Once upon a time there was a continuous land mass full of dozens of loosely related kingdoms, each trying to conquer the others, or trying to avoid being conquered, or trying to escape notice all together, in a continually shifting storm of alliances, betrayals, and destruction. China’s period of warring states lasted two and a half centuries. Generations came and went in a nightmare of permanent war. It is from this age that we get The 36 Stratagems.

Given in six sets of six, The 36 Stratagems is a simple list of options that apply in each of the six broad circumstances of conflict. This list has served as an outline to many books on strategy for military, business, and even board game applications. So, if this chapter feels like a fit for your thinking, there’s lots of available further reading. Covering each stratagem in detail is out of scope for this work, but would also not be fitting to the context. The third set of stratagems, for instance, are for initiating conflict — which is of limited relevance to our interests here.

The first six stratagems, called the ‘winning stratagems’, represent the six basic ways of leveraging a positional advantage to seize victory. The last six stratagems are the ‘losing stratagems’ or ‘stratagems for defeat’. These are the inverse of the first, representing options for mitigating or turning around a position of disadvantage.

In this chapter we’ll cover the first five categories in a general overview and look more closely at those last six stratagems — the losing stratagems. You’ll get some examples in simple human-scale terms of how these methods of dealing with positional disadvantage are successfully applied to common scenarios.

The rest of this chapter will become available following the success of this Kickstarter campaign.

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