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Strategic Innovation

Strategic Innovation

Though the methods of strategic innovation use in classical strategy are not complex enough to be considered a separate branch of the science, they are used by all its other schools.

While many elements are important in human competition, Sun Tzu recognizes only one real force: the force of imagination. Our creativity alone separates our endeavors and accomplishments from those of animals.  Military commanders and business leaders can mistakenly think that success goes to the largest and strongest force. History has proven time and again that this is not the case. Sun Tzu explains why.

You must use surprise for a successful invasion.
Surprise is as infinite as the weather and land.
Surprise is as inexhaustible as the flow of a river.
The Art of War, 5.2:4-6

Human ingenuity by itself is never sufficient for success. Everyone has a million-dollar idea, but those ideas never make a dime. Classical strategy defines the difference between an innovation that makes a difference and a great idea that goes nowhere. 

Sympathy as the Source of Strategy

The creative task of strategy starts with imagining how other's think and feel. We can never know how others think and feel. We can only imagine how we would feel in their position. This, of course, requires seeing thing from their position and not just our own. Nothing can be done unless we first make this leap into the unknown.

People think that competitive strategy is insensitive to the needs of others. The opposite is true. All effective strategy is based on sympathy. A strategist must  imagine the hopes, dreams, desires, and fears of others. A chess player only has to foresee an opponent's moves. A strategist has to leverage the desires of others to create a subjective position that will win friends, supporters, and allies and frighten all potential opponents.

Sympathy starts with selfishness. Someone knew what He was saying when He said, "Love your neighbor as yourself." We can imagine the needs of others because we are aware of our own needs. The gift of sympathy is a purely human attribute. It doesn't come from our senses. It comes from our self-awareness. Most animals have keener senses than we do, but their strategies are limited to flight or fight. They cannot imagine the range and variety of selfish desires that we human have. It is imagining this range and variety of desires that allows us to accomplish our goals.

Criminals also lack the imagination of sympathy. They see what others have and simply want to take it. This leads to conflict and the unavoidable costs of conflict. As Sun Tzu taught, these costs are too great. Success has never and will never come from conflict. Negotiations never work with criminals or tyrants because they don't cannot imagine any possibilities beyond the zero-sum game.

Competitive sympathy is work. Competitive ingenuity isn't a flight of fancy. The human fears and desires within a single human heart are so complex that few of us can be said to truly know ourselves what we want. These unknowns grow logarithmically when they are multiplied times the population of the world. This is why it is best sticking to our own little corner of it.

The greatest power on earth comes from imagining what others want and presenting it to them clearly.

Creativity from Knowledge

Sun Tzu details the elements needed to transform the creativity that most people waste on flights of fancy into strategic force. While it takes time and training to master all those elements, his first lesson is a critical one. To work, an innovation cannot be used alone. It must be part of a larger system.

Too much of what people think of as creativity simply comes from ignorance. Mostly we imagine that other people are much simpler, both in the sense of a lack of complexity and a lack of brains, than they really are. People are, on the average, exactly as smart as we are. Every complex problem has a simple solution. Unfortunately, for many reasons that we cannot guess, that solution will not work.

Let us give a general example of why simple solutions do not work. Everyone knows that there is a better, more efficient design for a keyboard. The QWERTY design spread out frequently used letters to that users wouldn't jam the original mechanical typewriters. Coming up with a more efficient design is easy. Implementing that design into a world where everyone knows QWERTY and every device uses it is impossible. The QWERTY design is embedded in a larger system that is impossible to change.

Sun Tzu taught that creativity could only come from knowledge of the complete system and could only be implemented as small, painless changes to that system. We must first know how things and done in a given area and why they are done that way. This is why organizations are advised in the various books on excellence to "stick to their knitting." You must know something well because you can make useful innovations to it.

Even then, before we can offer any useful innovation, we must identify what can be easily changed. And a lot of what can be easily changed depends on people's expectations. This brings us back to our first point about sympathy. We must know how these changes fit into people's thinking. If you think people are going to move to a non-QWERTY keyboard simply because they will type faster, you need to learn more about people.

A great, small, simple innovation to an existing system can conquer the world and has many times.

The earliest example I know was Phillip of Macedonia's change to the length of the spear in the Greek phalanx. The phalanx was a successful defensive formation used by the Greeks for hundreds of years. However, Phillip was able to conquer all of Greece by making the simple change of lengthening the spear. Phillip son, Alexander, coupled this more agreessive form of infantry with the use of the horse cavalry to conquer the known world. We know him, of course, as Alexander the Great because of that.

The Lessons of Strategy Focus Imagination

In translation, the Chinese character that Sun Tzu used to descried human creativity and imagination is usually translated into "surprise." The problem with that term is that it focuses too much attention on the emotional result of innovation as opposed to the process of creating innovation.

While the emotional reaction to innovation is certainly an important and necessary element to strategy, Sun Tzu was mostly concerned with how innovation works. The value of catching people unaware and exciting them through innovation is immense, but the surprise must work. The innovation must produce better results than the part of the system it replaces.

This brings us a little into the secrets of Sun Tzu's writing. Notice in the stanza with which we began this article, Sun Tzu said, "Surprise is as infinite as the weather and the land." What made Sun Tzu think that the land was infinite? Did he know so little of geography?

Just the opposite. He realized that innovation actually creates what he calls "the ground," that is, our source of resources. Innovation both creates an captures new ground. Since innovation is infinite, so is the ground that it can capture. This is the "invasion" that he is talking about in this stanza, a movement to new ground.

You are proving Sun Tzu's ideas right now. You are reading this on the Internet. This is exactly the type of new ground that Sun Tzu knew that the infinite human imagination could create. Individuals, making little improvements in areas that they new, have opened up an huge new territory all of humanity can explore.

And exactly why you need to learn more about Sun Tzu's powerful strategic force of innovation.

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