Comparing: Sticking Points

The Art of War 5:5.5-11

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 lines discussed in this article continue the Fifth and final Section of Chapter 5 of The Art of War. This chapter explains how strategic Momentum is created by the use of direct methods with surprises. These lines discuss how we overcome our resistance to change.

When individuals master the organizations standard methods, they should be given the license to experiment. Many of these experiments will fail, but over time we find ways to simplify, improve, and speed our routine tasks.

• (In the quotations below, we summarize each Chinese character as a single English word shown in < > brackets. A sentence from my English translation follows the line of characters.)

<Allow> <influence> <is>
You must create momentum.

As we said in the previous article, having too many innovations within an organization creates chaos, but we must allow experimentation by those with skills.

<This> <battle> <men> <also>
You create it with your men during battle.

We are compared in “battles” by our ability to create innovations and surprises. Everyone wants to be surprised. Contests that play out as expected are boring. Only surprises carry new information. The element of surprise give so much momentum to one party over another, that it often determines the winner.

To help us understand the problem with momentum, Sun Tzu provides an analogy.

<Comparable> <to> <roll> <trees> <stones>
This is comparable to rolling trees and stones.

This analogy seems simply, but, as we shall see, it is more sophisticated than it appears. Sun Tzu is proposing this as the secret to creating momentum in our organizations when competing against others. Not all trees and stones roll. There are two key factors:

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