The Ancient Eastern Strategist: A Disciple of Silent Transformations

William Gagliano, Silent Transformations, 2019

Disciple of silent transformations, the ancient Eastern strategist patiently waits for the adequate moment to intervene and to induce change indirectly. The right touch, the right word, at the right time in the right place.

The way of a stealth warrior

The ancient Eastern strategist is not here on this earth to revolutionize the world.

He does not seek reorganization on the basis of some order or another.

The ancient Eastern strategist does not even fantasize to redeem his audience and has no wish to bring to others what nobody asks of him and that he may not even have.

He does not force the course of things.

The ancient Eastern strategist is not a hero.

He does not even praise audacity.

Some Westerners would say that the ancient Eastern strategist looks lazy and lacks ambition, that he ain’t no leader.
The degree of the efficacy of the ancient Eastern strategist’s behavior is determined by the extent to which he refrains from trying to manage things (Jullien, 1995).

The ancient Eastern strategist is a stealth warrior.

Face-to-face with uncertainty

The concepts and tools of risk may be useful for dealing with repeated situations, but they become hazardous when dealing with the many dimensions that characterize complex and largely unprecedented settings.

When the conditions aren’t simply unstable but have become chaotic, outcomes aren’t simply hard to foresee, they are completely unpredictable.

Inhabited by a strong desire to categorize uncertainties and understand what will happen, the Western thinker creates frameworks to harness the ambiguity of a VUCA world. It is now time for BANI: Brittle, Anxious, Non-linear, Incomprehensible (Sridharan, 2021).

When the Western leader ambitions to reduce uncertainty by developing step-by-step analyses and alternative scenarios, aiming for some reassuring protection through the progressive reinforcement of control and power’s centralization, rigidifying postures and systems, the ancient Eastern strategist embraces uncertainty, not solely as a source of danger, but also as a source of opportunity. For the ancient Eastern strategist, uncertainty is the condition of human action, and in particular of creative action. Uncertainty exists because the future is not determined, and if it were, one could do nothing and would only be a spectator of reality (Silberzahn, 2022).

Embracing closeness — closeness to each other, closeness to the environment of which he is a part, the ancient Eastern strategist dares to accept a part of vulnerability, to be touched and affected by the unexpected. He opens up to experience and learns from it in the present, continually establishing and reestablishing a creative connection with an ever-changing reality (Silberzahn, 2022).
It is his way of being alive.

For the ancient Eastern strategist, relationships are ontologically primary, foundational. Things are secondary, emergent properties (McGilchrist, 2021).

In touch with the forms and rhythms that link all that lives, the ancient Eastern strategist inhabits a place where everything is in the process, resulting from the interactions between situational elements.

The ancient Eastern strategist does not simply occupy space, he is made of space.

Similar to a conductor standing on the edge of the stage, and even if some Westerners can’t help making a personality cult of him, the ancient Eastern strategist is aware that he “is not really making the music, it is making him — if he is relaxed, open and attuned, then the invisible will take possession of him; through him, it will reach us.” (Brook, 1996, p.49)

Chemical substances are defined by their physical interactions with the rest of the world, by how they react. Species are defined according to the niche they occupy in the biosphere, and we, as individuals, exist thanks to the relationships we are involved in (Rovelli, 2022).

As the late Thich Nhat Hanh may have said, a flower has a lot of non-flower elements to it: the sun, the water, the soil, … And when you touch the flower, you touch the cloud without which the flower would immediately collapse.
Nothing is static. Nothing is ever still. Immobility is merely a fictional representation imposed by the mind for the purposes of calculation (McGilchrist, 2021).

And it is in the process itself that the ancient Eastern strategist can find some underlying natural order, a way, not conceptual, yet evident in one’s being of aliveness.

The water of the torrent carries stones.

Nothing has independent existence. All properties are relational.

The potential of the situation

In contrast to action planning and modelling, the ancient Eastern strategist is relying on what is promising in the encountered situation, attentive to its potential, patiently waiting for maturation, for adequate conditions to emerge (Jullien, 2005).

The fortuitous circumstance is no longer what causes the project to stumble, but rather what creates potential. Lending himself to the situation’s solicitations, the ancient Eastern strategist lets all possible meanings dissolve within himself, and thus he engages in an itinerary that is endlessly renewed (Jullien, 1991).

Everything will come down to embracing the circumstances. And to take advantage of them.

The adequate moment to intervene

Observing and foreseeing the opportunity according to the course of events, the ancient Eastern strategist does not focus on intellectually constructed hypotheses, but on the trend or tendency that has begun, patiently scrutinizing the slightest “crack”. He is attentive to every shift, to every displacement, to every move. He knows that the earlier one intervenes upstream, the less one has to intervene and to act.

And he brings to light the signs that weave their way through our daily lives.

It is by coinciding with the logic of the unfolding that the ancient Eastern strategist can recognize the adequate moment and seize the occasion to intervene and induce change indirectly (Jullien, 2005). Effort and will are used only at pivotal moments, dependent on a felt perception of the larger pattern. The right touch, the right word at the right time in the right place (Whyte, 2001).

Seeking to provide little effort for much effect, what guides the ancient Eastern strategist is simply the gain to be made.

In passing, it may well be the ancient Eastern strategist who inspired the famous words attributed to the French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.” Take care not to interfere so you can take advantage at the right time.

And when the moment is ripe and the right word is spoken, it will be heard a thousand miles away, as the ancient Chinese proverb says.

Ultimately, the ancient Eastern strategist will defeat the enemy before having even fought.

Doing nothing and letting nothing be undone

The ancient Eastern strategist acts without acting, not to prevent from occurring what, otherwise, would occur all by itself. He accompanies the real during all its unfolding.

Not to pull on the plant, but not to dispense with weeding around it, to unlock the potential of the situation.

Not being stuck in any plan or project, the ancient Eastern strategist becomes unfathomable to others. All he does is respond and react to whatever reality prompts within him. And this he does not do partially or at particular moments, but in all situations and continuously.

The ancient Eastern strategist does nothing and lets nothing be undone.

Silent transformations

It is from the continuity of the transformation that the effect will proceed, and since the transformation of the situation is global, it is not visible, with the consequence that, regarding the ancient Eastern strategist, there is nothing to praise. His merit is so complete that it goes unnoticed.

It is as if there is nothing left to tell.

True efficiency always appears indirectly, and the effect can’t be attributable to spectacular heroic acts.

One does not see the river digging its bed, one does not see oneself growing old.

In the end, the event will have simply dissolved in favor of silent transformations.

One can’t see the wheat ripening, but one can see the result: when it is ripe and one has to cut it (Jullien, 2009).

The ancient Eastern strategist has showed up and he is open, part of the emerging relational assemblage that constitutes the situation. He will not be spared, and himself will be changed through the transformational process.

Some say that it was the ancient Eastern strategist who whispered to Carl Gustav Jung in his own Western language: “It is not I who create myself, rather I happen to myself.” (Jung, 1978, p. 322)

The ancient Eastern strategist is a partner of the real.

References
Brook, P. (1996). The Empty Space. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Jullien, F. (2009). Les transformations silencieuses. Paris: Grasset.
Jullien, F. (2005). Conférence sur l’efficacité. Paris: PUF.
Jullien, F. (1995). The Propensy of Things: Toward a History of Efficacy in China. New York: Zone Books.
Jullien, F. (1991). Éloge de la fadeur. Paris: Philippe Picquier.
Jung, C. G. (1978). Psychological Reflections. Jacoby and Hull Eds. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
McGilchrist, I. (2021). The Matter with Things. London: Perspectiva Press.
Rovelli, C. (September 5th, 2022). The big idea: why relationships are the key to existence. Retrieved from: https://amp-theguardian-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/amp.theguardian.com/books/2022/sep/05/the-big-idea-why-relationships-are-the-key-to-existence
Silberzahn, P. (May, 4th, 2022). Face à l’incertitude, soyez vulnérable. Retrieved from: https://philippesilberzahn.com/2022/05/09/face-a-l-incertitude-soyez-vulnerable/amp/
Sridharan, M. (July 29th, 2021). BANI — How to make sense of a chaotic world? Retrieved from: https://thinkinsights.net/leadership/bani/.
Verrier, C., Clenet, C. (May 2003). A propos du “Traité de l’efficacité” de François Jullien. In Gazette de l’autoformation.
Whyte, D. (2001). Crossing the Unknown Sea. New York: River Head Books.