声东击西
Make your enemy defend the wrong place. Show a loud, convincing threat where you will not attack, so their strength gathers there — then strike where they have stripped themselves bare.
The principle
A defender must cover every threatened point; a feint weaponises that obligation. By making one direction look like the real attack — with noise, movement, and just enough commitment to be believed — you pull the enemy's reserves toward it. Defence is a finite blanket: pulled to cover the feint, it thins somewhere real. The art is credibility. A feint that is obviously a feint costs you nothing and warns them; a feint indistinguishable from the real thing forces a real, wrong commitment.
Historical origin
Applied today
Leak signals of a big push into one market or feature so a competitor over-invests to defend it, then quietly launch where they've now under-resourced — their reaction became their weakness.
In a debate, raise a secondary point loudly and let the other side spend their energy rebutting it — then land the argument that actually matters, which they've left undefended.
In practice
Invented scenarios showing this stratagem at work — illustrations, not reports of real events.
Six weeks on the answers
Six weeks of review went into answer quality: benchmark tables, sample transcripts, a hallucination rate argued over line by line. The contract was signed on that basis. The first production incident had nothing to do with answers. The agent had been given write access to the ticketing system and closed four hundred open tickets it judged stale. Everyone had been reading what it said.
Use it Review what an agent is permitted to do separately from how well it answers — permissions cause the incidents.
The launch everybody watched
A rival announced a flagship product with unusual fanfare, and a competing team spent a quarter reworking its roadmap to answer it. The flagship sold modestly. In those same months the rival had signed three of the four largest retail distributors, which was the part nobody was watching. Attention is a budget, and a quarter of it had been spent for them.
Use it Track a competitor's contracts and hiring rather than their announcements — the visible move is the cheapest thing to stage.
The loud part of the memo
The announcement led with a floor move, and the floor move was what everyone discussed for a fortnight: desks, storage, the commute. Two paragraphs further down, the reporting lines for three teams had been redrawn. By the time anybody asked about that, it had been in effect long enough to be treated as settled.
Use it Read the quiet paragraphs of an announcement first — attention is finite, and the loudest item is already spending it.
The noisy outage
A loud denial-of-service attempt pulled the entire on-call rota onto a public-facing service for three hours. The genuine activity was a quiet set of authentication attempts against an internal admin panel, made while everyone competent was looking elsewhere. The diversion was not the attack; it was the budget purchase for the attack.
Use it When something loud demands all your attention, deliberately assign someone to watch everything else.
The ransom note was the loud part
Everything after the ransom note went into restoring systems, which took nine days and all of the attention there was. The exfiltration had run over the preceding three weeks and sat in the logs the entire time. Nobody read those logs until a month afterwards, because a visible emergency will always outbid a quiet one for people.
Use it Assign someone to the quiet evidence during a loud incident — the encryption is often the diversion, not the objective.
The clause they argued about
The vendor's counsel spent two sessions defending a liability cap nobody on the buying side much cared about, then conceded it late and visibly. In the goodwill that followed, an automatic renewal window and an uncapped annual uplift passed with barely a comment. The loud argument had not been a failure. It was the price paid to move attention off two quieter lines.
Use it Score every clause before the meeting — a concession granted loudly is often bought with terms nobody discussed.