Comparison: Communication Style
Art of War 7:4.1-5 Military experience says:
This post 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.
Practical Strategy is a reader-supported publication. Become a free subscriber or paid subscriber for only $5.
The stanza discussed here begins Section Four of Chapter 7 of The Art of War. The general topic of this chapter is Armed Conflict. The previous section was about “deception,” that is controlling the perceptions of others in order to avoid conflict. This section advances to the main problem with controlling people’s perceptions: communication. While we can learn about our competitive situation by careful listening, we must accept that such listening is an exception not the rule. In competitive environments, everyone wants to be heard but few are listening. This is true both of our supporters and our opponents.
<Army> <correctness> <says>
Military experience says:
There are some things that we only learn from what has worked in the past. These things are embodied into experience. The mental models built from logical systems like Sun Tzu’s strategy are based on a foundation of experience. We develop such systems from what has happened consistently in the past. People with deep experience on a personal level don’t need these logical systems. And those who are familiar with a specialized system’s concepts and terminology cannot use those terms because others do not understand them.
Sun Tzu’s strategy of positioning is built on two types of knowledge, our learning and our experiences that flesh out that knowledge. This continues the discussion of controlling perceptions from our last article (See this article). Our strategy is only as good as our knowledge about our situation and position. However, our vision of our position must be shared with others. It must be promoted in order for us to move to the last step in advancing a position, making claims. Our success in competition is not built only upon what we know, It depends more upon what others know about us. We do not want to be seen as potential opponents but potential supporters.
<Speak> <not> <examine> <hear>
“You can speak, but you will not be heard.
The first rule of speaking is to use as little jargon as possible. When I was in the software business, one of my pet peeves was how everyone fell so easily into using industry acronyms that others didn’t know. This becomes a form of “showing off” for many people, like using big complicated words found only in the dictionary. The best approach is to speak simply and directly but even this isn’t enough to be heard among the gabble of voices that crowd every competitive arena.
As Eliza Dolittle said in My Fair Lady, “Words, words, words. I am so sick of words.” This has become a common attitude in our world of messaging and texting. The question is: what else are we willing to do to communicate our positions to others?
<Make> <become> <metal> <drum>
You must use gongs and drums.
The first thing that we must consider is what others hear about us. “Listening” is the primary method that we use to learn about our environment. Very little what we know about a new environment is learned from direct experience. When we talk about “our experience” we are usually only talking about what we have heard from others.
But, like everything else, not all hearing is equal. When people want to hear, they listen, but we spend most of our days filtering out unwanted communication. What we and others hear is determined by how well it is communicated. Messages that ring true and are consistently repeated like a drumbeat are more likely to stick in everyone’s minds. If we want our message about who we are and what we are attempting to do to resonate, we have to communicate it in a believable and consistent way. If our message fails to take hold, it is because either it doesn’t ring true or it is not repeated consistently.
We alone cannot be the only ones who repeat our messages. We must construct our slogans and catchphrases so that they are easily remembered and repeated by others. Our positions must sound fun and interesting enough to be talked about. We must think about this when we are constructing our taglines.
<See> <not> <examine> <view>
You cannot really see your forces just by looking.
We confirm what we hear by what we see. If we want others to believe what we say about ourselves and our positions, we must act consistently with our message, but again, people cannot see everything we do even when they are looking for it. They can only see what they can recognize. We must know objects and understand moves in order to recognize them.
We must make unfamiliar ideas recognizable by connecting it with things that others recognize. Our positions don’t exist in a vacuum. They exist in relationship with others: our fellow competitors, our allies, and our supporters. If these others names and logos are more familiar to our competitive arena, we can use them to position ourselves. It is especially useful to do this with those who support and recommend us, that is, who are allies.
Too many of us try to position ourselves against others, specifically against our larger, better known competitors. This works in the sense that it gets us attention, but it can also draw us into dangerous conflict because it positions us as part of a fight. It also promotes the names of our competitors.
The right way to do this is to promote the strengths—not the weaknesses—of our opponents in contrast with our different strengths. This doesn’t draw us into dangerous conflict. Instead, it gives the devil his due, so to speak. And, ideally, forces him to recognize us.
<Make> <become> <banner> <flags>
You must use banners and flags.”
How do we get people to recognize the things that we want them to learn about us? We put labels on them. We use known visual symbols when we can. We identify the things that we want seen with the other things that are known. For example, to identify something with patriotism, we put a national flag on it. We live in a world full of symbols of all different kinds. Once symbols are known, they become a generic symbol for a category of things. Some are very specific, like product logos, but many are generic and available for our use. I don’t recommend emojis, like those above, but the popularity of such images are providing a new visual language that we can use to claim a position.