The Tactic Star
Definition
The tactic star is a Commons Library planning tool — a five-pointed star with one point per dimension (goals, resources, audience, timing, risk) — for choosing and assessing tactics before committing to them.
Each point is a 0-to-3 score the team assigns after a structured discussion: how well does this tactic advance the goal, given the resources it requires, for the audience we have, with the timing we need, against the risk it imposes on participants.
The practitioner craft is in the post-scoring conversation: a tactic with low scores on most dimensions is rejected, a tactic with high scores across most dimensions is committed to, and a tactic with mixed scores becomes the basis of a modification plan rather than a yes-or-no decision.
Full page: [[the-tactic-star]]. [source: the-tactic-star] [source: the-tactic-star-tool]
FAQ
What is the Tactic Star?
The Tactic Star is a Commons Library planning tool — a five-pointed star with one point per dimension (goals, resources, audience, timing, risk) — for choosing and assessing tactics before committing to them. The full-page version of this definition lives on [[the-tactic-star]].
How is each tactic scored?
Each point is a 0-to-3 score the team assigns after a structured discussion: how well does this tactic advance the goal, given the resources it requires, for the audience we have, with the timing we need, against the risk it imposes on participants. The five-point scoring forces the team to surface trade-offs that one-off brainstorming hides.
What happens in the post-scoring conversation?
The practitioner craft is in the post-scoring conversation: a tactic with low scores on most dimensions is rejected, a tactic with high scores across most dimensions is committed to, and a tactic with mixed scores becomes the basis of a modification plan rather than a yes-or-no decision. The post-scoring conversation is where the star’s scores turn into a decision.
What is the Tactic Star’s relationship to the Tactics Toolkit?
The Tactic Star is hosted on the Commons Library site alongside the broader toolkit collection [source: commons-library]. The Tactics Toolkit on the same Commons Library site provides the menu of named tactics that the star is applied to [source: commons-tactics-toolkit]. The star is the scoring framework; the toolkit is the menu.