[Gary Petty] During the early stages of World War 2, the Japanese won battle after battle – it went on for years. Eventually, they were fighting the entire British Empire and the United States. And as they began to fight all this power, and this ability to out-create them and produce them in ships and manpower and firepower, they continued to use the same tactics. The result is they began to suffer defeat after bloody defeat. And they wouldn't change their tactics to the new situation. Inside the Japanese army, they came up with a word that, if you translate it loosely into English, it means "victory disease". They had become so complacent with the fact that they had so much success, that they couldn't adapt to new situations.
You know, you and I can have that problem, too, and that's why Solomon wrote in Proverbs, "A wise man will hear and increase learning, and a man of understanding will attain wise counsel" (Proverbs 1:5). You and I face new problems all the time and we have to come up with solutions to deal with those problems.
Now, so that you and I don't suffer from victory disease, one of the most important things we can do is called "brainstorming". Now, whether the problem is just you and yourself, or maybe you and your husband or your wife, or a whole group of people, it's the same process. What you do, is you come up with, after seeking wise counsel, all the possible solutions. In brainstorming, you don't judge possible solutions – everybody throws their solutions in, and you make a list of possible solutions to the problem. And then you take each one of those, and what you do is, you get a piece of paper for each idea and you put a line here on the piece of paper. And here – you put over here the possible good things that happen because of that decision, and the bad results that happen from that decision. So say a group of people have a problem and they sit down and they come up with eight different solutions to the problem. Once you start doing this, you start throwing out certain solutions, because the bad way outweighs the good.
In brainstorming this is one of the ways that people get together and create solutions to group problems and avoid victory disease.
