In his recent piece in the New Yorker, How David Beats Goliath: How Underdogs Break the Rules, astronomically best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell, whose books The Tipping Point and Blink provided fine examples for The Rules of Victory, uses the example of a grade-school girls’ basketball team strategy to demonstrate how stepping outside the boundaries of accepted approaches can upset the power balance and lead to victory.

In this case, a team of geeky girls with lots of heart but almost no basketball ability were trained to harass their opponents in a relentless full-court press. They became champions. Why, Gladwell asks, doesn’t the full-court press become the norm?

In this case, we find that our hero has not gone far enough in his investigation. For one thing, he is delving into the vast world of asymmetric warfare but doesn’t even mention the idea or any of the discussion or literature around it, which might have caused him to stumble onto the Sun Tzu, which many regard as the guidebook for asymmetric conflicts.

Also, he might have run into the Sun Tzu idea of the orthodox and the extraordinary. The Sun Tzu counsels using the orthodox (the accepted, the inside the box, coloring within the lines) to engage, and the extraordinary (breaking the rules) to attain victory. But critically, the Sun Tzu points out, the extraordinary is never permanently extraordinary.

In other words, if everyone uses the full court press, it will become the norm and the skills will be developed to counteract it, or the rules of the game will be changed to prevent it from becoming a boring contest dominated by defense (cf. hockey’s now-outlawed neutral zone trap or the spitball in baseball or the freeze in basketball, which the 24-second clock eliminated).

The methods of earlier underdogs may not be successfully repeated in the original form. Adversaries will have adapted. The rulemakers will have changed the dimensions of the box one was thinking outside of. The extraordinary has to be discovered anew, otherwise everyone would be doing it. 

Barry Boyce

Leonard Mlodinow, author of The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules our Lives, was interviewed on CBC Radio’s The Current on May 13 (To listen, go here, scroll down to Part 3 and click the play button on the audio icon. To download a podcast, go here and scroll down to Drunkard’s Walk.) The New York Times published a helpful review when the book came out last June.

Mlodinow’s specialty is probability and statistics and he presents one of the strongest versions of the view that the world is vastly unpredictable, which renders many of our efforts at planning and strategy foolish. Interestingly, as so often is the case, he doesn’t really go far enough.

Leaving aside the complex debate about whether there is any such thing as true randomness rather than simply a mass of interconnected causes and conditions too vast to be encompassed (and perhaps that’s a distinction without a difference in the end), what Mlodinow doesn’t account for is something like shih.

He doesn’t delve into how deep our ability to perceive patterns at a subtle level may be. He doesn’t give much quarter to the power of contemplative mind, to intuition. We are presented essentially as victims. Yet others, such as Norman Schwarzkopf, when faced with vast complexity, uncertainty, and unpredictability (randomness if you like) have concluded that character, your way of being, the basic momentum and direction you have developed to date is what you can rely on. Through the deep knowing and cultivation of our basic being that is encouraged by the Sun Tzu, we can turn the tables on randomness and interconnectedness. It’s the basic ground rather than the enemy.

Barry Boyce

This morning on the Canada Broadcasting Corporation there was a segment of the show called The Current featuring an interrogator who claims that friendly techniques that work with the basic patterns of the person are much more effective than torture and other kinds of coercive techniques.

He goes by the pseudonym Matthew Alexander. His team was responsible for the information that led the US to finding Abu Musab al Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq. He’s just come out with  How to Break a Terrorist: The U.S. Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not Brutality, to Take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq.   

Time offers a very good synopsis of the book. There’s also a piece on Axcess News that includes comments from Alexander about the ineffectiveness of torture.

It’s uncanny how his description in the interview of his techniques accord with the overall approach of the Sun Tzu. Rather than trying to break the interviewee down (going against), he tries to discern the interviewee’s basic nature and let that take him where it will lead. Essentially, he works more with the shih than with the person. In particular, some lines from the Sun Tzu that come to mind in this regard:

 Now the form of the military is like water.

Water in its movement avoids the high and hastens to the low.

The military in its victory avoids the solid and strikes the empty.

Thus water determines its movement in accordance with the earth.

The military determines victory in accordance with the enemy.

The military is without fixed shih and without lasting form.

 To be able to transform with the enemy is what is meant by “spiritlike.”

From Chapter 6

To listen to the interview, go to The Current. At the bottom of the description of Part 2, there is an icon you can press to listen. The podcaset will probably be available soon.

Barry Boyce