Summery

• Your center of gravity is the asset which drives your best chance for success. 
• Your critical vulnerability is a weakness in your product or service that if filled by a competitor would take your market share. 
• Ask yourself what product, service or project, if done well, would most likely ensure success for your competitors’ business or team? Ask the same question of yourself. Those questions should start to define your and your competition’s center of gravity.
• Also ask yourself what weakness your competition has within their product, service or team which, if you started rapidly exploiting, they’d have a hard time keeping pace with you. Ask the same question of yourself. Those questions should help define your and your competition’s critical vulnerability.  

 

WAR

 

When developing a tactical or strategic plan, there are two key concepts that the military uses to assess the strengths and weaknesses of both the enemy and ourselves. 

• Center of Gravity 
• Critical Vulnerability

In the simplest terms, these are you and your enemy’s biggest strength and biggest weakness.. 

 

What is Center of Gravity?

 

The center of gravity is an asset that if used to its maximum effectiveness will give you the best chance to win. 

It is your bid for success. 

Both you and your enemy have a center of gravity. Every person and team has a center of gravity in every situation. They might not always know what it is, but it is there. 

The easiest way to conceptualize this is through an analogy. I will use boxing throughout this article. 

 

 

Let’s say you’re an up and coming boxer. In every fight that you’ve had, you’ve knocked your opponent out with a right hook. The rest of your punches are decent. However, your right hook is your best punch. Your right hook is your bid for success. If you use it to its maximum effectiveness, you’ll have your best chance to win. 

Your right hook is your center of gravity. 

Every organization should know what their right hook is. 

 

What is critical vulnerability?

 

Critical vulnerability is the opposite of center of gravity. It is a weakness that, if exploited, will achieve decisive results with the least amount of effort. 

Let’s use the same boxing analogy. 

You’re an amateur boxer with a good right hook. When you watch film on your next opponent, you see that they have been knocked down a few times by an uppercut. The way they hold their hands seems to leave them open to that punch. If you can land a few upper cuts, it will have devastating effects with the least amount of effort. 

In war, a critical vulnerability can be a logistical system, a communication node, a key piece of terrain, a gap in their lines or an exposed flank. 

It can be an infinite number of things. 

The key is that it’s something that, if exploited, will give you the biggest advantage with the least amount of effort. This usually means that  it neutralizes your competition’s center of gravity because if you can do that, then your chance of winning drastically increases. 

You’re ideally able to put your center of gravity against their critical vulnerability. This would allow you to have devastating effects on their biggest vulnerability. This is not always the case, however. In some cases, your center of gravity is not able to impact their critical vulnerability. Therefore, you need to find a way to attack it through another asset that you have. 

Having a deep understanding of both your and your enemies center of gravity and critical vulnerability will give you a very good perspective of how to attack them and how they may attack you. 

 

How do you identify a center of gravity and critical vulnerability 

 

Figuring out you and your enemies’ center of gravity can be quite challenging. It takes a deep analysis and synthesis of the nature of competition that you’re in and the capabilities and limitations of you and your opponents. 

 

Nature of War

 

First, you have to understand the nature of the competition you’re in.

The best leaders in the world understand the nature of their competition. 

Imagine a situation where the boxer with the nasty right hook shows up to a competition where he will compete against 85 year old Grandma Betty. In a boxing match, he will beat Grandma Betty’s ass. However, what if the nature of the competition changes at the last minute and instead of boxing, he has to compete in a pie making contest. 

The massive shift in the nature of the competition from boxing to pie making will have a drastic change in the center of gravity for both opponents. 

In war and business, the nature of the fight you’re in can change overnight. Having an understanding of your competition is fundamental to pinpointing your and your opponents’ center of gravity and critical vulnerability. 

 

Capabilities and Limitations 

 

Once you understand the nature of the competition you’re in, you need to understand the capabilities and limitations that you and your opponent have within that competition. 

Capabilities and limitations are fairly self explanatory. They are the assets and skills that your team brings to the fight compared to your opponents. 

The better you understand yourself and your opponent, the more of an advantage you will have when coming up with a plan to attack their weaknesses. 

 

Identify Center of Gravity and Critical Vulnerability 

 

If you have a good understanding of the nature of the competition and of both your and your opponents capabilities and limitations, then there are a few key questions to identify the center of gravity. 

• What is my opponent’s most dangerous course of action? 

You are asking what is your opponent’s best plan? What course of action would cause you the most trouble? You’re trying to visualize a world where your opponent executed to perfection. 

The follow up question is: 

• What asset is key to their most dangerous course of action?

Your opponent’s most dangerous course of action is centered around a key asset. If you can pinpoint what the key asset is, then you likely have an answer to what their center of gravity is. That asset is their bid for success. It is the driving force of their most dangerous course of action. 

The next step will be to identify the critical vulnerability around the center of gravity. 

• What could you do to make your opponent’s most dangerous course of action useless or less impactful?

A critical vulnerability should undermine your opponent’s center of gravity. If it doesn’t, then your opponent will still have their best asset in the fight making them capable of winning. Your best plan is to exploit some weakness that delivers the maximum impact with the least amount of effort.

It’s not going to be fair 

 

After working out of your and your opponents’ center of gravity, you may realize they have a significant advantage over you. Your opponent might be better than you at almost everything. 

Let’s return to a boxing analogy. 

Your next opponent is better than you in every way. They’re taller, stronger, faster and every punch they have is better than yours. Your right hook is still your best punch. However, their right hook is even better than yours. 

Even if your right hook is worse than your opponents, that right hook is still your center of gravity. If you can use it to its max effectiveness, you have your best chance to win. If it were taken away, then your chance of success is greatly reduced. 

The point is that even if your center of gravity is worse than your opponents it still is your center of gravity. If you find yourself in this situation, it is probably not a competition that you want to enter into.  

 

 

That is an extreme example where the boxer had no advantages over their opponent. However, in most cases, your center of gravity will be a clear advantage that you have over your enemy. 

In war, a center of gravity could be a machine gun position, your artillery advantage, your superior infantry or a hill that you’ve occupied. The list is infinite. 

Understanding what gives you and your opponent the best chance for success and a critical vulnerability around that, will help you to make the best plan to win. 

 

BUSINESS

 

Center of gravity and critical vulnerability are both very applicable to the business world. A business, department, team or a corporation should all understand their bid for success and their most glaring weakness. 

The following are some focusing questions to help identify your center of gravity:

• If our business executed perfectly for the next five years, what would it look like?
• What product or service would drive that five years of success the most?
• Ask the same questions of your competitors. 

These questions will help you identify your biggest strengths. Once that is clear, your overall strategy should focus on capitalizing on that strength. 

The easiest way to get sidetracked in anything are good ideas that take away from your best idea. Knowing your strength and your best strategy to capitalize on it will make it much easier to say no to good ideas that don’t support that. 

You should also know your critical vulnerability.

The following is a focusing question for critical vulnerability:

• What is our biggest limitation to executing perfectly?
• Ask the same question of your competitors.

The same question would apply to your competitors. They are also hanging their hats on something. They have a strength that they’ll be looking to invest in to capitalize on. If you can identify that, then you’ll have a good idea of what strategy they’ll be using. 

 

 

Is there a weakness in your competitors’ product or service lineup, that if you were able to exploit, they’d have a hard time keeping pace with you? If you can find that weakness and design a product or service that directly exploits that weakness, your competition will have to make major adjustments to stay competitive with you. 

If you constantly out-pace your competition with new products and services that use your center of gravity and exploit their critical vulnerability, it will keep you ahead of your competition. 

Conclusion

 

Once you have a good understanding of your center of gravity and critical vulnerability, your overall strategy will easily fall into place. You’ll be able to stay focused on using your center of gravity to exploit your competitors’ weakness and gain as much ground as possible. You’ll also be able to mitigate your weakness, by understanding it fully and avoiding your competitors’ best course of action.