Strategists, the good ones anyway, awake each day and while munching on Bran Flakes or whatever ask themselves at least two important questions: Was the strategy I implemented yesterday a good one? And, what’s the strategy for today?

Today, I can’t imagine that Prime Minister Steven Harper’s Director of Political Operations got much past the first question.

It’s one thing to have a strategy that doesn’t exactly work out as you and your boss planned, but it’s something else entirely to have a strategy blow-up in your face, especially in politics. I am speaking of course of the strategy and decision that October 18, 2006, or any day for that matter, it was wise to press the Garth Turner eject button.

Surely something other than hindsight should be guiding such a seasoned pair of reputed thinkers, or, does this bring into sharp perspective the very kind of thinking that goes on between these two bowls of cereal?

In the development and implementation of any strategy there are assumptions made, and degrees of acceptable risk considered and taken. However, not easily predictable are the resulting unintended consequences. That’s why they are called unintended.

Unintended consequences aren’t always a bad thing. In fact, strategists often contemplate the positive effects of the consequences they don’t intend. They usually fall, however, into the category of “well that’s a bonus” as opposed to anything planned. And if the unintended consequences turn negative, they are usually thought not significant enough to derail the initial strategy.

Ouch! on several counts.

Whether you agree or disagree that Garth Turner deserved some of what he got, and I happen to disagree he deserved any of it, that is not the issue in terms of a technical analysis of the strategy and decision to give him the boot this week. By almost every scale of measurability, the strategy was flawed from the very start in its motivations, assumptions, and risks. But above all, the strategy was deeply flawed in terms of the unintended consequences which, I dare say, even a rank amateur might have contemplated, beforehand.

I will not, today, provide a post mortem answer to the first question; was everything in the PMO’s strategy this week a good one? The question isn’t just rhetorical, it might be a worthwhile lesson for that group to figure it out on their own. Indeed, as a strategist, I am far more interested in the outcome of the second question — what’s the strategy for today? — assuming Mr. Harper is still talking to the strategy brainchild.

Keep in mind, this is the same Steven Harper that is reputed to churn through communications directors when the message, the messenger and the messengee, clash.

I can only imagine what happens when the chief political operations strategist self-destructs and takes everyone with him. I imagine the same thing will happen as  happened to the individuals behind, and/or, who miscalculated the impact of creating and then pulling the Jean Chrétien disfiguration attack ads. Mistake #1, create the ads. Mistake #2, pull the ads thereby highlighting the mistake, but don’t bother to apologize.

In today’s case and the strategy decision to oust Garth Turner, mistake #1 was long ago refusing to recognize and embrace the “digital democracy” and Garth Turner’s command of it. Mistake #2 was thinking that a strategy, any strategy, which assumed  the digital democracy could be ignored, much less eradicated, was as marred in its false assumptions and risk miscalculations as it was in neglecting to contemplate the unintended consequences.

Moreover, in this particular case the negative unintended consequences for Steven Harper, and the positive unintended consequences for Garth Turner are about to overshadow — it’s already begun — anything that was wrong in the first place with the initial and ill-advised strategy.

When the first strategy to try and oust Garth Turner, using disciple Charles McVety, failed, anger and embarrassment set in at the PMO. Anger is not a particularly good sentiment to have as a backdrop when going back to the drawing board to scratch-out failed strategy #1 in search of a hopeful, but just-as-doomed, strategy #2.

Again, I won’t give the PMO strategy advice on what they ought to do next. As much as it’s obvious, they likely wouldn’t listen making it already likely too late. I will however, offer the PMO the following forecast, and they can figure out how they want to navigate between now and its eventuality.

By the end of next week, or the week after, Decima Research or the Strategic Counsel will announce another poll showing Conservative support falling from this week’s 32% to below 28%. And, at the conclusion of the next election the Conservative Party as it is defined today will not be in power, but I dare predict, Mr. Turner will be, regardless of what decision his constituents help him arrive at in the weeks ahead.

The second sad and ironic reality for the Conservative party is they were heading to 28% next week anyway whether they booted Mr. Turner or not. This was going to happen regardless, principally because of its environment and energy policy and its general faulty communications strategies, including especially its communications strategies surrounding Afghanistan. Booting Garth Turner out of caucus merely ensures an encounter with a number below 28% and a near impossible climb back above it.   

The unintended consequence? Just keep watching Halton’s lowly MP.

In the final and perhaps most poignant scene of the film, An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore closes with the following:

“Future generations may well have occasion to ask themselves, what were our parents thinking … why didn’t they wake up when they had a chance? We have to hear that question, from them, now!”  

Nearly seven months ago on March 28, 2006, John Ibbitson of the Globe and Mail wrote “Kick Garth Turner out of caucus? They’d be kicking out the future of Canadian politics.”