Comparing: Chaos
The Art of War 5:4.1-3
This article continues our project explaining each line of Sun Tzu’s work. The English and Chinese are from my award-winning translation, The Art of War and The Ancient Chinese Revealed. Start here for the book’s opening lines.
The three lines discussed in this article begin the Fourth Section of Chapter 5. This chapter explains how strategic Momentum is created by the interruption of direct actions with surprise. This Section deals with the resulting unpredictability of competition.
In the language of information theory, our direct actions using proven methods are the carrier for surprise. Proven methods are needed to convert resources into value, and without them there could be no surprises. Surprises are unexpected change. It happens so often that it becomes part of the system, that is, not a rare feature of competition, but a common one. Surprise is the only completely new information in the system. We can know that surprises are coming, but we don’t know when or what the surprise will be nor its effects.
Not all surprises work. Many surprises only work once. Some ideas that were surprises work so well they become innovations and standard moves in the future.
A World of Surprise
(In the quotations from Sun Tzu below, we summarize each Chinese character as a single English word shown in < > brackets. The English sentence version follows.)
What happens in a world full of new information and surprise?
<Confused> <confused> <tangled> <tangled>
War is very complicated and confusing.
Competition, i.e. war, is chaotic. Surprises tangle together. Our modern world is increasingly confused because competition is increasing. But our natural world is also complicated. If we think science “explains” nature, we have a nineteenth century understanding of science. The twentieth century began with Gödel's incompleteness theorems, proving that no logical system could be internally consistent. This was later given practical form by quantum mechanics and Heisenberg uncertainty, the science on which all modern technology is built. Our natural world is not predictable in a deterministic way.
I have just finished reading George Guilder’s latest book, Life after Capitalism: The Meaning of Wealth, the Future of the Economy, and the Time Theory of Money. In his work, Guilder makes four main points:
Wealth is Knowledge.
Growth is Learning.
Money is Time.
Information is Surprise.
We can easily convert these ideas into Sun Tzu’s strategic language of competition.
Positions are Knowledge. We hold our positions in the world not only because of what we know, but because of what others know about us. These positions exist primarily in people’s heads, but this knowledge is reflected in the resources and authority with which we are rewarded.
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Advancing Positions is Learning. We can only advance or expand our positions by exploration and testing new ideas and territory to see if they produce rewards. Learning must be useful. To be useful to other people, our learning must produce value for them, value for which they reward us.
Rewards are Time. Our efforts, if well spent, convert our time into rewards. Rewards come from others spending their time on us. Rewards can take the form of other resources, but those resources can all be traced back to expenditures of time. The secret is leveraging our time to produce the most rewards for others and therefore for ourselves.
New Ideas are Surprise. Sun Tzu does more with this idea than Guilder does, making surprise itself just a component of Momentum. It is, after all, momentum that we use to advance our positions. New ideas must be tested in future moves to see if we have discovered an innovation, a new standard method, or just today’s news, tossed in the trash after one use. However, even one-time surprises can be useful in creating the momentum needed to advance our positions today.
The Battle for Order
Since our world is growing increasingly competitive, it seems increasingly chaotic. Everyone has heard of the “fog of war.” Today’s world is enveloped in a “fog of information.” Some of this information is true and productive, but much of it is hype, lies, and half-truths aiming to destroy the positions of others.
<Fight> <disorder>
Battle is chaotic.
This line can mean that competition is chaotic, but it also means that we must fight chaos itself. We must invest resources, which is Sun Tzu means by <fight>, to create order. We create order by converting resources—our time—into value. One way we do this is to turn surprise—new ideas—into innovations, new standard methods for direct action.
Sun Tzu’s perspective of competitive positions consisting of five elements gives us a big-picture order to a chaotic competitive landscape. A large part of my success in the computer market during the eighties and nineties was my ability to explain the changes in computer technology to our business customers. It all looked very chaotic then both to those outside and inside the industry, but there was also a great deal of order in what was emerging.
All our decisions involve an unrevealed future. One way we can all help each other is by identifying the safe islands of order in a chaotic world. The job of every competitor is making sense of the changes in their competitive arena to their potential “customers.” The best guides are those who seek to tell the truth. We can lie with the best of intentions, but, in every situation that I have personally witnessed, even well-intentioned lies come back to create more chaos. Lies have a way of demanding more lies. A world full of lies collapses into chaos.
A Creation Cycle
In a sense, our job is to create order from chaos and to create chaos from order.
<And> <yet> <no> <may> <disorder> <also>
Nevertheless, you must not allow chaos.
We are given chaos, or we may create it ourselves. Sun Tzu always sees both sides of every coin. Chaos and order are both complementary opposites. One creates the other in a continuing cycle of change. How complementary opposites create each other is the topic of next week’s article.