I recently bought and read another of Edward de Bono’s books. This one is entitled: “Simplicity”. Being a Wing Chun person, I was attracted to it by the title. I’m going to borrow from his ideas and apply them to, or comment on them with respect to, our Wing Chun concept of simplicity because as I was reading the book I was thinking how applicable a lot of what de Bono writes would be to my students. I was also thinking that a de-construction and discussion of our core principles might be interesting.
On page 1 de Bono writes: “Those who know the system cannot imagine the problems facing those who do not”. I read this and immediately thought of my saying: “You don’t know what you don’t know!” What I really empathised with though, was him writing about technological complexity! He noted that if you visit a house and see the clock on the VCR flashing you know no teenagers live there! Those who know me as well as my students will laugh and shake their heads when I confess my VCR clock flashes!
Amongst a lot of other useful ideas pertinent to our thinking on realworld self defence, De Bono spells out ten rules of simplicity. I’d like to present these - reworded - as I interpret them with respect to martial art.
1. Simplicity has to be highly valued.
The implication here is if it isn’t, it won’t be sought. (“You don’t know what you don’t know!”). Observation will reveal that very few people actually do value it. This is true in martial arts. It ought to be a prime objective of any martial art yet we see most martial arts are far from simple. The bulk of them are unnecessarily complex, in fact. Why? Perhaps it has something to do with what I’ve heard referred to as “traditionalism”. This refers to the situation where techniques and forms are retained because it’s thought that they were the way a famous ancestor did things. Many people seem to think that learning a martial art necessarily involves learning a large number of techniques and forms - the more the better.
It might be a little disrespectful in some sense but I refer to this as the “squirrel” notion of a martial art - collecting a store of food against the fear of scarcity or need. Perhaps there are several reasons that martial arts aren’t simplified. Maybe another reason that simplicity is eschewed and complexity embraced is because if an art is made too simple the commercial instructor may think it’ll be too easy for his students/clients to learn and he won’t be able to retain students/clients longer and he’ll thereby lose revenue. More to teach, more to learn and the student must learn longer and pay longer!
Perhaps another reason simplicity is so uncommon in martial arts is because some people prefer complexity. Complex moves or more difficult moves may give the impression that the person teaching them is more skilled. They’ll also impress the friends of students. Perhaps also it’s because the instructor doesn’t see how he could simplify a response to an attack. This would usually be due to not being open-minded enough and being constrained by parameters and paradigms his art sets up. If he’s enslaved by these then he thinks they must apply when actually if he took a completely fresh look they need not. The instructor is just not determined or open-minded enough to achieve simplicity. Certainly simplifying most martial arts would change their very essence. It’d make them something else entirely. This possibility brings us to the next of de Bono’s rules.
2. Simplicity must be sought with determination.
The martial artist has to be motivated and determined to actively seek simplicity. Simplicity isn’t an add-on or optional segment. An ideal realworld self defence system ought not to have a “simple section”. Simplicity needs to be a pervasive feature on which the whole art pivots.
People like simplicity if it doesn’t cost them anything - time, effort, money, thinking energy, discarding notions or techniques to which they’re attached. Most martial artists seem to become attached to an art or a few arts and some favourite notions. They are especially prone to become attached to a technique or set of favourite techniques. Most have favourite forms. This might not be a problem except in the majority of cases the objects of their attachment are predominantly unnecessarily complex.
The whole notion of simplicity in martial art - unless the martial artist has chosen or lucked onto Wing Chun - is not something they’ll have systematically encountered and been inducted into. Western boxing, although mainly a sport, is a prime example of simplicity. Incredibly few techniques, a few punches, some ways of evasion, and powering techniques is all it is. The great majority don’t want to train as hard as most boxers do - that’s true. And, most martial artists simply don’t know how to fight a boxer. Why? Well, several reasons - the boxer has heart, fitness, determination, mind-set and, of course, simplicity. Their complex art can’t handle simplicity!
3. Simplicity needs to be very well understood.
Here’s: “You don’t know what you don’t know!” again! I’ve alluded to this problem before. It’s in a way semantic (we use the same terms but understand different conceptual schemas they are denoting) and reference (what you see as “simple” depends on what you’re comparing it to). Martial artists are no different to non-martial artists in one sense - they’re usually prepared to debate issues about which they actually don‘t know enough. Of course they don’t know this! Martial artists will sometimes vehemently or very angrily debate an issue it’s clear they have only a superficial or completely erroneous understanding of.
In my experience the eagerness to argue aggressively actually almost defines some groups that assert they learn Wing Chun. The amusing thing to me is these groups invariably break even their truncated set of principles of Wing Chun in practice. In one case, the principle of simplicity is consistently broken - or perhaps was never really grasped! I can only guess this is to impress with a lengthier sequence of techniques and to differentiate this branch for marketing appeal.
Attempts to ensure simplicity can lead to an art being simplistic rather than simple. An art can be over-minimalised if people don’t have a thorough grasp of all that simplicity actually implies. Simplicity is neither minimalisation for minimalisation’s sake nor pseudo-simplicity - i.e. complexity masquerading as simplicity. Some well known Wing Chun teachers who, despite their marketing myths to the contrary, didn’t actually complete their Wing Chun curriculum under a sifu who himself might have the same incomplete background attempt both these alternatives - over-minimalisation and pseudo-simplicity. I’m not sure which is worse!
4. Design alternatives and possibilities are essential.
This rule of simplicity applies more to martial arts that are unnecessarily complex and haven’t yet been able to release themselves from the stifling grasp of attachment to even begin to seek simplicity. Analysis is important in arriving at simplicity but getting there depends on alternatives to complexity.
Some versions of martial arts have incorporated simplicity into their art. Others, as I note above, have arrived at simplistic rather than simplified, Yet others have arrived at pseudo-simplicity whilst others have continued with and indeed, embrace, complexity.
To get to simplicity the imagination has to be free from limits that impede analysis. The best place for a sacred cow is in a hamburger! Even if you’re learning a martial art which incorporates simplicity as a fundamental principle running through the whole art it’s a productive mind-set to constantly question how simplicity might be improved - without falling into the errors of becoming simplistic or pseudo-simplicity.
Seeking other arts or doing a hunt and gather through other arts is not the answer to finding simplicity. Remember the squirrel? Some modern martial artists seem to have a fetish for collecting bits and pieces of this, that and the other and eventually cobble together a Frankenstein art. It could be compared to eating all the ingredients of a cake without properly blending them and somehow hoping you’ll have eaten a cake! This is very antithethical to simplicity! Why study five throwing arts to learn five different ways to perform the one throwing function? Well, it’d be positive if you then derived the one simplest way from that experience. What usually happens though is the martial artist just carries around the five different ways. And, some of the “differences” are minuscule and irrelevant! Form takes precedence over function time and again in conventional modern martial arts! Making the paradigmatic shift from analysing self defence in terms of techniques and their variants or in terms of the framework of a particular art to analysing it in terms of the functions required is a huge component of being able to approach simplicity.
Yes, you need design alternatives - but then you have to come up with the one way that’s simplest! Of course, this all goes without saying that if you know one, five or fifty ways of throwing that this is a total waste of time and energy if you can’t actually apply what you know in realworld self defence!
5. Challenging and discarding the inessential is vital.
This has been said and disseminated before in the martial arts world. However, the followers of those who’ve said it go out and become squirrels! Technique collectors! The more esoteric the better it seems! Some martial artists seem to take some sort of strange pleasure in discovering rare arts. The fact they’re often fraudulent doesn’t seem to phase them!
A few modern arts even pride themselves on being a Frankenstein art and actively promote the art as if being based on 54 or so other arts was some sort of virtue! If some heretofore unheard of Eskimo grappling art based on the seal hunt came to light these folk would be the first into parkas and heading to the Arctic! If some ancient secret Patagonian native striking art were unearthed they’d be heading there to pick up a few techniques! In this respect I’d like to offer Zopa’s Law: “Spread of arts studied correlates positively with superficiality of competence in them”.
Retaining training methods (some of which modern sports physicians and sports physiologists gasp at!), techniques, or forms simply on the basis of tradition serves the preservation of tradition. But that’s all! In some cases the fact is the genuine tradition was nothing like the modern re-construction posing as the original!
When Wing Chun first began to be devised the process of discarding of traditional techniques would’ve posed a real challenge. In a time and culture where challenging tradition was very dimly viewed it would’ve been far harder than it is today. The baseline seems to have been that realworld self defence had to be analysed by challenging and questioning everything with an open mind but with the grid of realworld combat dropped over the material or concepts being analysed to give reference to decisions.
6. A new start is required to achieve simplicity.
De Bono asserts that to arrive at simplicity it’s best to start from the baseline. He writes: “Be clear about what you are trying to do and then set about designing a way to do it - ignoring the existing system entirely”. He thinks modification doesn’t achieve the same results. I think to a considerable extent that this is probably how Wing Chun mostly came about. For those arts that have yet to arrive at true simplicity, this rule has relevance. It even has relevance for some arts that call themselves ‘Wing Chun” but are too complex. Though, once again “You don’t know what you don’t know!” would apply. Angrily asserting: “Of course we know!” usually simply affirms otherwise! The art is either observably simple without being simplistic or it isn’t! If it can be simplified then by definition it wasn’t simple in the first place!
7. Concepts are essential.
Wing Chun is both a conceptual and technical art. It requires both a full understanding and capacity to apply both concepts and specific techniques designed with specific structural requirements and determinants in mind. Simplicity is largely arrived at by employing concepts because concepts simplify the world. In this case they simplify the world of realworld combat. We can distil a heck of a lot of experience and knowledge into a word expressing a concept if - and often it’s a very big “if’ - the sifu can actually fully unpack the concept for you. Specific ideas and technical detail are required to fully unpack the concept. Also, creativity is required. But, it has to be a creativity bounded by the system parameters - the eight basic concepts. You have to have the right concepts!
8. Chunking is essential.
“Chunking” is breaking down a larger unit into smaller segments and putting some of them together. We can, at least initially, grasp a larger unit of information or perception by first grasping the component parts. My Wing Chun could be chunked in several alternative ways. It could be by expressing the key words. It could be by expressing the eight basic concepts. It could be by the functions underlying the forms. It could be by the several sik we train. The difficulty we sometimes experience when we chunk is that we have to know what we’re chunking. An example of the misuse of chunking can be afforded by breaking realworld self defence up into boxes called “kicking range”, “punching range”, “elbowing range” and “grappling range”. This is an example of simplistic analysis! Even more ignorant is dividing martial arts up as being a “kicking art” etc. Some-one once postulated this ranges notion and huge swarms of martial arts read or hear it and believe it without analysing it! In the eyes and ears and out the mouth without going through the brain filter! I make a habit of making a mockery of this “ranges” idea with my students by showing them how an experienced martial artist can be, and put their attacker, simultaneously in all these ranges! This is not to even highlight that many arts claim to deal with a number or all of these ranges anyway! Any martial artist who thinks they have to study several arts to learn realworld self defence has got it drastically wrong! They may have chosen an art that isn’t comprehensive but this doesn’t mean that all arts are deficient in some way and need supplementation. This is a recent nonsense notion developed by school owners who realise that given the modern market segmentation they can’t hope to enrol the numbers as used to enrol when there were fewer martial arts available. So, they settle for getting a proportion of their fellow school owners’ fees by teaching “bits” of their art or running seminars! They “borrow” students from other arts for a time. If they can convert them to become more full-time clients they obviously prefer that. But, failing this, a few dollars are better than no dollars.
Stepping outside this “ranges” paradigm, folklore or myth (call it what you will, the only relevant ranges to train for realworld self defence are: when your attacker isn’t touching you and when he is! This translates to when you can see his reactions or when you can mostly or only feel them! Now, that’s a great example of simplifying things! It’s practical, it works, and it’s demonstrable!
I always guffaw inwardly when some clown (inevitably someone who has read a few martial arts magazine articles and they’re regurgitating inaccurate ideas on Wing Chun) tells me it’s a “close range art” or “punching art”. OK, I learn it, I teach it, I’ve been doing it forty odd years and now I learn something new from this guy? Wow!
It’s utterly absurd to me to have a non-Wing Chun practitioner tell me that I or my students can only fight “in one range”. Keep in mind my gwoon is a closed gwoon and there are no spectators allowed, this type of guy won’t have actually seen our art unless by chance they’ve caught a Chinese New Year demo. We simplify all that nonsense about “range”. We fight our attackers where they are. Once we touch them we control this notion of “range”! If we can’t touch them, they can’t touch us - and vice versa! This notion of “different fighting ranges” introduces complexity to perception where simplicity and cognitively uncluttered responses are required.
9. Trade-offs may need to be made for simplicity.
There are cases where more complexity is required by the demands of the situation. A simplified realworld self defence system still needs some sorts of guidelines, principles or parameters, concepts, techniques and methods of powering and training. It’s when there are discontinuities or exceptional cases that there may need to be a trade-off to cope with it.
In most systems of Wing Chun we learn from the first form to control our centreline, balance, sinking and rooting, structures, and expression of jing. From the second form we learn to control these aspects of our attacker. The third form is a parallel system that deals with situations where the normal guidelines haven’t applied for some reason. This form is like a Norton’s computer repair program. Things go wrong and you reach for it. Hence, it typifies situations where trade-offs may need to be made for simplicity. Utilising the basic principle of flow or fluidity we’ll often find that if we flow from technique to technique in accordance with the demands of the attacker and the situation that what is actually simple if you reduce it to the component elements performed seriatim looks, and is, complex. We may, to the superficial eye, seem to be complexifying our response. On fuller examination, however, this is not as much the case as that we are trading off reductionist simplicity against the need for serial simplicity.
10. Simplicity exists for a reason.
De Bono’s last rule is actually for whose sake simplicity is being designed. I think if we try to apply it to martial arts we could raise some interesting questions surrounding why a martial arts system needs to be simple.
Well, logically, if a realworld self defence system is for realworld folk living in realworld conditions firstly it really ought not to be so difficult to learn that it rules out anyone not possessed of statistically rare personal physical attributes. It ought not to be so complex we need to spend many hours a day training it. The aspiring martial artist is wasting time they could otherwise spend on learning and practising realworld self defence if first they have to learn a set of complex cultural ritualistic behaviours, become built like a steroid freak body builder, acquire the skills of an Olympic gymnast or circus acrobat, or acquire the sheer power of a power-lifter. These people are all statistically rare and acquiring their abilities takes a lot of time. This would be time better spent on acquiring realworld self defence skills if one seeks simplicity in the acquisition of such skills.
In addition, the emotional and psychological pressures and physiological response to threat of a realworld self defence situation produce changes within a person such that complexity of a response - especially if it entails several physical steps or fine motor control - is inhibited markedly. Under the pressure of realworld combat things need to be kept as simple as possible if we’re not to expose ourselves to unnecessarily increased risk in addition to that posed by the attack. That’s our “safety” or “risk and harm minimisation” principle.
Simplicity ought not to be designed into a martial art simply because it’s seen as a virtue in its own right or a marketable commodity. In fact, I, like de Bono, believe simplicity is actually a virtue in its own right. But, at this level, this is simply my belief. It’s nothing more than a personal preference. No, simplicity needs to be justifiable because simplicity is demonstrably a core pre-requisite of enhanced realworld self defence skills. It needs to be justifiable because it’s essential or contributes significantly to a positive outcome. It needs to decrease the risks of a realworld self defence situation and enhance the prospects of a positive outcome - attacker deterred and you escaping or surviving unharmed or not critically or permanently injured. Simplicity is functional if seen this way.
I’ve had an interest over the decades of visiting various martial arts classes and watching martial arts videos or DVDs - even commercial movies - to analyse what is occurring and to see if or how a technique could be simplified or a simpler alternative chosen. I always look to the function the technique serves. “Can it be more simply served to achieve the same or better outcome?” is my index. It’s incredible how rare it is to observe simplicity in action. Although simplicity is one of our core Wing Chun principles it’s interesting to de-construct it and really examine it. And that’s why I found de Bono’s book fascinating.