The Changes of Climate
The passage of time changes people's perception of positions
We experience the world as a series of events. Events change situations. These changes continually reshape the mental models we construct about people’s positions. Events come at us from many different directions. The strategic challenge is seeing these events in useful context rather than as a random series of happenings. We call this changing aspect of a position “climate” instead of simply “change” because many of these changes can be foreseen, if seldom perfectly. These changes can be either physical, like the erosion or building up of land, or they can be psychological like the erosion or building up of faith.
The changes of climate can erode strategic positions over time. Remember, a strategic position is a mental model. Every bright, shiny new idea grows tarnished and stained over time. How people used to see you is not how they see you today. Your own actions and events in the large environment change their perceptions. Today's media makes this problem worse since it makes its living by constantly bringing us new events. Most of which are irrelevant to our own strategic position. Our challenge is putting all those events into a coherent strategic picture of the positions of others and our own position in their minds.
Only the changes of climate create opportunities to advance strategic positions. Without change, all positions are frozen in time. One way to describe a practical strategy is as one that adapts quickly to changes. Change must be seen as a resource because only change creates the openings and opportunities to advance, grow, and improve the positions that we hold in other people’s minds.
Adapting to cange is easier if we can foresee change. Some foreseeable events arise from people’s decisions. The direction of those decisions is driven by their individual missions. Practical strategy attempts to choose actions where we can predict the reaction of others. Other foreseeable events are those that arise from predictable cycles. It is perfectly predictable, for example, that everything that survives will be a year older a year from now.
In societies that suppress change, people live and die in the same state and, for most of them, that state is abject poverty. The more dynamic external conditions, the more opportunities we have. The richest nations throughout history have been the fastest changing, that is, those at the center of events. The fact that most people fear change creates even more opportunities for those who are willing to embrace it.
Adapting to Change
To adapt to change, we must see it, embrace it, and predict it. We must harness the energy of change to utilize opportunities to improve our position.
All external conditions that shift, evolve, and reverse themselves over time.
In the simplest terms, climate describes what changes in our environment in contrast to the ground, which describes what is relatively stable. Of course, everything changes, especially strategic positions, which change even if we do nothing. People judge us by our decisions and actions. Doing nothing is both.
The primary resource of climate is time.
We can only make decisions in the now, but those decisions factor in what has come before and what we expect in the future. Unlike all other resources, we each get the exact same amount of time every day. The only difference is what we do with it. Some of us kill time. Others of us are killed by time. Time is a resource we can use to improve our strategic position, but it also naturally erodes all position as they age.
Physical changes in climate affect our capacities.
The physical manifestation of time is movement. As time passes, movement changes the relationships of our physical proximity. This physical change affects our capability for various activities and our access to physical resources. Like the movement of pieces on a chessboard, the movement of people and objects from place to place over time affects what activities are possible.
Psychological changes in climate affect our attitudes which determines our activities.
Change affects us emotionally, changing our attitudes. To categorize events, we separate conscious choices from natural phenomena. The choices in competition cannot be separated from emotion. Emotion is the trigger for action. The stronger the emotion, the more likely action is. The ability to get people to act is determined by the emotional climate.
All trends in change reverse automatically when they reach an extreme.
No trend keeps going up or down forever. Only learning and knowledge accumulate predictably and over time, but even learning can be lost as change outdates one set of skills and replaces it with another. In predictable cycles, we can often recognize when an extreme is reached based on history. People mistakenly predict straight-line trends, but all such trends must eventually end.
Foreseeable cyclic trends are invaluable for decision making.
They occur at regular intervals. These cyclic trends are driven by the balancing forces of complementary opposites. All such cycles eventually reverse themselves automatically because the underlying forces driving them balance each other. According to Sun Tzu's analysis, without these underlying balancing forces, all nature would dissolve into chaos. Only some cycles repeat themselves at regular intervals. Trends that depend on physical phenomena are more predictable than those that depend on choices, but people are rational. When they put increased effort into something with a decreasing return, they can choose to stop.
All positions age and are eventually destroyed as new positions are created.
All existing position are rooted in the past, but they are paths, growing and advancing or shrinking and retreating. Many such paths must be eventually abandoned. This is the cycle of birth and death. Everything that grows stronger eventually grows old and dies, including strategic positions.
Every competitive arena is associated with its own climate.
In the competitive environment, climate cannot be separated from ground any more than time can be separated from space. However, we can talk about the characteristics and aspects of climate as distinct from those of the ground, just as we can discuss aspects of the dimension of time as distinct from the dimensions of space.
Good timing depends upon understanding the trends of climate.
Timing is knowing when to make a move and when to stay put. Many strategic moves are time sensitive. Situations are fluid. When a situation clearly demands a specific response, we must do so instantly, before the situation changes. It is also the knowledge of how to create and use strategic momentum.