Offensive action
Take the initiative to achieve your objectives. Being proactive in pursuing and retaining opportunities and position yourself for growth and success.
The military principle of Offensive Action is a proactive approach that seeks to seize the initiative and maintain a freedom of action to achieve a decisive outcome. For offensive action to be successful, careful preparation and the coordinated employment of supporting resources are essential.
In a club context, Offensive Action can be seen as the willingness to take risks, pursue opportunities, and actively seek out opportunities. Sports clubs operate in highly competitive, complex environments, by taking the initiative, a sports club can gain a competitive advantage and achieve its objectives more effectively.
Offensive action contains several important elements:
Seize and hold the initiative: In Defence, initiative means more than simply coming up with new ways to do things. It is a concept of exploiting opportunities faster than an enemy can react, where the enemy in a sports club context is defined as something that will significantly negatively impact your operations. Eg. Taking the initiative against a lack-of-sponsorship enemy would see the source of future sponsors identified before they are required.
Maintain freedom of action: A freedom of action describes an ability to pursue aims by utilising your core capabilities without interference. This includes internal enemies of compliance and governance that can distract you. Like initiative, a freedom of action can be lost and, should this occur, it is decisively harder to regain than to maintain.
Pursue decisive results: Like economy of effort, think fewer, bigger, better. While this doesn’t mean always chasing the biggest fish in the pond, high impact outcomes can be chased by partnering with businesses with similar values to exploit the speed of trust to achieve outcomes that are out of scope and scale to what can be achieved by the sports club alone. It will also create processes that are scalable and repeatable.
Offensive action exploits opportunities to gain and retain the initiative. Offensive action is swift, decisive and directed toward the achievement of the end state.
“Never forget that no military leader has ever become great without audacity.” Carl von Clausewitz