A Red Document Envelope: Primer on Strategic Planning

Dire Rabbit

What is this?

A paper on the essence of tactical planning, meant to be accessible this document is intended to help with some of the issues the councils have faced in the past. It might also all help us to get on the same page with its concepts considering what we’re being asked to achieve.

I am learning very quickly that my shortcoming is communication. I’ve spent the last seven years of my life being trained to think a certain way, surrounded by others that do the same using language alien to most people. This document is me trying to bridge that gap. I am not attempting to talk down to you, it’s illustrative and descriptive by intention, I believe the intelligent minds assembled will see its value and assist me in remedying any faults they see with it.

That out of the way, let’s begin.

Introduction to The Pie Problem

You will get sick of hearing about the Pie Problem if you spend much time around me, but it’s a thought experiment and puzzle meant to elaborate the simplest ways of planning using a common enough food metaphor. Since I was a baker, this is especially close to my heart and pie is one of the holiest of foods.

The Pie Problem’s lesson is how to plan for a campaign, design its objectives and plan from the strategic to the tactical level. Its metaphor scales shockingly well and can be as complex as any arcane ritual- most critically, it also removes your emotions from your objectives. You stop thinking about politics and the wages of war to focus on the tactical puzzle that will lead to your success. During the planning phases of a campaign, this is what you want, you can (and should) take other considerations into account after the plan has been drafted.

Language

You will see me use two terms (and no more for simplicity’s sake) that have very specific meaning in planning parlance:

Strategic/Campaign – This refers to the widest scope objectives and plans. This is the big scale stuff that you see daily when soldiers re-enforce a border or assault a kingdom.

Tactical/Team – This is the much smaller scale planning down to the individual. Using this term would indicate the smallest element in a given host, it might be used to indicate how many members of that border guard are carrying new weapons; ‘at the tactical level 50% of the soldiery are carrying iron blades’ So we can assume 2 on every 4 people have those iron blades.

This specificity is intentional, you are counting the soldiers who will be fighting and nobody else. ‘50% of the soldiers are carrying iron blades’ doesn’t account for logistics, support, cooks and others and only adds confusion when planning.

The Pie Problem

Let’s assume for some reason I am a baker that lives in a kingdom that has suddenly passed a ban on pie making. In this dystopic hell hole, I am someone who has customers who used to love my pies and desire more in spite of the ban. They are willing to pay me well for them, enough that risking the executioner’s axe is a worthy trade off, so I decided I will fill this market niche.

Already I am faced with a major problem: the law of the land says pies are evil and make you fat and I will be put to death if I am found making them. From this I can deduce that there will be all kinds of posters decrying confectionery glory, people who sell pie making ingredients will be watched carefully and the tools to make pies- stolen from me by zealous guards when the ban went into effect- will be hard to acquire.

From this, I have three goals:

The Strategic (campaign) goal of making and selling pies without being discovered, requiring the success of two Tactical (small scale) goals:

Acquiring or creating tools to make pies.
Obtaining a supply of ingredients to make pies.

Additionally, outside the scope of this document, we could add things like ‘establish a network of pie sellers’ and the like. It gets as complex as you want it to.

I can further break this down to:

Make and sell pies

Rolling Pin
Pie pan
Measuring Cup
Butter
Flour
Salt
Eggs

Planning for Success

These are my tactical objectives; I must secure these resources, make pies, transport said pies to customers who (for the purposes of this document) I already have. I will labor under the knowledge that getting caught means I will die, this means it is in my best interest to:

Take stock of my resources, skills and disposition: I keep a few healthy chickens meaning I can produce my own eggs. I am proficient in baking and can be charming with some effort. I’m utterly dedicated to making money by selling black market pies because I need to make enough money to get out of this dystopian nightmare.
Transport what I need as discretely as possible; appear weak and compliant with the law, appear ignorant while surveying the environment and learning the ins and outs, memorizing common guard patrol routes and finding places where I can cache my things. In short, learn everything I can about my adversary and the areas they are most comfortable in so I can survive in those areas.
Defray risk of losing all my supplies at once. Using multiple caches and different routes to get to them reduces the risk of losing all of my supplies- or worse, getting caught with all of them- at once. It is a risk I’d have to balance this against how much time I have during the day to move things around.
Build relationships with people who can acquire the things I need, carefully test the waters to find those who will be willing to help me and the depths of their devotion to the concept. Would a tinkerer be willing to create a rolling pin, or the whole suite of tools I need? What price would I pay, what are the risks?
Plan for swift victories, minimizing my exposure by maximizing the work I do when I am carrying out risky activities. Can I gather the ingredients in one evening and get them turned into a pie? How will I transport that pie without being found out?

Bringing it all Together

Having taken all my tactical concerns into account, I can now lay out my road map for success:

I will buy the tools I need from a local copper smith, a tinkerer, and a glass blower on separate days- the copper smith will make my pan and disguise it as a small shield which I will carry attached to my shoulder bag. The rolling pin will be capped at either end to give it the appearance of a club and the measuring cup will be made to a specified size and painted brown, the top wrapped with leather to make it look like a hand drum which I’ll carry in my bag. When not in use, these items will be parted out to trusted friends who live close to me except for the ‘drum’ which I will keep to prevent accidents from happening.
While I’m waiting for these tools to be made, I will scout out the guard patrols and roam the city purchasing and selling small items back and forth between vendors to give myself the appearance of a merchant adventurer, it will cost me money but the long term investment will be recouped with my first pie.
Once I’ve identified places to store foodstuffs to make my pies, I will cache them throughout the city in a zig-zag pattern starting from the docks to my home. I will use small amounts of ingredients, enough for one pie at a time, but enough different caches that if an entire set of ingredients were found, I can still make at least one pie with what’s left.
The pie will be made at my home with the windows blacked out and my chimney covered to hide my activities. During this process I will fan the smoke into a closed room which will then have to be scrubbed out later. Once the pie is created, I will box it up wrapped in layers of cloth impregnated with charcoal to diffuse the tasty smell. I will use a fictitious transport company name because I know guards on my side of the city don’t know what companies are based in the other side of it. I will wear overalls and boots (unlike my usual dresses) and deliver the pie during the early morning when most guards are tired and people are just waking up.
If I am successful, I will then use the proceeds to hire people to find cache spots and other activities to help me continue doing this unimpeded. As my finances and proficiency grow, I will branch out and engage in other pie distribution activities, building upon my successes to create an illicit confectionery empire.

This is meant to open the floor to discussing proper planning and creating a sustainable long term campaign strategy that will see a victory won before a single blade is drawn. I started with the Pie Problem, but there are many, many facets of planning that can be as fun as they are exhausting. We’ll explore them together under the mantle of the Red Knight until we are ready to act with the valor and force of arms our challenges demand of us.

We must labor quickly to remedy our problems, but I am confident that if we adopt the principles of strategic and tactical planning, we will create our victories on paper and then upon the battlefield. I invite any critique or questions attached to this file.

Aspirant Keline Hallenthen