The one-percenters of strategic competition

Eleven consecutive wins (Opens in new window) so far in this Australian Football League season have subtly changed the way many rusted-on Fremantle Dockers supporters are watching our team. Hope is gradually, tentatively giving way to expectation. For a club whose supporters have spent much of its 30-year history developing resilience in the face of disappointment, it remains unfamiliar and nervous territory.

I occasionally reflect on how the late political journalist and seasoned Freo tragic Matt Price (Opens in new window) would have written about this current purple patch. No commentator captured the peculiar psychology of Fremantle supporters better than he did – with wit, insight and affection. He understood the familiar rhythm of hope, anxiety, resilience and reluctant belief that accompany following the Dockers.

This year, in the post-game commentary, reviews and interviews, the same names tend to surface. Goals, clearances and match-winning moments are easy to identify. They are visible. They fit neatly into the story of why a team won.

Other contributions are less obvious, but no less consequential.

Players such as Sam Switkowski don’t dominate the statistics, headlines or post-match discussions. Yet week after week such players contribute to conditions that make success possible.

Pressure is applied. Space is denied. Decisions are hurried. Possession changes hands.

The highlight reels usually centre on the goal rather than the pressure that forced the turnover. The outcome is visible. The conditions that enabled it are less so.

In global affairs, strategy often reflects the same behaviour.

In environments of persistent competition, crisis and conflict, the ability to shape decision-making and pursue deterrence may matter more than the ability to impose effects.

Across the Indo-Pacific, successful outcomes increasingly occur through the cumulative application of pressure rather than decisive acts that reflect crisis and conflict. Chinese coast guard and maritime militia vessels operating around Scarborough Shoal (Opens in new window) in the South China Sea rarely seek a single pivotal confrontation. Instead, they steadily compress the decision space available to the Philippines, forcing repeated judgements about escalation, restraint, logistics and sovereignty.

The same dynamic can be seen elsewhere. Disruptions to undersea communications infrastructure (Opens in new window) in the Baltic Sea, around Taiwan, and at other potential flash points create uncertainty and force decisions before complete understanding is available. Questions of attribution, response and escalation often emerge before governments possess all the information they would prefer, creating opportunities for ambiguity, denial and competing narratives.

Information activity surrounding elections, military incidents and geopolitical crises follows a similar pattern. It does not need to persuade the whole target audience. It simply needs to influence perceptions, confidence or timing sufficiently to affect the decisions that follow.

Even where a government possess a clear understanding of events, public expectations can create pressure for visible demonstrations of awareness and response. The Chinese naval circumnavigation of Australia in 2025 provided a useful reminder of this dynamic.

We are better at measuring outcomes than assessing the cumulative pressures that shape them. We count incidents, messages, vessels, sorties and disruptions. We are less adept at assessing the collective value of the one-percenters and near misses, and how those activities combine to influence choices, create hesitation, narrow options or alter behaviour over time.

That distinction matters because contemporary strategic competition is concerned with decision advantage. The objective is often not to compel an adversary to act, but to shape the environment in which decisions are made. Success is found not simply in the visible effect itself, but in creating conditions that make certain decisions more likely and others less so.

If decision advantage is becoming now central in contemporary competition, greater attention may need to be paid to recognising, understanding and responding to the pressures that shape decisions before visible effects emerge. That matters because intelligence, information operations and policy are ultimately concerned with decisions. Understanding how decision environments are being shaped may become as important as understanding events themselves. Information activities should be assessed not only by reach, but by whether they contribute to resilience, deterrence and decision advantage.

Governments have also learnt that narrative vacuums rarely remain vacant for long. While some activities must remain hidden, timely and accurate communication to the public can be equally important. Once a narrative takes hold, shaping perceptions becomes considerably more difficult than establishing it in the first place.

Different environments. Similar dynamics.

Matt Price understood that good stories were rarely about the obvious event. They were about the players, emotions, behaviours and conditions of our beloved football team that made success possible. Players such as Switkowski remind us of that.

Strategy that relies upon public resilience deserves the same discipline.

The visible effect still matters. But amid persistent competition, resilience, deterrence and advantage are often secured much earlier – when decisions are being shaped, options narrowed and perceptions formed.

By the time the effect becomes visible, the more important decisions may already have been made.

Whether in the Indo-Pacific or towards September grand final glory, the conditions that shape success are often established long before success becomes visible.