Strategic Patterns in terms of Knowing, Feeling and Action

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The four generic conditions highlighted in Figure 1 (whether associated with knowing, feeling or action) lend themselves to a potentially very interesting way of classifying any strategic undertaking or engagement. This can be done by using the binary coding system as applied in Chinese culture to the encoding of the conditions of change and decision-making identified by hexagrams of the I Ching. Aside from its value as a coding system, a case may be made for such an exploration in the light of the arguments of Susantha Goonatilake (Toward a Global Science: mining civilizational knowledge, 1999) as discussed previously (Enhancing the Quality of Knowing through Integration of East-West metaphors, 2000).

Rather than focusing on the classical BaGua combinations of three lines (two such combinations being used in each hexagram), the focus in what follows is on the use of the three pairs of lines that constitute a hexagram. Each pair of lines can take four forms, associated here with the conditions of the table.

Figure 2: Association of generic conditions with classical Chinese binary codes (the word order of the descriptors in the feeling and action columns has been inverted, the abbreviations added here are used in mouseover labels within Fig. 3)
binary coding	Knowing (upper pair in Fig. 3 hexagrams)	Feeling (middle pair in Fig. 3 hexagrams)	Action (lower pair in Fig. 3 hexagrams)
	known knowns (KK)	felt knowingly (FF)	done knowingly (DD)
	known unknowns (KU)	felt unknowingly (FU)	done unknowingly (DU)
	unknown knowns (UK)	unfelt knowingly (UF)	undone knowingly (UD)
	unknown unknowns (*K)	unfelt unknowingly (*F)	undone unknowingly (*D)

The possible combinations of knowing, feeling and action are then expressed by using the top two positions of a hexagram for the 4 variants of "knowing", the middle two positions for the 4 variants of "feeling", and the bottom two positions for the 4 variants of "action". This allows the combinations to be expressed by the following classical arrangements of hexagrams to constitute various possible "periodical tables" of strategies.

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