- Invisible Purpose and the Uses of Misdirection
- Safe-to-Fail Probes
- Weak Links (Social Media)
- Weak Links: The Universal Key to Stability
- Uncertainty and the Media
These are not procedures or any form of “7 steps to success”. They are guiding notions that can open up possibilities for the situation that you and your personal network face.
What to do when you can’t reduce the uncertainty effectively:
- The Indirect Approach: Liddell Hart was the person who developed the idea of the “Indirect Approach” in the West, through the use of the idea has always been reflected in effective strategies. Sun Tzu is the best-known example of Eastern Thought on the same issue, and Hart read Sun Tzu as he developed his own framework. The idea is that as you implement your plan, you hide the actual target of that plan. Geographically, you might choose an approach path that is between a number of potentially useful targets, moving toward your choice only at the last minute. Conceptually, you might advocate for small pieces of your advocacy strategy, without revealing how you would use a victory in the small pieces. The purpose of using this approach is to force your opponent to commit scarce resources to the defense of targets that won’t actually turn out to be targets, and to increase uncertainty in your opponent’s planning.
- Avoid Irreversible Commitments: In the Cynefin model, this is called “fail-safe experiments”. You try out ideas on a small scale to learn more about how they work in the current reality. Then, you ask yourself what you can do to make the successful ones more common.
- Build Reserves: Reserves are a kind of redundancy that you build to make it easier for you to turn on a dime when your view of the future turns out to be inaccurate. Reserves are not just cash. They include trust, cross-skills training, mutual support, and a host of other things described in various posts. Reserves mean a bunch of different resources that partially overlap. It doesn’t mean a big pile of the same stuff.
- Weak and Strong Links in Your Network: In network theory, it is useful to distinguish between strong and weak links in a network when thinking about change. The Strong Links are the ones that drive whatever it is that the network is doing. The Weak Links buffer the volatility and unpredictability of the interactions between those strong links so that they don’t cause the network to run away uncontrollably. People who are deeply focused on their own personal power think that weak links are preventing them from increasing their personal power (however they define that) and seek to eliminate them. Interestingly, the two communities that deliberately and successfully eliminate weak links, thus exposing themselves to volatility, are homeless and destitute people, and the 1%.
