What is tactical readiness?

Have you got all the tactics that you need to do your job?

Tactical performance is all about doing the best you can with what you have.

It’s about how you plan to use your knowledge and skills in the best possible way towards achieving your aims and it’s about the choices you make.

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Tactical Readiness

For the tennis player this is about choosing the game plan and shots to play given their technical ability, the conditions and the opponent.

The assessment of the demands and challenges faced – difficulty, risk, importance – weighed against the time, skills, knowledge, experience – determine the tactics selected.

Given the complexity of many businesses, people and situations, tactical options are almost infinite. There are always choices. This means there’s importance in selecting tactics that are simply understood and easily deliverable, and that can be delivered with high degrees of confidence of control.

Tactical readiness requires an ability to truly understand the world and the challenge. It then needs self awareness about capabilities and technical competence.

Tactical considerations

Many people feel that the demands of their role exceed their available resources to perform the role at the level they’d like.

For many this is a function of time (‘I’ve more things I could do than time to do them all’) and impacts quality (‘I could do it better if I had more time’).

Tactical readiness is about confidence in the choices being made irrespective of the challenge. This includes choosing priorities about what to focus on e.g. ‘do I need to be at that meeting?’ or ‘how much time do I need to set aside to do that?’

And it includes choosing options about how to do something. The greater the technical ability – e.g. to be caring, empathetic, assertive, challenging, quick, deliberate, forthright etc – the greater the tactical options.

Tactical considerations also include using goals, the context, prioritisation, personal discipline, decision making, planning, organisation, flexibility and working with others.

All of these can be developed and used to make tactical excellence a reality.

Tactical readiness

To summarise this part of the performance is about using whatever you have with maximum effectiveness focused towards what it is you’re trying to achieve.

  • How well do you make great choices about using what you know and doing what you are capable of doing?
  • What score would you give yourself out of 10 for how ready you are in this part of the pie?
  • Is it a priority area for you to focus on to maintain or improve your score?
  • What tactical know-how should you seek out to help you be more ready?