(Personal Note: My recent health scare from a series of little strokes appears mostly behind me. I want to thank you all for your prayers. Gary)
This article examines the third stanza in the third section of chapter three of The Art of War. The topic is still focus. It answers the questions: what do we focus on in a given situation? Focus must be implemented in some form of action. The purpose here is not to show all possible actions in different situations, but rather to illustrate how simple choosing the right actions can be. We need a criteria for deciding how we focus our resources in different situation. Here, the criteria is the relative size of the opposition that we face.
Focus means amassing our resources in a certain time and place. We usually do this to explore a new opportunity. We do not know what we are going to find in a new area. A new opportunity means unexplored territory, at least, from our point of view. We gather our resources so that we have the most options to respond to the situations that we discover. Most situations are easier to deal with if we have more resources than we need when we face opposition.
Our lives are constant kaleidoscopes of different situations that require different responses. Our situations are the most uncertain when we move into new territory: start a new relationship, start a new job, have a baby and so on. In each new beginning, we discover challenges that we expected, but also unexpected surprises. Most of Sun Tzu’s strategic guide is training so we can pick the right response, that is, focus on the key conditions that determine the appropriate response.
As an example of this, this stanza has us focus on the relative size of the opposing forces when we meet opposition. We don’t only meet opposition when exploring a new territory, but that is the time when we get the widest variety of surprises. A new opportunity is called an “opening,” because the ideal situation is that we are moving into a completely empty position that we can occupy. In that case, there are no opposing forces so we can use our resources solely to explore the territory and build up our new positions and test them for their ability to produce rewards.
However, conditions in a competitive world are seldom ideal. We can a wide variety of opposition during a move into a new area. Because the territory is unexplored, we can discover a wide variety of unexpected situations. The question is: How do we appropriately focus our resources to respond the the situation that we find?
The Rules
What do we do when the position into which there is opposition? We decide based upon the relative balance of forces at that time and place. Sun Tzu makes a simple list of the rules and tells us that:
The rules for making war are:
The Art of War 3:3:12
The Chinese is more specific, saying these rules are for choosing the right methods. The phrase is uses is “competitive methods,” which in Chinese is bing fa. This is the Chinese title of the book that we call The Art of War.
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