Most strategic errors are not errors of information. They are errors of extreme positioning.
The organisation that moves too fast and breaks things it needed. The leader who holds too firm and misses the moment to adapt. The culture that values execution so completely that it stops learning. The culture that values reflection so completely that it stops executing.
The Buddha identified the same structure two and a half millennia ago and called it the First Noble Truth in a different register: suffering arises from clinging — to positions, to outcomes, to the belief that one particular way of seeing is the complete picture.
The Middle Way — Majjhima Patipada — is the recognition that both extremes contain something true, that both extremes obscure something true, and that the intelligence that can hold both simultaneously without collapsing into either is the intelligence that sees clearly.
The string of a veena tuned neither too tight nor too loose — the Buddha said this to a musician who had been torturing himself with asceticism. It is as precise a description of strategic calibration as anything produced by McKinsey.
In practice: the leader who has internalised the Middle Way is not a compromiser. They do not split the difference between two positions to avoid conflict. They hold the tension between the positions long enough for a third option — one that was not visible from either extreme — to emerge.
This is what the best strategic thinking actually looks like. Not the efficient processing of a known option set. The patient holding of genuine uncertainty until clarity arrives from a level below the argument.
Zen calls this Don't-know mind. The Stoics called it Epoché — the suspension of premature judgment. The Bhagavad Gita calls it the mind of the Sthitaprajna — the one of steady wisdom who is not pulled by either pleasure or pain.
Different vocabularies. The same operational intelligence.
The best decisions in your career were probably made from this ground — from a quality of settled attention that was neither attached to a particular outcome nor detached from the problem. You may not have had a name for it. Now you do.