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

Welcome to Victory Chatter, the blog for the Rules of Victory: How to Transform Chaos and Conflict—Strategies from the Art of War, which is an extended commentary that builds on the Denma translation of The Art of War.

This blog gives us an opportunity to continue the conversations and observations that formed our book. As we see Sun Tzu principles reflected in all manner of ways in many different arenas, we’ll point to them and chat about them—with each other and with you. Just as happened with the book, we find that examples abound in our interconnected world and we stumble on them every other day. Our first entry is one such example.

The students in Barry’s communications class in the Bachelor of Informatics program at Dalhousie University are making presentations about books they read this term. Tian Yu Zhao, who recently moved here from China, was giving a presentation about The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell. He began with the following quotation:

              One leads to two

              Two leads to three

              Three leads to many more.

and explained that it was a Taoist statement well-known to the average Chinese person.

It struck us immediately as having the same combination of almost brutal simplicity and profundity that we have found in the Sun Tzu, The Art of War.  It also quickly reminded Barry of something he had read in The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization by Thomas Homer-Dixon and posted on his bulletin board as if it were a poem:

 Small changes

add up

over time

The cadence and meaning of those short phrases recalled for us some key images that recur in the Art of War: rocks rolling downhill and water flowing from high to low. Rather than trying to command the world and control the world, we can make use of these simple, self-existing forces. We’ll encounter them in classrooms, in book rooms, on the street, and in the field.

That’s what we’re going to do in this blog, in our individual voices, jointly, back and forth, with you and among you. We’re going to chat about chaos, conflict, taking whole, interconnectedness, forming, transforming, the extraordinary, the orthodox, and the strange—the many themes that pervade the Sun Tzu and emerge from a profound yet simple understanding of the workings of everyday life big and small. That means life in our homes, offices, communities, organizations, nations, and the world as a whole.

When we bump up against something that resonates with the common worldly wisdom expressed so beautifully in the Art of War, we’re going to point it out and talk it up and talk about it with anyone who wants to join in. It’ll be nice to have this little chat with everyone.

James Gimian and Barry Boyce