Stratagem #2: Foreknowledge (Sun Tzu Series)

This is second post in my Sun Tzu Stratagems series.

Stratagem #2: Foreknowledge

In the last post, I talked about shaping the opponent and acting according to the enemy. One of the core components of this principle is foreknowledge – foresight and intelligence that helps us to better orient to the situation, environment and the opponent.

Sun Tzu talks about the necessity of foreknowledge.

A major military operation is a severe drain on the nation, and may be kept up for years in the struggle for one day’s victory. So to fail to know the conditions of opponents because of reluctance to give rewards for intelligence is extremely inhumane, uncharacteristic of a true military leader, uncharacteristic of an assistant of the government, uncharacteristic of a victorious chief. So what enables an intelligent government and a wise military leadership to overcome others and achieve extraordinary accomplishments is foreknowledge. – Sun Tzu^[1]

To Sun Tzu, not knowing the opponent’s goals, objectives, plans and position of forces as well as the character of command, is inexcusable and a way to failure and defeat.

Frans P.B. Osinga notes in his book that foreknowledge is essential for the grand strategic level, but it permeates the whole body of thought.^[2] Foreknowledge means something different at each level of war and battle. Each level has different issues to address and in the different levels of detail. For example, on grand strategic level it’s obviously important to know what is the agenda of the opposing nation or band of nations; on military strategic level it’s perhaps the drivers of the policies put forward by one’s opponent; on battle strategy level it might be what forces each party has in the theater; on tactical level it might mean the number of enemy units of particular type, their mobility and how long they can hold a position.

One must be active gatherer of intelligence and not resort to assumptions, calculations and other means of interpreting the enemy and not obtaining the facts.

Foreknowledge cannot be gotten from ghosts and spirits, cannot be had by analogy, cannot be found out by calculation. It must be obtained from people, people who know the conditions of the enemy. — Sun Tzu^[3]

As Chet Richards noted in his study A Swift, Elusive Sword, Sun Tzu’s commanders are not passive “consumers” of intelligence^[4], but actively and by all means seek out the very pieces of intelligence that will give them the upper hand and a decisive advantage against the enemy.

Therefore, no one in the armed forces is treated as familiarly as are spies, no one is given rewards as rich as those given to spies, and no matter is more secret than espionage. — Sun Tzu^[5]

This implies that the commander and leader must be very close to the sources obtaining foreknowledge in order to get the truth, unfiltered, and to be able to interpret the weak signals.

But before even one gets to war-time intelligence gathering phase and using spies, an important pieces of foreknowledge must be obtained and that must happen before deciding whether to start clashing sabres at all. In grand strategy level, because the survival or destruction of a country and the life or death of its people may depend on military action, it is necessary to examine it carefully. Sun Tzu encouraged to measure and assess oneself with five things:

Therefore measure in terms of five things, use these assessments to make comparisons, and thus find out what the conditions are. The five things are the way, the weather, the terrain, the leadership, and discipline. — Sun Tzu^[6]

The way is the ability to find a common goal, purpose, einheit, so that leaders and the people will share the same fate (life or death) together. The weather means the seasons, knowing when to fight. Don’t go into another’s territory at an unfavorable time.^[7] The terrain is obviously the battleground environment, the lay of the land. If your forces consist only of tanks, don’t go fighting in mountain range. The leadership is a matter of intelligence, trustworthness, humaneness, courage and sternness.^[8] And discipline means organization, chain of command and logistics.^[9]

Once this groundwork has been done, then you can determine who is superior, who is likely to prevail and should you mobilize your forces after all.

Business foreknowledge

Let’s examine foreknowledge and Sun Tzu in business context. Why foreknowledge is very important in, let’s say, product development or customer development?

Obviously, one should not run a business by blindly developing an offering and trying to market and sell it to the world. Yet this is what most of the companies seem to do. Jussi Laakkonen, founder of Everyplay, wrote a great piece on customer development. He said that according to Steve Blank, a lecturer at Stanford and a serial entrepreneur, 9 out of 10 startups fail from the lack of customers. Put more simply, nobody wanted to buy what they were making. They failed because they didn’t obtain necessary foreknowledge. They didn’t get out of the office to talk to their prospects and customers, to study them, to survey the market, to study their competitors and find out where and how the company could offer greater value than anybody else. Instead they resorted to phony assumptions, calculations and suppositions about the customers, the size of the market, etc. To paraphrase Sun Tzu,

Foreknowledge cannot be gotten from assumptions and suppositions, cannot be found out by calculation, cannot be gotten from outside analysts. It must be obtained from people, people who know the conditions of the customer, the conditions of the competitor, the conditions of the market.

Of course one can make educated guesses about all of these things, but those guesses shouldn’t ever be treated as facts, a business shouldn’t ever rely solely on them, and the guesses should be validated by the obtained foreknowledge and business intelligence.

Now that we have probably established the need for obtaining foreknowledge and business intelligence, how do we go about obtaining it? Here are few means of gathering foreknowledge:

• Talk to your prospects and customers
  This is a no-brainer. If these folks dislike and don’t buy your offerings, it’s irrelevant what the competition, the market, all the rest of it do or look like. Work together with these people as they possess the key knowledge for competitive advantage. Look for value gaps or needs that haven’t been either discovered or addressed yet and value innovate like crazy.
• Study your competitors
  Research their marketing and sales efforts, material and methods. Buy their products and services to find out how their order management cycle, production and delivery processes, and customer service works and operates, and where they fall short of excellence.
• Observe your own processes and behaviour
  At least observe your company’s order management cycle to find out how customers will experience buying from you or try to think through the processes that customers see, experience and interact with. Does your company have the way of doing business and serving customers that all stakeholders buy into? Are you disciplined enough to prevail?
• Observe the market and the world
  Get up to speed with the megatrends happening in the world and trends happening in your markets. Know the terrain you’ll be competing on and what is the economic weather like.
• Look outside your market and industry
  Observe successful businesses outside your market or field. Try to get another point of view on a particular business subject, to broaden your view of the ways of doing business. You might gain an unfair competitive advantage from bringing in existing elsewhere well-known practices to your industry or market.
• Challenge all assumptions
  If everybody have done something some way for fifty years, it’s still not necessarily the best way of doing business. Look everything with critical eye.

If you use these means and more to know everything that there is to know about your business, customers, competitors and the market, you’ll be leaps and bounds ahead of most of the companies in the market. Now that the world economies seem to enter a downturn, competing for all business becomes more fierce and important, and all means of getting the upper hand on your competition are very valuable. Don’t waste your time on ever improving your offerings with features that the customers might not find valuable but get out there and boost up your foreknowledge.

Tomorrow we’ll look into Cohesion.

If you happen to read these through and find them at least a bit valuable, please let me know what you think of this material and how I could improve these posts. Am I rambling for too long, am I not explaining myself clearly, any comment would be very helpful.

References

1. Sun Tzu, The Art of War, p. 219
2. Frans P.B. Osinga, Science, Strategy and War: The Strategic Theory of John Boyd , p. 39
3. Sun Tzu, p. 219
4. Chet Richards, A Swift, Elusive Sword: What if Sun Tzu and John Boyd Did a National Defense Review?, p. 19
5. Sun Tzu, p. 220
6. Ibid., p. 60
7. Ibid., p. 63
8. Ibid., p. 63
9. Ibid., p. 64

Tags: John Boyd, Stratagems, Strategy, Sun Tzu