“According as circumstances are favorable, one should modify one’s plans.”
- The Art of War, Written by Sun Tzu,
Translated from Chinese by Lionel Giles (1910)
How quickly have you felt all your hours of preparation slip through your fingers? How many more hours did you linger upon the loss?
Sun Tzu has given you the Five Constant Factors with which to assess yourself and assess your enemy. If you use these tools, you can be confident that your plans will be sound. But though his tools may help you in your planning process, Sun Tzu would not have you cling to those plans if they prove inadequate or out of date. Plans ought to be made with the expectation that they will need to be changed.
Planning itself is an attempt at seeing the future, but humans already have limited sight in the present. The further into the future we project our plans, or the more precision we expect from our predictions, the more error-prone we become. Knowing this, we must be wary of attachment to our plans. Attachment traps the planner in the past. Instead of being fully present and responsive to the immediate demands of combat, the too-attached planner will be driving from the back seat, insisting that the action unfold just as he predicted.
It will be tempting, and not without just cause, to solve the problem described above by building plans within plans. If my opponent does A, I respond with X. If my opponent does B, I respond with Y, and so on. In this way, we plan for what options are likely to be available when our initial plan breaks down. Unfortunately, this can quickly develop into a convoluted decision tree with contingencies for contingencies for contingencies. This is not a wrong way to strategize, but after the first few options, it requires a beyond-human level of active memory, and the more attention you are investing in memory recall during combat, the less attention you’re investing in response time. Many a match has been lost by the person who had the right answers, but at the wrong time.
The advanced martial artist may recognize a partial solution to the limited-memory problem. The body has memory of its own, independent from the mind and its plans. While the white belt is busy trying to remember which limb goes where, the limbs of the black belt already know where and how to best connect to the opponent. The limbs of the black belt know that a push here and a pull there will yield predictable results.
Once the body develops the reflexes and muscle memory demanded by combat, the mind can spend more attention on the plan. The well-coordinated body stays out of the way of the mind, just as the unattached mind stays out of the way of the body. In this way, both the body and the mind are better able to adapt to the dynamism of combat, even beyond the scope of the original plan.
Muscle memory can help to reduce the planning load and allow the advanced grappler to make more robust plans, but it doesn’t eliminate the possibility that the plan will need changing. And though it may prove necessary for a plan to be abandoned entirely, that doesn’t mean it's wise to skip planning completely or to overreact and abandon the plan upon first contact.
A balance must be struck. Some of this balance will be dictated by the skill of the practitioner (or of his support staff, coaches, and training partners). The competitive grappler, at the top of the sport, has the resources to invest in a robust planning process. He or she has sponsorship and funding to invest in the scouting of opponents, diverse training partners to mimic opponents or strengthen weaknesses, and an experienced coach with encyclopedic knowledge of the game. It would be a great disservice to that investment to walk out, slap hands and bump fists, and then just “do whatever feels good in the moment.” The grappler who lacks these resources may have to depend less upon nuanced preparation and more upon broader instincts and reflexes when it comes match time. Budget notwithstanding, the wise competitor will assess the strengths and weaknesses of his or her preparatory environment and plan accordingly.
When it comes time to change, consider that a wise game plan should have been founded upon, at minimum, a principled understanding of the game, an analysis of your opponent, and an analysis of yourself. The least likely of these factors to break down mid-match is your principled understanding of the game, and if it has, you probably don’t have time to fix it. If you give up on your principles in your haste to change the game plan, you are likely to find yourself fighting from behind and unable to make a new plan that is better than “hunker down and hope to not lose”. This new plan can hardly be better than the one you were seeking to change.
The amount of energy you invest in the planning stage should correlate with your ability to plan and the resources at your disposal, not with your desire to win. If you lack the skill, knowledge, and resources necessary to build a robust plan, then more time spent planning is not necessarily better. Keep your plan simple and adaptable.
Beware! The more energy invested into a plan, the harder it will be to adjust or discard when the need arises. Energy invested in planning leads to attachment to the plan and attachment impairs the ability to adapt decisively. Don’t invest more energy into planning than necessary, and only hold on to the plan as long as it is serving you.
Plan the work. Work the plan. But don’t let the plan work you.
Success,
Charles Batey