a set of goals and needs, doctrine tells us what tools to make more of. That can form a feedback loop that’s hard to break out of if the doctrine is invisible and unquestioned.
These are often discussed and debated vigorously in the ideation phase of a redesign, or the inventory phase of a replatforming — when “Why?” questions are flying fast — but it’s rare to see them codified outside of oblique references and “when to use a gallery” editorial FAQs.
With one current client, we’re pulling together an easy-to-communicate statement about the jobs each content type is expected to do on their family of sites, the ways the types can support each other, and the indicators that’d be measurable as the overall approach succeeds.
For example: “News communicates timeliness and breadth, Topics establishes consistency and clarity over time, and Themes connect them. News lists related topics for context, and Topics list thematically similar news to demonstrate relevance.”
That kind of perspective is almost never universally agreed upon: there may be bits and pieces of it that many orgs agree are “best practices” but useful doctrine establishes how a team’s approach DIFFERS from the norm as much is it articulates an assumed truth.