Comparing: Past and Future Methods
The Art of War 6:6.12-18
This article continues our project explaining each stanza 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 lines in this article are from the last three short stanzas of the sixth Section of Chapter 6 of The Art of War. They extend the lessons on knowledge and ignorance from the earlier stanzas in this section. Ignorance and knowledge are a specific form of emptiness and fullness, also known as weakness and strength, the topic of this chapter. The specific focus here is how our knowledge of current best methods changes over time.
In the quotations below, we summarize each Chinese character as a single English word shown in < > brackets. This article focuses on the broader meanings of the original Chinese, not its more limited English translation.
<By> <means> <of> <our> <measure> <it>
The quality of our decisions depends on the alternatives that we compare. All competition is a comparison. What makes each competition different is what is compared, by the means we measure it. Sports comparisons are judged by the number of points at the end of the game. Military ones are judged by who controls the ground at the end of the battle.
If we want to improve our positions in the minds of others, we must either improve our strengths by whatever measure people have been using for comparison, or we must shift people’s thinking about what should be compared to something that emphasizes our strengths.
Success in the Past
For many years in the comparison of military forces, it was thought that the size of the opposing armies determined who ended up controlling the battleground. However, that assumption was often proven wrong. For example, the much smaller army of Alexander the Great triumphed over the armies of Persia, which were many times larger.
<Excess> <men> <of> <war> <although> <many>
Much of what we measure as “strength” is simply excess. The issue is never how much of a given strength we have. The issue is how much of that strength we can effectively and economically bring to bear on the contest at hand. To answer that question, we must first understand the nature of the challenge and its underlying dynamics.
An excess of a given strength motivates us to see the world from that strength’s perspective. To those with a hammer, everything looks like it needs to be pounded down. Large, successful organizations often have an excess of monetary resources. Because of this, they tend to throw money at problems. Meanwhile, those without the money or the hammer are focusing on overlooked issues. Their goal is to find other alternatives to the current methods for winning the contest.
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The winning moves are often what others overlooked or even thought was impossible. Look at the idea that rockets should be reusable. When I was a boy growing up in the fifties and sixties, rocket reusability was obvious to everyone. The rockets in the sci-fi were as reusable as cars and airplanes. Gas them up and they were ready to take off again. But as the sixties went on, reusability was forgotten in the space “race” to the moon, where time was the focus. The only working rockets were expendable, developed for launching missiles where the rocket was destroyed in the explosion at the end. Rethinking the rocket around reusability to go to the moon would have taken too much time. America won the moon race, but that success warped the whole world’s thinking about what was important in rocket design.
<Also> <why> <augment> <to> <victory> <alas>
We reach a point of diminishing returns with any proven set of methods. Over time, as the cost of launching payloads into space became the real issue without anyone noticing it. No one asked the key question: <why><augment> the traditional methods of space flight? We overlooked that the main value of rockets had change to delivering payloads to space.
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The Courage To Speak
Why is it hard to reexamine our methods and change them? We cannot ignore past success and its proven methods, but when the basis for success changes, most of us fail to see it. Most of those who glimpse new possibilities are slow to speak because they don’t want to seem out of step with the crowd. Because no one brings new possibilities to our attention, the comparisons in competition continue to be based upon the traditional formulas.
<Make> <said>
Someone must speak before any competition can move forward in a new direction. Even when a new perspective is suggested, most will not believe that it is a possible road to a higher level of success. Only a few will listen to new ideas. Even fewer will act on what they hear. And fewer yet will make it work.
<Victory> <can> <become> <also>
Eventually, someone will act on the new vision and make it work, and a new basis for victory comes into being. Success from new methods must be seen by the crowd in order to be believed. When Elon Musk introduced a reusable booster, bringing the cost of putting payloads in orbit way down, it still took the market some years to change, but gradually, inevitably, it did. When the basis for comparison changes, standards methods must change as well. We cannot achieve better goals with old approaches.
<Enemy> <although> <crowd>
Even after a revolutionary innovation, most of those competing will stay with the crowd. In military contests, the largest forces continues to lose to new weapons and methods, but most military armies still think in size because it is the easiest to measure. In space flight, many continued to pour money into expensive one-use boosters. People stick with the old methods because they do not understand or cannot master the new ones.
<Can> <make> <without> <fight>
Over time, those using the old methods fade away. In Sun Tzu’s terms <fight> means putting our limited resources into a certain kind of competitive contest. We all avoid investing in forms of competition that we don’t think we can win. Those who stay in the competition or join it are those who have mastered the new approaches or think that they can improve upon them.
New types of methods are the most fertile areas for more innovation, not because we know so much about them but because we know so little. New techniques take us in new direction, going into unexplored ground. Unexplored ground is where we have the most to discover. We humans are endlessly inventive because we always want more. People on Mars will discover possibilities in that ground because they will have new needs, needs that can never be felt by those running Martian robots from here on Earth. The goals of those running the robots are writing articles about their discoveries. The goals of the new Martians will be survival.