If you analyze any long-term competitive success, you will see that progress is made in a series of fits and starts. Many paths are explored, but only a few of those paths prove successful. However, each improvement in position creates the conditions for future advances. All three areas of adaptive strategy--position awareness, opportunity development, and situation response-- work to improve your position, moving it in the desired direction. All three of these aspects of classical strategy are used together to assure meaningful progress.

The challenge of position awareness is understanding your existing position and how it related to other positions. Sun Tzu's rules of positioning compares existing positions with competitive positions and current positions with possible future positions. It identifies the key elements that allow the relative comparison of these positions. The most of important of these key elements is identifying the mission or goals that motivate them, guiding them in one direction or another.

Opportunity development is the ability to identify and utilize an advantage, an opening in the environment. In that search, certain techniques work more frequently than others. The use of Sun Tzu's "progress cycle" leverages opportunities over time and eliminates the cost of failures from which you cannot recover. Though the success of any given move cannot be predicted exactly, using the correct method makes eventual success certain. After success is achieved, you can identify the roles that the tools of strategy played in achieving it, and you can see how planning that path would have been impossible beforehand.

A study of classical strategy shows that most failure results, not from competitive attack, but by responding inappropriately to a given situation. The study of situations and the selection of the appropriate set of responses it the realm of situation response. History has shown that there are a limited number of common competitive situations. Again, history has show that there is one best response in each of these situations. While situation response is the most advanced of the three schools, it is the most beneficial in terms of making the right decisions quickly.

The science of strategy flows from the nature of human competition. Its principles depend on people behaving in certain predictable ways when faced with competitive challenges. These human reactions haven't changed in the last 2,500 years and are not likely to change in the next 2,500 years.

For a complete description of the basic process of advancing positions in the competitive environments of business, we suggest you read our book 9 Formulas for Business Success: The Science of Strategy.