These posts were originally published on the Tempo book blog between 2011-14, and imported here in 2019 when that blog was shut down and replaced with a single page.

Positioning Moves versus Melee Moves

July 16, 2012 By

My general philosophy of decision-making de-emphasizes the planning/execution distinction. But I am not an agility purist. Nobody is. You can think of the Agility Purist archetype as a useful abstraction. This mythical kind of decision-maker believes that a mind and personality that is sufficiently prepared for a particular domain (say programming or war or biochemistry) needs no preparation for specific situations or contingencies. This magical being can jump into any active situation in that particular domain and immediately start acting effectively.

At the other extreme you have an equally mythical Planning Purist archetype who has thought through every possible contingency all the way through the end and can basically hit “Start” and reach a successful outcome without further thinking. In fiction, this is best represented by jewelry heist capers based on long, involved and improbably robust sequences of moves, as in Ocean’s Eleven or The Italian Job. A few token things go wrong, but overall, these narratives play out like Rube Goldberg machines.

Clearly, reality lives somewhere in the middle. But planning vs. execution is not always a good pair of trade-off variables to create reality out of these two asymptotic myths. That distinction only works when there are a lot of known, hard temporal constraints  or formal logical constraints (socks before shoes) in play. These actually help simplify things and make planning/execution a useful model.

When there is none of this temporal structure (what David Allen calls “a hard landscape”) and everything is rather fluid and chaotic, I find it useful to think in terms of a different distinction: positioning moves vs. melee moves. I learned of this distinction from Alfred Thayer Mahan’s The Influence of Sea Power Upon History. Here’s a brief primer.

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Stress Failures versus Decay Failures

July 9, 2012 By

There is a rich history to the idea that the state of your personal environment reflects the state of your mind. So a cluttered office reflects a cluttered mind, for instance. This is why I made the connection explicit and foundational in Tempo by assuming that designed environments are primarily projections of mental models, created via codification and embedding into fields-flow complexes (the big brother of systems and processes).

Clutter is the most obvious manifestation of the mind-environment mapping, but I want to comment on a less-appreciated one: brokenness. 

There are environments where things are in a constant state of disrepair and brokeness. What do such broken environments reveal about the mental models that created them?

Brokenness implies a physical failure in the past.

There are two major sources of failure: operational stress and decay.

Operational stress failure happens when a heavily used system is subjected to a rare loading condition that breaks it.

Decay failure on the other hand, happens when a rarely used system is degenerating internally through disuse, until a common loading condition is enough to break it.

An environment that is in a constant state of brokenness because operational failures are coming in faster than repairs can be made is a state of war. One that is in a constant state of brokenness because things are decaying and collapsing is in a state of atrophy.

Neither is sustainable. A state of war must eventually lead on to victory or defeat. This kind of brokenness requires stepping back to rethink mental models and modification of field-flow complexes. If the rare loading condition is truly rare (example, Katrina), you might need to rethink your insurance model. If a once-rare loading condition is suddenly common, you need to redesign the whole thing operationally.

Atrophy happens either because nothing is happening in your life (so you need to get some action going) or because you built useless/non-functional environments. A state of atrophy is also not sustainable. It can turn into gangrene. You must either excise the decaying portions to protect the healthy portions, or start subjecting them to stress so that they start to regenerate.

Healthy environments aren’t unbroken ones. They are environments where different things get broken as time progresses, repair is mostly able to keep up and the brokenness does not spiral out of control.  The variety in what breaks down suggests that your mental models as well as the environment are evolving in a healthy way. If the same thing keeps breaking down, there is something stupid in your thinking.

Repair must also be able to keep up. If it overtakes to the point that your environment is routinely in a state of perfection, you are not doing enough. If on the other hand, brokenness accumulates to the point where you are constantly fighting fires, you need to upgrade capabilities all around.

Not Important, Not Urgent

July 2, 2012 By

In Stephen Covey’s famous important/urgent 2×2 diagram, why is the not important/not urgent quadrant even there (other than for geometric completeness)? If you’ve always got things going on, the other three quadrants always trump the NI/NU quadrant after all, so do things in it every get done? Do they need to?

I claim that the critical NI/NU stuff is stuff that usually only gets done when it moves to one of the other quadrants. When it isn’t being done, it exists in a state of brokenness. This is okay. Wanting to eliminate all brokenness from your life is practically the definition of OCD.

Most of us live in a state of constant semi-brokenness due to things in the NI/NU quadrant that we never seem to get around to.

Here’s how this quadrant works.

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Fertile Variables and Rich Moves

June 25, 2012 By

Engineers and others attracted to comprehensive systems views often fail in a predictable way: they translate all their objectives into multi-factor optimization models and trade-off curves which then yield spectacularly mediocre results. I commented on this pathology as part of a recent answer to a question about choosing among multiple job offers on Quora  and I figured I should generalize that answer.

Why is this a failure mode? Optimization is based on models, and  this failure mode has to do with what you have left out of your model (either consciously or due to ignorance or a priori unknowability). If there are a couple of dozen relevant variables and you build a model that uses a half-dozen, then among those chosen variables, some will have more coupling to variables you’ve left out than others. Such variables serve as proxies for variables that aren’t represented in your model. I’ll overload a term used by statisticians in a somewhat related sense and call these variables fertile variables. Time is a typical example. Space is another.  Money is a third, and particularly important because ideological opinions about it often blind people to its fertile nature. Physical fitness is a fourth.

Fertile variables feed powerful patterns of action based on what I will call rich moves. 

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Analysis-Paralysis and The Sensemaking Trap

June 18, 2012 By

Analysis-paralysis is when you get into a loop of continuous analysis that prevents you from breaking on through to the “other side” where action can begin. I am beginning to get a handle on the problem, but it is not going to make much sense to you unless you’ve read the book. So this is in the advanced/extra-credit department. Perhaps after some more thought I’ll be able to capture this idea in a simpler way.

In the Double Freytag model of narrative decision-making, analysis-paralysis corresponds to getting stuck in the sense-making phase. Why does this happen?

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Appreciative versus Manipulative Mental Models

June 11, 2012 By

In my early training in mathematical and computational modeling, an idea was drilled into my head by many teachers: make your models as simple as possible. But somehow, I’ve always resisted this urging. I’ve instinctively gravitated to greater complexity; even intractable complexity. Sometime later in my career, I encountered the slightly more refined principle: start with the simplest model of the problem that you don’t know how to solve. 

Still, I did not like the advice. Even with Einstein’s credibility behind it (“a theory should be as simple as possible, but not too simple”), something seemed wrong about the advice to me.

A few years ago, I found the key clue to the simplicity principle. A work colleague offered the principle: how you model something depends on what you want to do with the model. 

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Time Lensing

June 4, 2012 By

We all experience lenses and fun-house mirrors from an early age. Some people were glasses, while others have very acute vision, better than 20/20. Some are colorblind while presumably others are more sensitive to color differences. We know that there are birds and animals that see space very differently from us.

So we are used to the idea that our perception of space depends on how we see. We are used to the idea that if how we see space by default isn’t good enough, we can buy and use telescopes and microscopes to change how we see.

Time is actually a very similar dimension and exhibits exactly the same phenomena, but our intuitions around time are far worse.

For example, if you are angry or sick, time can seem to pass much more slowly than if you are having fun or are healthy. Alcohol generally slows down the perception of time passing (a drunken hour seems longer than a sober one).  Coffee speeds it up.

Various meditative practices or extraordinary situations (like being involved in a major fire, being on a battlefield, etc.) can make time appear to almost stand still, or make hours seem like minutes.

There has been some systematic study of these things (which I’ve referenced in Tempo, such as the early work of Ornstein), but in general, the phenomenology of time perception is largely unstudied. It is just hard to study in laboratory conditions. But it is not hard to study in your own life.

It is useful to think of yourself as going through life with varying kinds of time lenses stuck between your consciousness and the universe. Sometimes you are experiencing time through a microscope or telescope. Sometimes in a convex mirror. You can deliberately put on different types of time glasses for different purposes (coffee, alcohol, music). You can learn mindfulness meditation — the equivalent of getting Lasik surgery for your time-eyes.

The value of gaining some conscious control over your time-perception is that you can experience reality at different levels of resolution, both external reality and your own thoughts. Sometimes it is useful to see all the pores in your time-skin, just as it is useful to see your hair roots in a convex mirror while shaving.

If you are a computer science or information theory geek, you can think of consciousness as having a sort of raw bit-rate, and your time-lens as being able to experience that stream at a certain sampling rate and resolution.

But I am not particularly enamored of the idea of developing strong time-vision for its own sake. So long as I am wearing time-lenses appropriate to the task at hand, I am fine. I don’t need an electron microscope when a hand-held magnifying glass will do.

Forged Groups

May 28, 2012 By

In the military, they have a saying: soldiers don’t fight for causes or countries, they fight for the guy next to them. Why would you die for the guy next to you?

It takes a very special kind of extremely cohesive grouping to sustain the kind of punishment that warfare dishes out. There is absolutely no reason to believe that members of a random group, without ties of kinship or race or shared political values for instance, would be willing to die for each other.

It turns out that what makes people willing to die for each other is actually the pressure of war itself. Facing death together means being reborn together.  The metaphor of fire and forging is apt.

The cohesion has to be manufactured. The result is forged (as in metallurgy, not fraud) groups. How do you create forged groups?

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The Daily Ugly

May 21, 2012 By

The Russian proverb, morning is wiser than evening (MWTE) is one of my favorite ideas about tempo management at the daily level. It makes a more abstract idea (avoid making decisions when you are tired or depressed) more evocative.

MWTE is a simple tempo management heuristic that works for most people, most of the time. If you are a typical sort, and you use it systematically, you’ll slightly improve your decision-making quality by introducing a timing bias. Most of the time. Sometimes, you are smarter at night-time. And there are people who are always wiser in the evening. Good heuristics have this robustness. Even if you proselytize them with no qualifications, on balance you’ll do more good than harm. Really robust heuristics can even handle being rhetorically exaggerated into absolutes (“If you practice MWTE, you will succeed, guaranteed!”). They are also very forgiving: if you execute partially, you get partial results. There is no all-or-nothing effect.

The 24-hour  circadian rhythm is usually the easiest one to work with when you first start to practice tempo management. This is the reason take it one day at a time is such a robust heuristic for tough times. The world of motivational speakers and self-improvement gurus is choked with circadian advice. It is useful to sort out the torrent of circadian tips this world throws at us. A decent classification is good, bad and ugly heuristics. It is the last category that determines the quality of your daily life.

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How Life Imitates Chess by Garry Kasparov

May 14, 2012 By

I’ve been slowly working my way through Garry Kasparov’s excellent How Life Imitates Chess.  I had rather low expectations, since in my experience superstars in a very narrow activity generally do not have the breadth of perspective to adequately situate what they know in broader ways.

But Kasparov’s book is excellent, a pleasant surprise. It is heavily focused on competitive decision-making of course, but he manages to abstract out lessons from chess encounters very well, so you can read the book even if you aren’t a player. It is helpful to know the basic rules of chess and the general nature of chess strategy (for example, it helps to know that openings and endgames are thoroughly studied and well-understood, while mid-games are complex), but you don’t need to know specifically what the Sicilian Defense is.

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