I don't know why unpredictability must always be considered a strategy all its own and not part of a larger strategy.
I've been reading a lot about John Boyd and the OODA loop, and one of the major takeaways was that if you have a "fingertip feeling" on changing battle conditions, acting unpredictably from time to time can disorient the enemy commander, expand their loop and therefore allow you to act at a faster tempo than he. This idea was not new but something he adapted from Sun Tzu's "cheng" and "chi", his two fundamental moves of war, from which all maneuvers and strategies are built.
Usually predicability vs unpredicatability maps to zero- versus non-zero-sum games.
In a purely competitive (zero-sum) game, the equilibrium strategies are randomized ones which deny the opponent any exploitable openings. But you get much more interesting structures in non-zero-sum games, where both players have an incentive to coordinate with each other.
War and fighter combat is quintessential zero-sum games, but one would hope that business is win-win.
A head to head game in the vacuum of a single match, like, say, Chess or Go or Starcraft, is conducive to certain kinds of strategies. You have one opponent and no teammates. Your win is his loss. It's black and white, clearer what you're trying to accomplish.
Not all games (or "games", i.e. business) are this simple. There can be multiple players. You may have teammates, or you may need to forge alliances. You may then need to break alliances. There can be multiple degrees of victory or defeat, and multiple paths to victory.
Being unpredictable is inherently scary. It's effective in direct conflict because your opponent must account for more possible future situations, diluting his ability to attack you directly, or thwart your true attack directly.
Exactly what makes this effective in direct conflict, makes it a liability when seeking alliances. People will not want to cooperate with you if they aren't comfortable in their prediction that cooperation will be beneficial, so they'll only do it if the alternative is worse. Being predictable makes it easy for people to work with you. This opens you up to many opportunities for cooperation you'd otherwise miss. When cooperation is essential to victory, this is immensely powerful and puts a hard limit on how unpredictable you want to be if you'd like to win. And heck, in life and business, maybe relationships with people are most valuable trophy anyway, i.e. https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ
A few feints to throw off your opponent can work very well in a 2-player game, where, like the grandparent says, they throw off his OODA loop and can give you additional room to maneuver. In a multiplayer game, though, it's unlikely that all your competitors will be thrown off. One will go for the ideal strategy, irrespective of competitors, and while you & your chosen adversary are duking it out with feints and countermoves, they'll silently come up and pwn you all.
I'm reminded of the Microsoft/Netscape battle during the first browser war. The two of them set each other firmly in each others' sights, each trying to predict what the other would do and counter it. In the end, Netscape died and Microsoft became irrelevant, and it was a tiny startup called Google that ended up winning.
That depends on the timescale. While Google is winning in 2016, in 2006 we would definitely have been saying Microsoft had won. Nobody knows who will be winning in 2026.
- Microsoft got so good and prolific at fighting on their terrain, they overspecialized and forgot how to win anywhere else. Once their opponents stopped stepping on their terrain, MS started losing.
- There's no such thing as the first browser war or the second browser war or the operating system war, and there's no such thing as winners or losers. There's just a never-ending sequence of skirmishes and battles.
> acting unpredictably from time to time can disorient the enemy commander, expand their loop and therefore allow you to act at a faster tempo than he
I disagree that this is a good idea. I think acting unpredictably gives your opponent a reason to look deeper into your strategy which ultimately might end up sinking it. If you perform an unpredictable move it should be for a hard and fast strategic gain.
Ideally you should move in a fashion that is entirely predictable by your opponent without incurring significant loss to yourself. This will caused them to be surprised when you eventually break from your predictable normal activities and perform an unexpected maneuver.
Hmm, what you're saying makes sense, because the way you explain it makes it sound like it would have the opposite effect and let them act inside your OODA loop. Maybe I'm reaching too far, since it's not a topic I'm well-versed in.
I've heard cheng and chi translated in other ways, like "ordinary" vs. "extraordinary", "direct" vs. "indirect," so maybe "unpredictable" doesn't really apply here. I read it as being more about conflict within an ever-changing environment. If the world is constantly falling out of order, the advantage doesn't go to the one with the most consistently rational strategy, but the one who responds to change the fastest. So instead of making your opponent confused about your strategy, the goal is to degrade his perception to make him unable to keep up with reality itself. This is all very theoretical and abstract though.
I always liked orthodox and unorthodox. I think there are lessons when Sun Tzu discusses cheng/chi that are somewhat orthogonal to the OODA loop, but I see the stated interpretation by porpoisemonkey as a "subset". Lulling your opponent into complacence with the obvious and baiting him into a lethal trap absolutely fits the definition of destroying their perception of reality, but isn't the only way.
Your opponent becoming so paralyzed by the fear of not knowing what you will do next and thus doing nothing also fits the OODA loop in a completely different way, but isn't really cheng/chi. This is also touched on in Art of War, so it's not like they are conflicting ideas.
> I've been reading a lot about John Boyd and the OODA loop,
Care to share your reading list? I've read the Coram biography and really enjoyed it, but it's understandably light on details of how to apply OODA to things like business.
There's also sort of an "anthology" book on Boyd/OODA called Science, Strategy, and War by Osinga.
You can find some other random content on dnipogo.org and in the web archive for belisarius.com (I don't know why this is down now).
When reading about Boyd and his ideas, I think it's best to focus on the core concepts and reason about applications yourself. He built his philosophy bottom up (he was originally a fighter pilot). Examples like in Certain to Win are looking for parallels that exist coincidentally... or perhaps a better word is patterns ( http://www.dnipogo.org/boyd/patterns_ppt.pdf )
I've been reading a lot about John Boyd and the OODA loop, and one of the major takeaways was that if you have a "fingertip feeling" on changing battle conditions, acting unpredictably from time to time can disorient the enemy commander, expand their loop and therefore allow you to act at a faster tempo than he. This idea was not new but something he adapted from Sun Tzu's "cheng" and "chi", his two fundamental moves of war, from which all maneuvers and strategies are built.