Workarounds

If what you are doing isn't working, do something else.  That goes for life, but in my usual focus, staying whole when someone wants you broken, it is critical.  It requires skill- you have to have a repertoire of things to switch to. It requires judgment- sometimes what is not working is a particular technique, sometimes it is a whole class of techniques.  Some people shrug off body blows and some seem to completely ignore heavy strikes, even to the head and even with impact weapons. (Someone will want to argue this. Feel free. In my personal experience I've taken a crowbar to the back of the head with no effect whatsoever and had to deal with an inmate who had received a full power blow from the infamous lock-in-a-sock to the center of his forehead and proceeded to beat the shit out of the guy who swung it.) It gets weird out there.

That judgment loop feeds back into repertoire- if your training has concentrated in one class of techniques, such as strikes or locks, and that class is off the table, it will be a harder switch than if you have facility with strikes, takedowns, locks, gouges and strangles.  (FWIW, the shime, the vascular strangles, are the ones that I haven't seen anyone show immunity to, though I have seen competitors with extremely strong necks who were very hard to get one on quickly).

Tying back to the nature/nurture thing from the last post, and one possible answer to Narda's question.  Someone may not be able to do something because of either an actual incapacity (not strong enough, for instance) or an experiential deficit (doesn't know how) or a glitch ("oooh. I could never do that, that's horrible!").  Some glitches are conditioning- "Ladies don't fight." Some glitches are choices or self image issues- "I'm not the kind of person who..." And some are training artifacts, things that were taught and are believed that limit ability, "If you hit him here he WILL go down."

Each of these problems has several ways around it, and here is the mimicking thing again- just as it is hard to tell conditioned fear (you can psychologically damage a child or adult to make them afraid to act) from physiological fear (some people dump more stress hormones for less stimulus than others)- when you work around them you get to different places that look the same.  The hormone dump problem yields to stress innoculation and the person gets less chemical fear; the conditioned one wasn't getting the same hormone dump to begin with so once he has to learn to fake fearlessness (being brave and acting brave, in practice are the same, both using will to do what must be done despite fear) he will look very much like the rest of the students.  Both are now acting 'brave' and affecting the world in similar ways but the internal states and the ways to get there are very different. 

Workarounds

One of the 'rules' of classic consim is that students aren't allowed to lose. This doesn't mean they never get their asses kicked.  What it means is that they are not allowed to quit or declared beaten or dead. The scenario goes on until they find a way.  Given enough time, you can almost always find a way.  Sometimes it takes a little coaching.  That is what training is for- to put in the time now so that we have a touchstone when we need it, so that we can spend hours and days working out a solution when the stakes are low so that we have it at our fingertips when the stakes are high.

I want to go off on a tangent here: people are used to fairly quick success. Time and again I have seen people work on the hard survival problems for a little while (like close range knife defense) and when they decide it is hard, they dumb down the problem and start practicing against easy attacks that rarely happen.  Too often this is driven by an instructor who feels his authority is based on having an answer.  Unless it is just a hobby or material for your fantasies, train for the hard stuff.

You can look at most training as a series of workarounds. Power generation is a workaround for weakness, as is application of leverage. For that matter, using a tool.

There is more, though.  Some extraordinary practitioners (like Loren- hey buddy) habitually take injuries as opportunities to practice succeeding.  Loren knew damn well that just because he was injured, sometimes badly, had no bearing on what the world might throw at him. He had to do his best to get the optimum effects with what he had to work with.

Scott has had me work drills with techniques not allowed or only one specific technique allowed to win. I like students to train blindfolded or with an arm or sometimes both out of action.

Those are just some ideas. Workarounds, adaptation, is another skill. It is very important, but rarely directly addressed.  Dave Sumner used to define 'ju' (the essence of jujutsu) as "tactical adaptability."  Flexibly adapting to what the world threw at you in order to prevail.  The art of advantage lies in the ability to solve the problem from many different angles.