[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":273},["ShallowReactive",2],{"useAsyncGraphqlQuery:Article:AaN0HaX1gJdmdB_4pHffq3QuY4ydz9tsFIJrdCWFcDs":3},{"data":4,"extensions":269,"errors":272},{"article":5,"homepage":208},{"createdAt":6,"updatedAt":7,"source":8,"title":9,"url":10,"body":11,"publicationDate":206,"peopleInvolved":204,"articlePage":19,"seoDescription":204,"seoImage":207},"2026-02-24T11:36:21.50649+00:00","2026-02-24T15:38:24.74801+00:00","Book chapter","You Live the Surprise Result of Old Plans. The New Normal Book ","you-live-the-surprise-result-of-old-plans-the-new-normal-book",{"json":12,"references":198},{"children":13},[14,20,27,32,36,39,43,47,50,54,58,62,66,77,81,85,89,93,97,100,104,108,112,116,120,124,128,132,136,140,144,148,152,156,160,164,168,172,176,180,183,187,191,194],{"type":15,"children":16},"paragraph",[17],{"text":18,"subscript":19},"*as published in \"The New Normal\", by Strelka and Park Books - ed. Benjamin Bratton & Nick Axel",true,{"type":21,"nodeId":22,"children":23,"nodeType":26},"embed","cmm0j3eil752607mkz5b7omvy",[24],{"text":25},"","Asset",{"type":28,"children":29},"heading-two",[30],{"text":31},"The New Normal as Strategic Environment ",{"type":15,"children":33},[34],{"text":35},"The twenty-first century poses questions about existing and new relationships to the future and the past, and the technologies, organizational formats, and other means to bridge them. An aspect of this, and a defining feature of the new normal, has been the now ubiquitous and consistent visibility of strategic thinking in everyday life. On the one hand, we are witness to geopolitical multipolarization,  increasingly powerful non-state actors (from corporations to insurrection networks), and a generalised climate crisis. On the other hand, news of these shifts reaches us through the Stack—its arrival itself comprising a planetary-level strategic event, one that has strikingly democratized strategic thinking. Public and private social networking platforms, for example, invite billions of users to internalise the tenets of corporate strategy (such as brand identity and “impression management”).  Simultaneously, these users have adopted behaviors en masse that were, until recently, the province of highly-trained state operatives, such as assessment of source veracity (cf. “fake news”),  codenames and concealed identities (pseudonymous handles, sock puppets), opsec measures (multi-factor authentication), and so on. Under these circumstances, whatever strategy it was, it is now becoming something else. ",{"type":15,"children":37},[38],{"text":25},{"type":28,"children":40},[41],{"text":42},"The Strategic Imagination  ",{"type":15,"children":44},[45],{"text":46},"A strategy is locked to its context: it is formulated in response to a specific landscape of perceived opportunity. Nonetheless, broad concepts, often unrecognized but shared by large numbers of people, guide the formulation of strategy. The sum of these concepts in any one situation represents the strategic imagination at work. Providing the infrastructure of decisions and manoeuvres, the strategic imagination gives rise to certain styles and vectors of strategizing that represent different modes of computing the environment. Shifts in the strategic imagination enable the possibility of there being a “contemporary strategy” at any given juncture. ",{"type":15,"children":48},[49],{"text":25},{"type":28,"children":51},[52],{"text":53},"The Pursuit of a Position of Advantage  ",{"type":15,"children":55},[56],{"text":57},"Strategy is the pursuit of a position of advantage. This definition, contra the military origins of  “strategy” as an intellectual field in the West, does not assume that the precondition of strategizing is the designation of an enemy to be defeated, but rather, a set of circumstances that can be improved.  “Advantage” here requires no more than a broad sense of “the better” but the acute perception of  perceived discrepancies, vis-á-vis opportunities, in a given environment. Perhaps in relation to someone else—a single or collective mark or adversary—but just as easily with nonhuman structures and forces, or oneself.  ",{"type":28,"children":59},[60],{"text":61},"Material Qualities of Strategy ",{"type":15,"children":63},[64],{"text":65},"Strategy is given a certain blurriness by its appearance, in the abstract, as a wideranging mode of  cognitive behavior. But how strategic imagination conditions the design of a strategy can be understood by considering strategy to have material qualities—specifically, to be understood to be composed of different approaches to strategic presence (how the strategy shows up in the world),  structure (how it unfolds in space and time), and leverage (how it proposes to procure and utilize resources).  ",{"type":67,"children":68},"numbered-list",[69],{"type":70,"children":71},"list-item",[72],{"type":73,"children":74},"list-item-child",[75],{"text":76},"Presence  ",{"type":15,"children":78},[79],{"text":80},"We become aware of a strategy as a pattern of revealed intent. Identifying strategic presence as a layer of strategy draws attention to how the strategy shows up in the world: who grasps what, when, and where. Once initiated in thought, strategy immediately gains a presence of its own right, and this  presence expands in relation to an audience. By being talked about, secretly or in the open, strategy starts to absorb and inform the culture of a given context. How a strategy is communicated is often  not an ancillary to strategizing, but forms part of the strategy itself. Nowhere is this more true than in  the examples of con-artists, corrupt politicians, and other practiced liars, where there are detectable  discrepancies between behavior and its explanation, or any other frictions and inconsistencies.  Concealment is a fundamental part of many strategies, but this is just a special case of the principle  of information asymmetry that underlies strategic presence in general.  ",{"type":15,"children":82},[83],{"text":84},"2. Structure  ",{"type":15,"children":86},[87],{"text":88},"A strategy’s structure is how it unfolds over time and through space, linking a course of action to its  expected outcomes. It is the overarching system that makes sense of a given activity or subtle  movement as significant or not significant in terms of the strategy as it develops. The simplicity of a plan, for example, might lay the foundation for strategic structure to exist, even if structure isn’t always as clearly defined as a plan can be. As a strategy unfurls, structure becomes the trace of evolution—giving memory to strategy and the strategist. The structure of a strategy accounts for direction and goals, makes strategy navigable, and registers its advancement.  ",{"type":15,"children":90},[91],{"text":92},"3. Leverage",{"type":15,"children":94},[95],{"text":96},"Leverage concerns how a strategy procures and utilizes resources in order to produce effects. It is  the quality of strategy that perhaps has most obviously shifted under the terms of the new normal,  given the exponential emergence of advanced technologies, organizational forms, and other  potential levers. The lever is a tool for eliciting extraordinary effects from unlikely materials. Simple in  its own right, the lever relies on intelligent placement to align larger forces toward the objectives of a  strategy. It is a means of multiplying the scale of a gesture, and, in doing so, displacing the world as it  is. An expanded and evolved strategic imagination affords the visibility of different leverage points,  enabling the design of new kinds of interventions and placement of levers to ensure maximum  potential is met.  ",{"type":15,"children":98},[99],{"text":25},{"type":28,"children":101},[102],{"text":103},"Playing Out ",{"type":15,"children":105},[106],{"text":107},"Strategy is always about and exists in relation to an environment, whether material or semiotic, relying on the detection and exploitation of existing affordances therein. Architects and urbanists are acutely aware of the challenge of turning strategy into something that exists in space, although they often find themselves on the receiving end of strategic thinking done elsewhere, which lands on them in the inarguable terms of a brief. A framework is conceivable, a hypothetical discipline of spatial strategy, which understands space from the beginning as a dynamic field through which strategic presence, structure, and leverage play out. ",{"type":28,"children":109},[110],{"text":111},"Time Machines  ",{"type":15,"children":113},[114],{"text":115},"Prospecting a given situation for points of potential leverage is a specific application of modelling, an  activity that can involve maps, scenarios, and other forms of simulation operating at whatever level of fidelity. Such devices bring slices of the putative future into the present, enabling the assumptions that underlie a present course of action to be investigated.  ",{"type":28,"children":117},[118],{"text":119},"Strategic Objects ",{"type":15,"children":121},[122],{"text":123},"All objects utilized in the deployment of a strategy might be seen as “strategic,” in the sense of being  vehicles for the strategy, but certain designed objects serve as crucial reference points for  strategizing in general. Properly strategic objects are not only systems for prospecting opportunities, but also serve to structure and communicate the strategy as a whole. They tend to combine simplicity with enormous conceptual depth, and serve as foundations for iterations of the strategic imagination.  Three examples are the plan, the plot, and the platform.  ",{"type":28,"children":125},[126],{"text":127},"The Strategy vs. The Plan  ",{"type":15,"children":129},[130],{"text":131},"The plan is a linear sequence of events organized in time. The arrangement of its phases usually communicates the understanding of some degree of necessity: time and resources may be limited,  and certain things x, y might need to be in place before step z can be successfully attempted.  Attempting to choreograph multiple planes of activity, the plan fractures as it becomes charged with ambition, sprawling across pages with the introduction of multiple endings, evolving loops, parallel streams, convergence points, and alternate pathways to accommodate hypothesized contingencies and disruptions. The plan is the most obvious form a strategy can take, to the point where the two are often treated as near-synonyms, but they are not identical. A plan is an aspect of any strategy, but strategy is not reducible to a plan.  ",{"type":28,"children":133},[134],{"text":135},"Plot and Twist  ",{"type":15,"children":137},[138],{"text":139},"The most effective strategies are not just planned, but plotted. Like a plan, a plot conjectures lines  between points, but adds to the plan the concept of the twist: a moment where what one thought was  the line of the plot is revealed to have been mistaken; the trajectory was different all along. Plot twists  compel not just a revision of the future, but also a reassessment of the past, as events take on a new  significance in the light of present developments. The ability to distance oneself from an expected course of events in order to manufacture a plot twist is called ingenuity, and ingenuity is the form of creativity native to strategy.  ",{"type":28,"children":141},[142],{"text":143},"The Significance of the Platform  ",{"type":15,"children":145},[146],{"text":147},"Platforms arrived in the ruins of long-term, large-scale planning. As an idea, the platform is pushed  into the spotlight by the emergence of the Big Stacks and their distinctive model of operations  between 1995 and 2010. For strategy, ideas attached to these digital business models, like the  coordination of multi-sided markets and the exhibition of network effects, are of secondary  importance compared to the platform’s role as a system that metabolizes contingency. Platforms are modular structures, portfolios of capabilities that can be reconfigured and refined. New elements can be added, modified, relocated, quarantined, spun off, and retired in a process of distributed evolution.  As a strategic object, the platform creates a future of multiplying possibilities. As such, like the plan,  the platform enables a link to be imagined between present action and future consequences. But  contrary to the plan, the platform addresses an ongoing goal, aspiring to become not what something  is, but the way something is done.",{"type":28,"children":149},[150],{"text":151},"Organization as a Verb ",{"type":15,"children":153},[154],{"text":155},"The fantasy of an endlessly reconfigurable organization has animated the strategic imagination since the emergence of cybernetics and operational research. Yet institutional structures (HR, finance,  operations, directorship, etc.) continue, and are remarkably similar across large organizations. They have been codified both explicitly (as law or regulation) and implicitly (as habit or expectation). These factors represent an image of an organization as a noun, with attendant metaphors of the organism,  the machine, kingdom, and so on. The possibility of organization as a verb emerges with the growth of distribution and auto-coordination of operations afforded by digital interfaces. Understanding  organization as a verb builds certain affordances into a new moment of movement and evolution.  ",{"type":28,"children":157},[158],{"text":159},"Strategy’s Pathologies  ",{"type":15,"children":161},[162],{"text":163},"Strategy’s encounter with reality always risks disaster, most obviously in its derailment by unexpected  events. But certain kinds of pathology inhere in an attachment to different strategic objects themselves. The plan’s pathology is useless overdetermination before contact with the world, or violence in the preservation of the ideal after it. The platform’s pathology is senseless growth and a riot of appropriations, off-label and illicit uses. As for the plot, it turns in on itself, becoming an embroidery of twist and counter-twist without progress, where struggle comes to substitute for sense.  ",{"type":28,"children":165},[166],{"text":167},"The Geometry of Commitment  ",{"type":15,"children":169},[170],{"text":171},"If a strategy might take the plan, the plot, or the platform as its primary reference point, these do not represent the force that brings it together or makes it cohere. This role can only be played by commitment to a course of action in the pursuit of some kind of advantage. Conceived at whatever scale, commitment welds together a tactical repertoire of activity into some kind of whole, and differentiates “strategizing” in general from a specific strategy which can be considered better or worse, smart or dumb, likely to succeed or not so. Commitment turns strategizing into strategy.  ",{"type":28,"children":173},[174],{"text":175},"Fractal Plays ",{"type":15,"children":177},[178],{"text":179},"Strategy is related to ambition, and is often assumed to be the pursuit of power in the simple sense of power over. This connotation is reinforced by the association of strategy with decisions taken at the apex of a hierarchy, treating long-term and large-scale proposals as things to be handed down for implementation via a chain of command. Delivered from above without reference to local realities,  improvisations on the ground are required to effect strategy or contest it, manifesting in the conceptual distinction between strategy and tactics as opposed styles of thinking. This idea is deeply ingrained in the Enlightened West and is not accorded similar importance in other traditions of strategic thought. Yet the distinction between strategy and tactics captures a productive tension, a richer approach to which takes strategy as fractal, operating across diverse scales, and tactics as more like capabilities: specific operations that can be utilized in different ways within different strategies.  ",{"type":15,"children":181},[182],{"text":25},{"type":28,"children":184},[185],{"text":186},"An Infinite Game  ",{"type":15,"children":188},[189],{"text":190},"There is an inherent endlessness to strategy. Only rarely will everything come together. Certain  dramatic images have informed how we see strategy play out in the world, and often tend towards a climax. Contrary to this representation, the objective and nature of strategy aren’t steered towards a climax or even a clear end; there is no inherent, proper, or natural conclusion to it. The primary aim of strategy is to get to the next stage, a next life. An ongoing pursuit.  ",{"type":15,"children":192},[193],{"text":25},{"type":15,"children":195},[196],{"text":197,"subscript":19},"*Title taken from Jenny Holzer, Survival, 1983–1985 ",[199],{"id":22,"url":200,"width":201,"height":202,"fileName":203,"alternativeText":204,"caption":204,"mimeType":205},"https://eu-west-2.graphassets.com/cml6bym1c0c5207mi8l9pgndz/cmm0j3eil752707mk7pc9rsts",390,514,"Screenshot 2026-02-24 at 11.25.24.png",null,"image/png","2020-10-31",{"url":200},{"articlesTitle":209,"articles":210},"Things we’ve written ",[211,218,223,228,234,236,242,247,252,258,264],{"id":212,"articlePage":213,"title":214,"source":215,"url":216,"externalLink":217},"cmm0iq5yj76li07l7v4accmi6",false,"New ideas about how an art and design school can work ","Linkedin","new-ideas-about-how-an-art-and-design-school-can-work","https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/new-ideas-how-art-design-school-can-work-benedict-singleton-bqjif/?trackingId=dSxCYOUtTUmLPeamo81tFw%3D%3D",{"id":219,"articlePage":213,"title":220,"source":215,"url":221,"externalLink":222},"cmm0k9u9n96gk07l7lvv3q2fa","AI Vendors Promised Efficiency. What we Got Was an Arms Race","ai-vendors-promised-efficiency-what-we-got-was-an-arms-race","https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ai-vendors-promised-efficiency-what-we-got-arms-race-ferreira-de-s%C3%A1-5vwne/?trackingId=MOCm%2FdbD6WrHY%2F%2FoJl3XAQ%3D%3D",{"id":224,"articlePage":213,"title":225,"source":215,"url":226,"externalLink":227},"cml9p3kog72q206l5udyvqor4","The AI Gradient: Organisational Culture, Power, and the Uneven Future of Work","the-ai-gradient-organisational-culture-power-and-the-uneven-future-of-work","https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ai-gradient-organisational-culture-power-uneven-work-ferreira-de-s%25C3%25A1-xe6jf/?trackingId=aHg3YW0gQMaql0KCY%2BphvA%3D%3D",{"id":229,"articlePage":213,"title":230,"source":231,"url":232,"externalLink":233},"cmm0kboeu8olq07mprsiwb1ux","The rise of the ‘culture stack’: What is it and how is it reshaping art, technology and places?","World Economic Forum ","the-rise-of-the-culture-stack-what-is-it-and-how-is-it-reshaping-art-technology-and-places","https://www.weforum.org/stories/2025/07/the-rise-of-the-culture-stack-what-is-it-and-how-is-it-reshaping-art-and-technology/",{"id":235,"articlePage":19,"title":9,"source":8,"url":10,"externalLink":204},"cmm0j5atu7oje07l7tg6ig6lg",{"id":237,"articlePage":213,"title":238,"source":239,"url":240,"externalLink":241},"cmm0k5eso91bj07l7wd9ehlsg","Health Worlds - The hidden logics that shape healthcare systems","Substack","health-worlds-the-hidden-logics-that-shape-healthcare-systems","https://substack.com/@rivalstrategy/p-156986403",{"id":243,"articlePage":213,"title":244,"source":239,"url":245,"externalLink":246},"cmm0k6faq92i807l7p0s92mgy","Health Worlds II - Guiding Strategic AI Investment in Healthcare","health-worlds-ii-guiding-strategic-ai-investment-in-healthcare","https://substack.com/@rivalstrategy/p-159469452",{"id":248,"articlePage":213,"title":249,"source":239,"url":250,"externalLink":251},"cmm0k4cx08gnp07mkvo2eg61y","Art and Tech in the Year of Quantum ","art-and-tech-in-the-year-of-quantum","https://rivalstrategy.substack.com/p/art-and-tech-in-the-year-of-quantum?triedRedirect=true",{"id":253,"articlePage":213,"title":254,"source":255,"url":256,"externalLink":257},"cmm0jb2087vqr07l7xj738uay","Contemporary strategy","Medium","contemporary-strategy","https://medium.com/rival-strategy/introduction-to-rival-strategy-125e50529175",{"id":259,"articlePage":213,"title":260,"source":261,"url":262,"externalLink":263},"cmm0j97l27aos07mpzucjjsg2","Platform design, introduction","Medium ","platform-design-introduction","https://medium.com/rival-strategy/platform-design-part-i-db26d08a947d",{"id":265,"articlePage":19,"title":266,"source":267,"url":268,"externalLink":204},"cmm0lkq9703uf07l6l4kdxqnd","Art Worlds: A Visual Essay","Book","art-worlds-a-visual-essay",{"Complexity-Cost-Left":270,"Effective-Complexity-Limit":271},1999999999999978,2000000000000000,[],1772144631626]