If we can take the idea of parallels between such different systems as Aikido, lean thinking and GTD seriously (see Aiki, Lean and GTD: Lining things up) - which requires that we be prepared to countenance some higher-order similarities in them - then I think that there are other lessons to be drawn.

Firstly, in Aikido, some ideas seem obvious - like the idea of getting our attackers lined up. This idea only seems obvious because a martial art offers us practical demonstrations of what happens when we do and don’t get them lined up. In fact, the only way of discovering it, of finding it obvious, is through practice in which we are allowed, without serious consequence, to try it various ways including the wrong way. That is, we get a chance to learn what works and why only because we are given the opportunity to experiment with what doesn’t as well.

Secondly, in Aikido, we learn very quickly that knowing what works and why is very far from knowing how to do it ourselves. And again here, the key is practice. We learn Aikido through practice, because what we learn is to do Aikido, and the only way to learn how to do anything is through practice.

And here perhaps are two more important clues for the other methodologies. GTD and lean thinking are both practical methodologies, not merely theoretical systems, even if both - like Aikido - are informed by a systematic theoretical framework. All three represent praxis, that special kind of activity which is free, self-conscious and self-reflective, and it is a central concept in all three that a continuous self-review is part of the activity.

If GTD and lean thinking do indeed represent praxis, then as in Aikido we need in them to be permitted to experiment, and to discover what doing things the wrong way is like without suffering serious consequences - we must be allowed to do it wrong in order to really learn what it is to do it right.

And, we must realise that in GTD and lean thinking just as much as in Aikido, merely knowing about them, knowing what works and why, is not enough. What we are learning is to do something, and this is only possible if we are allowed to learn it through practice.

There is only one way to deal successfully with multiple things that need to be dealt with, and that is by lining them up to deal with them one at a time.

Holding the bridge

Horatius Cocles, according to legend, defended the Pons Sublicius single-handedly against the Etruscans, saving Rome. How did he achieve this?

Horatius, obviously, was not as strong as the entire Etruscan army, but he didn’t need to be. By choosing to engage with the Etruscans on a narrow bridge, he lined them up, so that he could deal with them one at a time. At any moment, he had only one problem: the Etruscan in front of him. The rest were harmlessly lined up behind the first, and the entire Etruscan army was reduced to the strength of the man at the front of its queue, a queue controlled by Horatius.

Dealing with multiple demands

Horatius’s principle is used centrally in three different practical systems, each of which uses it to deal with the problem of too many things to deal with at once.

The first is ‘lean thinking‘, an operational philosophy that seeks to eliminate wasteful activity in organisations. The second is GTD (Getting Things Done), a system to improve personal productivity. And the third is Aikido, a martial art.

Each of these offers strategies for managing multiple demands that things - whatever these things are, and they are very different in each of the three contexts - be dealt with. So an office might have large quantities of material - documentation, or data perhaps, of all different kinds and from numerous other departments - to be processed. Most of us as individuals have a vast, sometimes overwhelming, number of diverse things to do. And in Aikido, like Horatius, we sometimes face multiple attackers.

The wrong way

There’s one way to approach the onrush of multiple things that need to be dealt with, and invariably, it fails. That way is to fling effort and energy at them, to charge at the attackers or jobs to be done. The result, in a martial art, is to find ourselves surrounded and outnumbered; in personal life, overwhelmed and ineffectual, and in an organisation, facing confusing mountains of piled-up half-finished work.

In Aikido we are fortunate because it is just obvious that such an approach can never work (and even better, we get the opportunity to discover it without serious consequences). So when faced with multiple attackers, we never deal with one from the centre of the attacking group, but one on the outside - otherwise, the ones on the outside will circle in from behind, and that will be the end of that.

The right way

The only way to deal effectively with multiple freestyle attacks is to ensure that we can, like Horatius, line up the attackers so that only one need to be dealt with at a time, the rest harmlessly queued up behind the first. It doesn’t matter how many of them there are; if they have to climb over the one we’re dealing with just to reach us, they aren’t going to be much of a threat. And if we can keep the one you’re dealing with between us and the rest of the attackers, it’s not until we to get rid of that one that they will be able to make the next attack.

Getting our attackers lined up like this makes it possible to control the space, keeping them where they need to be, knowing where they are and where they can go. It makes it possible to dictate the pace and rhythm of the work, keeping it smooth, flowing and measured.

This way we get to control what happens, and when, which is the next best thing to not being attacked in the first place. We, not the attackers, are in charge. We do not respond to what they do next, we determine what they do next.

This is not a discussion of how to get multiple attackers lined up, which is certainly easier said than done. The point is that it is necessary, and the question is: is this the same insight that both lean thinking and GTD make use of?

Parallels

We can identify several key points in this, and each of these is in fact reflected in both lean methodology and GTD.

In Aikido, we position ourselves so that attacks can arrive only in a line, one at a time. We, and not the attackers, get to control the line, and so we can work to our own rhythm and pace. We do not passively wait for the next attack, but actively call it in at the moment that suits us. We eliminate the mental distraction presented by the multiple attackers.

In lean processes, we attend to the physical and logical arrangement of work so that it arrives sequentially, one item at a time. We control the upstream line of work, by pulling it through instead of having it pushed at us. We work to a rhythm that we, and not the work, dictate. We eliminate the waste of piled-up, stalled items requiring attention.

In GTD, we set up “contexts”, structures and lists that allow us to identify, at any given moment, the single next action. Instead of facing a mountain of things to do at once, we pull, according to our present context, the next item from the stream that we have created. The contexts and the choice of the next action are ours; we are unburdened and undistracted by the items that lie outside the present context-line.

In conclusion

All of these are important. But it is the great gift of handing control back to the overwhelmed agent (whether an individual or an organisation), allowing overwhelming circumstances to be controlled, that is the purpose of each of Aikido, GTD and lean thinking. That each of them identifies getting things lined up as essential to this purpose is at the very least an important clue.

• In Aikido we ask: how can I position myself so that my attackers are lined up?
• In GTD we ask: how can I structure my lists so that my next actions are all lined up?
• In lean thinking we ask: how can I structure these processes so that our work activities are all lined up?

So perhaps this is worth making into a general principle for all contexts: what can I do to get everything lined up?

Some people advocate “You must make your own trouble” as a good motto for life.

This might, on the face of it, not appear to be a particularly Aiki kind of attitude. Aikido is about defusing trouble, not creating more problems (as if we didn’t have quite enough of those to deal with already). But I think though that far from being un-Aiki, making your own trouble is actually part of Aikido.

“You must make your own trouble” is not an exhortation simply to be a trouble-maker, simply to make trouble; it is to make your own trouble. Any idiot can make trouble, and often will, but it takes care, practice and understanding to make trouble that is your own. Your own trouble is trouble that you have engineered, trouble that you determine and manage, trouble that you are in control of and which belongs to you.

So what does this kind of trouble look like? We should see it all the time in our practice. Tori does not stand passively, inertly, like a mere thing or a potential victim, waiting for uke to start something off. Tori is alive, alert and active, determining the nature, direction and timing of uke’s attack: she makes her own trouble. It is tori’s trouble, not uke’s trouble. And we should be quite used to the idea that tori, not uke, should initiate uke’s technique, that how we stand and move and look will determine what happens.

The trouble that we make should be like the cut in the bank of a stream that directs its path the way we want it to go. It takes skill and practice to do this well (and while we’re learning to do it, we are often going to find ourselves in a muddy mess of our own making until we can do it effectively) but it’s a much easier way of diverting the stream than trying to force it to go where we want.

So making your own trouble is destabilising something that was stable. The stream was running it its course, and uke was just standing there. We can, if we like, let the stream run where it will and hope it won’t flood the wrong place, or let uke stay there and hope he doesn’t do anything too troublesome. But sooner or later that stream is going to burst its banks, and uke is guaranteed to make some trouble for us, and then we will be taken by surprise, and find ourselves dealing with trouble. So it is up to us now to make our own trouble, to destabilise that situation in the way we want, and take control of it.

So make your own trouble.

Aikido is praxis, which is to say practice informed by theory. And sometimes our practice stalls; we stand there on the mat trying to get a move right, stuck, unable to recreate the movement with our theoretical knowledge of what we have seen demonstrated.

In Bayles and Orland’s Art & Fear there is this story:

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.

His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot—albeit a perfect one—to get an “A”.

Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work—and learning from their mistakes—the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

There will be occasions in Aikido when we can unstick ourselves in the same way, by aiming in our practice not to perform the technique well a few times, but performing it as many times as possible without trying to get it right. By simply churning out a body of practice to refine, we can avoid producing a pile of dead Aikido.

Is a special martial arts grimace part of your kit? Have a look around the dojo at the people you are practising with. Are they wearing strange contorted looks, as if they were taking part in a Kung Fu movie?

Clive James pokes some fun at the extravagant grimaces, stances and movments of martial arts films. Maybe they helped Bruce Lee (who was “unable to narrow his eyes without flaring his nostrils and vice versa”) deliver his fearsome kicks and punches. Then we have “that special dialogue from the Orient that actually sounds more Chinese after it has been dubbed into English” (which maybe serves to unnerve and disconcert opponents).

So, looking around the dojo, sometimes we see people wearing peculiar grimaces while practising, standing oddly, moving oddly, even speaking oddly. What is all this about? Does it somehow “look more Japanese” to adopt an extravagant and unnatural stance?

We are not on film, and we’re not trying to disconcert baddies (who in any case are unlikely to be intimidated by our wearing a scary face); movements in Aikido are fluid and natural, and so should be our stances, words and the expressions on our faces. It is hard to relax, to move and think in a relaxed fashion, while wearing a contorted glare. Our faces do not just reflect what goes on inside our heads; on the contrary, it’s a two-way connection, and what we do with them gets back to the brain.

Perhaps to have Jean-Claude van Damme’s face (”a bodybuilder’s bicep in worried search of its original arm”) or to look as scary as Chuck Norris (”with two eyes sharing the same socket”) might indeed confer an advantage when confronted with baddies. But scary Aikido faces are not required in the dojo, and worse, screwing up our faces screws up our posture, movements and thinking.

What happens when we’re under stress?

Leaving aside the internal events, the subjective experience of being stressed, let’s consider it from an external point of view: what other people see happening.

The first thing that becomes apparent is that the behaviour of a stressed person is altered. Certain behaviours become more dramatised or excessive, and others disappear. As the stress increases, these behaviours tend towards three points: paralysis, fight, or flight.

Whereas before the individual’s actions might be taken from a wide palette of responses to a situation, with smooth, controlled progressions or changes from one mode to another, the shifts become radical and sudden. One moment they are furiously angry, responding savagely; a moment later desperately trying to disengage from the situation; a moment after that simply not doing anything but miserably suffering it - and then back to one of the other responses.

So one sign of stress is a diminished behavioural repertoire, a set of responses that has collapsed - in the worst case - to a minimal possible repertoire.

We need to learn ways to deal with pressure so that it does not become stress, so that our responses, when we are faced with it, are not stressful ones. We need to be able to keep our available repertoire of responses as wide as possible. And this is one of the functions of Aikido: to help us learn how to handle pressure, whether it’s the physical pressure offered by a partner on the mat, or the pressures we might find outside the dojo in the rest of life.

As in Aikido we become increasing skilled at managing pressures fluidly and appropriately, and not falling into patterns of flight/fight/paralysis, we should be able to take those skills and apply them elsewhere.