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Position Awareness
Opportunity Development
Situation Response
Situation Response
 Situational
response teaches you the most successful reactions to
specific situations. It gives you the confidence to use these reflexes
without a moments hesitation. This is the most detailed and advanced component of the
science of strategy. It is the highest level of your strategic reflexes
and the most powerful.
The faster you make the right decisions, the more successful you are
going to be. In a wide range of situations, the longer it takes you to
identify the correct move, the more likely it will be that that move
fails. In responding to situations, you want the right decision to leap
instantly into mind.
Even the decision not to act must be a choice rather than the
result of indecision. Once you master situational response, you can
instantly see when all available actions are either too expensive or too
risky.
Making quick decisions is critical because fast, short moves are always
more powerful than long, large moves. Smaller, faster groups also
make more progress than larger, slower groups. You create strategic
leverage by putting a small amount of the right resources in exactly the
right position at the exact right time to create the maximum advantage.
Since window of opportunity often open for just a moment, you must see
them instantly.
You are aware of about 30,000 events every day. This is approximately
one every second of your waking life. An event can be anything: a
word, a look, even something that is not said. For most people, these
events have little meaning, but for those trained in Sun Tzu's strategic
cognition, each event automatically adds to your situation awareness. When
an event triggers your recognition of an opportunity, your reflexes are
primed for instant recognition.
You must adapt your responses to the specific events shaping of your situation. All situations consist of a number of specific conditions
that are well-defined within classical strategy. Situational strategy
teaches you how to see every event as a brush stroke painting the outline
of the situation. As its various characteristics become clearer, you can
instantly know the specific responses necessary demanded by each specific
condition. Without trained strategic reflexes, most people never see the
plot much less know how to respond to it. Once you master Sun Tzu's
system, your responses are finely tuned to the mixture of elements in the
situation because you
An important aspect of situation response is the ability to avoid
conflict. Since all conflict is always costly, you need to see the
mistakes that lead up to conflict and avoid them. You develop the reflex
of looking for ways to make victory pay. Your success is much more certain when conflict is avoided.
If you set up
situations so that the elements are all in your favor, you discourage
people from attacking you and make it much more likely that they will join
you.
Since perceptions create reality and reality creates perceptions, the
least costly way to overcome resistance is by doing what is unexpected but appropriate at a critical time. At a critical turning
point, expectations must be leveraged by an innovative approach. An
appropriate surprise alone can overcome specific obstacles. Though
innovation cannot be predicted,
classical strategy has its own approach to innovation that starts by
mixing the actions required by situation response.
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