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The Role of
Empathy
Creativity from Knowledge
Rearranging Elements
Innovative
Openings
Rearranging Elements
 Given the perspective of sympathy and knowledge of how systems work,
using classical strategy's system of innovation, you simply change parts
of the system and see what happens. The most common elements that you
experiment with are not the physical parts of a machine, but the steps in a
process. You experiment by rearranging the steps or changing them slightly
to see what happens.
Though Sun Tzu's approach is simple and has been around for 2,500
years, it is surprising how seldom people try it. Everyone hears the story
of Thomas Edison's experiments when inventing the light bulb. All he did was
try different filaments, and eventually he got it to work. Despite this
simple example, how many people are comfortable doing this? Very few.
The defining aspect of being human is our ability to create. We could
all be experimenting every day to create our own innovations. We can all
rearrange what we do to try the steps in a different order. We can make
small changes in procedures to see what happens. If we did so in
an intelligent manner, we could improve every aspect of our lives.
If innovation is as easy as that—and it is—the big question is: why
don't people experiment more?
The answer is that people are afraid of making mistakes. Part of this
is training. While meaningless forms of creativity are encouraged in
school as "self-expression," the real creativity of trial and error
in changing working systems is neither taught nor encouraged. When it
comes to areas of hard information and solid knowledge, people are
consistently punished for their mistakes. They are never taught the joy of
using wrong answers to find the path to the right answer. The result is
that people never learn how to experiment except when they play video
games. This is why video games are so popular and school is not.
Sun Tzu's classical strategy offers a number of other rules for experimentation,
but the need to try slightly different approaches to see what happens is
at the heart of the entire system. Specific elements of both opportunity development and situation response are built on
it. Learning these two systems provides both a method and a guidebook for
strategic innovation. You never know where the resulting innovation will take
you.
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