Goals, Strategies, and Tactics

deciding what to do and how to do it

Terminology

A goal is something you want to accomplish
- "Make research fairer, more reliable, and more efficient"
A strategy is a long-term plan to achieve that
- "Increase institutional and individual adoption of open science"
A tactic is a specific action that fits into a larger strategic plan
- "Give researchers credit in performance reviews for creating open-access data sets"
Over time, people often confuse strategies with goals
- Open science isn't the goal: fairness, reliability, and efficiency are
...and focus too narrowly on the tactics, losing sight of how they conflict with or contradict each other within the overall strategy
- Giving researchers credit for sharing data incentivizes salami slicing and the proliferation of useless data sets

Exercise

In order to discourage researchers from salami slicing their papers, your university has decreed that people can only submit one paper per year for consideration by the promotion committee.

Identify goals, strategies, and tactics in the statement above.
Identify (at least) three ways in which this proposal can go wrong.

A Simple Conceptual Framework

[Borrego2014] looked at how to increase adoption of evidence-based teaching strategies in STEM
- Prescribed (top-down) vs. emergent (bottom-up)
- Environments and structures (the system) vs. individuals

Exercise

How can you translate the tactics described for that option from teaching to your problem domain?
Which of these options do you think will work best in your environment? Which are you most comfortable with?

A Little Philosophy

Isaiah Berlin defined two concepts of liberty
- Negative liberty is freedom from, i.e., there's no rule that says you can't do something
- Positive liberty is freedom to, i.e., you have the means and ability to pursue a goal
Those with power will often cede negative liberty without supporting positive liberty
Berlin and others also showed that absolute rights often conflict
- E.g., freedom of speech vs. freedom from harassment
Easy to say "find a balance", but much harder to agree on what that balance is
Reform movements often tie themselves in knots over this
- Deny the conflict
- Try to formulate precise rules in advance
Two kinds of knowledge [Scott1998]
- Techne is hard-and-fast rules, often derived from first principles
- Metis "can be acquired only by long practice at similar but rarely identical tasks [and] requires constant adaptation to changing circumstances"
- Scientists and programmers want techne; organizational change requires metis

Exercise

Describe the last time you tried to apply techne when the situation required metis.
What have you learned in your current role that qualifies as techne? As metis?

Sabina's Goals and Strategy

Sabina's goal is to enable people to devote working hours to open source projects and DEI initiatives
She doesn't believe there is support for making either mandatory, so her strategy is to have both added to the performance review guidelines at her company as things that people can get credit for
Sabina therefore fits in the Prescribed - Environments & Structures quadrant of Borrego and Henderson's classification
Her next step is to pick tactics