Clausewitz: friction, uncertainty, and a purpose set from outside
The plan was good and half of it was eaten by small things: a locked door, a speaker who did not come, a dead microphone. That is not failure. It is the normal noise of doing anything, and you can prepare for it in advance.
Club plans collapse not through big mistakes but through small things adding up, partial information, and nobody having said what the means is for.
List the five things that must happen on time for the event to work, and against each write one name and one fallback. If you cannot invent a fallback for three of them, the plan is too tight — simplify it now, not the night before.
The full biography is on the public version →
Portrait by Karl Wilhelm Wach, 19th century. PD-Art-old-100 — Karl Wilhelm Wach (1787–1845)
These screens carry out this specific work. Every published work in the library also has at least an exercise — it is at the foot of this page.
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These works are related to the one you just read — and not by accident:
shared competencies: Strategy, Judgement
shared competencies: Strategy, Judgement
shared competencies: Strategy, Judgement
shared competencies: Strategy, Judgement
The same work written at length: what it claims and what its evidence is worth.
This text is freely available, so the links go straight to it rather than to a summary of it.
- On War — the 1873 Graham translation, chapter by chapter
- Stanford Encyclopedia on the philosophy of war — where Clausewitz sits in it
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