Water — The Amazing Dynamism of Effective Strategy
Embrace the Most Agile Life Strategy
In an era of uncertainty and turbulent change, the best strategic response is flexibility and agility. Today’s VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity) environment, caused by the uncertain impact from known unknown variables regularly, upsets existing competitive relationships to produce the stormy turbulence that defies conventional and legacy solutions.
The Jeet Kune Do (JKD) Martial Art Master, Bruce Lee, advised, “You must be shapeless, formless, like water. When you pour water in a cup, it becomes the cup. When you pour water in a bottle, it becomes the bottle. When you pour water in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Water can drip and it can crash. Become like water, my friend.”
When you embrace the situational environment and its circumstances, you stop resisting, adapting to their flow so as to be empowered to “weaponise” their terrain vectors in favour of your strategic goals. Using the flexibility and agility of water as the teacher, one becomes “invincible”.
Blue Leaders readily embrace VUCA challenges in the search for alternative sustainable solutions. The first step in agile decision-making is by continuously scanning and capturing sufficient but adequate relevant material variables in their Terrain of Opportunity for processing, configuring, and developing feasible viable scenarios. “Be shapeless and formless, like water”, said Master Bruce Lee.
Water can be “weaponized” into countless forms of Formless Strategy, but remains basically itself (千方百计不离其宗). This quality characterizes the agility and flexibility traits in Blue leaders in their execution of Blue Strategy.
Self-mastery in The Dao (道) of Blue Leadership develops a profound sense of Formless-ness in Blue Leaders. Blue Leaders do not mistake motion for action, nor substitute resources for creativity. They derive no lasting contentment with current performance since change continually re-opens and widens the gaps between expectations and performance. Change produces wide fluctuations and unacceptable dissonance in the expectation-performance gap like a runaway yin-yang pendulum where no action would surrender to the chaos of oblivion whilst conventional action would definitely accentuate the gap.
The Dao (道) in Blue Leaders directs watery Formless-ness into their Blue Strategy. The Blue Strategy playbook is different from the prescribed strategies in the literature. Blue strategies are at once and forever formless, like water over terrains.
To paraphrase Sun Tzu, the Master Strategist in “The Art of War”: “Just as water retains no constant shape, so Blue Strategy also has no constant forms or conditions”.
Blue Strategy does not target change itself but the configuration and dynamism of capricious environmental Vector characteristics in the Terrain of Opportunity. They reflect and locate the genesis of change to certain Vectors in the terrain of opportunity. The only and most appropriate decisive response to opportunistic turbulent change is to reinvent Blue Leadership continually so as to reimagine, reconfigure, recalibrate and reframe its strategic moves without adherence or conformance to any particular management ideology, known models, and successful legacy solutions.
The synthesis of timeless and formless in The Dao (道) unleashes creative consequences and possibilities from the trending captured as they are happening in the terrain of opportunity. Reflective and reflexive learning emboldens, excites, and accelerates the creative energy flow in Blue Leaders to generate the necessary innovative, unusual, unfamiliar and uncommon intelligent change management response.
Agility in Dynamic Formless Strategy
The above 9-Actions Pathway provides the sensemaking frame for Blue Strategy. It materialises The Dao (道) or Tao [or Way] of Blue Leadership for the planning, formulation, execution, and evaluation of Strategy. When fully installed and implemented, the Pathway has the essential 9 DNA building blocks of a living Blue Organisation led by Blue Leadership at all levels to assure sustainability for the existential survival of lasting organisations.
The playbook of Blue Strategy compiles and encapsulates the dynamism of Action Trigons. The dynamism of Action Trigons spawns numerous material combinations in the patterns of Blue Strategy. The first strategic pattern is a single Blue Strategy consisting of 9 strategic Blue Action moves of the Pathway consistent and aligned with one another. There are therefore 81 (9x9) possible strategic positions at the outset of Blue Strategy as choice options for the first strategic move.
Mathematically, there are actually 136,048,896 possible strategic pattern combinations of Blue Strategy for the first consideration before any specific formulation. When factored in the 6 specific Vectors in any Terrain of Opportunity, Blue Leaders would have 4,897,760,256 material strategic combinations available in his initial 1st step strategic choice matrix.
Once he begins to execute his strategy, responses from other actors and players in the same Terrain of Opportunity can be expected to be immediate and swift. And the actions by Blue Leaders in response to these countermoves to their initial Blue Strategic move would generate a choice of any combination(s) from (2.39x10 to the 19th power) possible strategic patterns! This is just at the initial 2nd response stage of the strategy cycle.
Such awesome transmutation of Blue Strategy represents the absolute formless-ness of Blue Leadership. The possibilities of strategic moves and the variations of the respective strategic pattern are however finite and knowable, and, hence, can be learnt.
The simplicity and elegance of Blue Strategy lie in its basic structure grounded in the 9-Actions Pathway centred at the Hub of Strategic Purpose (千方百计不离其宗) as seen above. The Passions of Blue Leaders facilitate insightful visions and The Dao’s disciplined mindfulness of Timelessness, Formlessness, and Intelligent guarantees the instinctive execution of Blue Strategy to great effect for truly outstanding and exceptional impact.
Look at the game of Chess as an imperfect comparison. In Chess, only one piece is moved at any time. In Blue Leadership, each strategic move consists of at least one move by each Action within the 4 respective Action Trigons. In practice, many initiatives or moves actually take place in each of the 9 Actions.
In a Chess game, the number of possible chess positions for the first White move is 20 (16 pawn moves and 4 knight moves). There are 400 possible chess positions or board patterns after the pair of first White move and the first Black move in response. And after the 2nd Black move, there are 197,742 possible games or board patterns, and after three pairs of moves, 121 million. Some have estimated the possible number of Chess game patterns to be around 10,100,000. Of these, 10,120 Chess games are believed to be “typical”, with each game lasting about 40 moves with an average of 30 choice options per move.
When compared with Chess, Blue Strategy is indeed more complex and complicated. Blue Leaders can therefore play Chess as a form of mental practice for formless Strategy even though the Chessboard is clearly not an authentic depiction of an actual Terrain of Opportunity.
RELATED ARTICLES –
Unpacking the Passions of Blue Leaders
Everyone can be a Leader for This Era of Uncertainty and Change
Be an Action Leader for these Turbulent Times (Part 1)
Using Action Trigons for More Effective Leadership (Part 2 of 2)
Spotting Opportunities in a Changing World
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