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.

Motifs, Mascots and Muses at Refactor Camp, 2012

February 13, 2012 By

On Saturday March 3rd, I am organizing a barcamp style event at the San Francisco Zoo: Refactor Camp, 2012. It is a small event, with a few scheduled speakers (including me of course) to get people thinking and talking, withe rest of the time left open, to improvise a barcamp-style agenda on the spot.  Use the promotional code EARLYBIRD to register before 10 PM, Thursday Feb 16th, and get $10 off the $40 general registration.

You can find out more about the theme and inspiration behind the event in the announcement post on ribbonfarm.

If you enjoyed Tempo, the event should be of particular interest, since it is largely inspired by themes and open questions in the book. Narrative, archetypes and design thinking all feature in the developing agenda.

My own talk will build on the ideas on archetypes and cheap tricks in the book: “Motifs, Mascots and Muses.”  I am developing the talk for a general audience, but those who have read the book should be able to peel back more layers in the ideas.

The Tempo Glossary

February 8, 2012 By

I finally managed to check an item off my to-do list that’s been bugging me for months. There is now a a glossary of terms from Tempo on this site.  You can always get to it directly via a link on the top menu.

It’s one of those annoying little housekeeping tasks that was tedious to do, but now that I am done, it should prove very helpful. In the past, I’ve limited my use of terms from the book in blog posts to avoid losing people through either confusion or repetition. Now I can just link to the definitions. If you write about anything related to the book and need a convenient reference, feel free to link to the specific definition.

I hope to refine and extend the glossary and do longer encyclopedia style entries on some of them, linking off the short entry. While the glossary is mostly for Tempo-specific neologisms, I also have a few borrowed concepts that I use a lot. I plan to judiciously add more of those. There is a good chance that the second edition of the book will actually start with an expanded glossary, representing space I want to explore. I’ll probably do a post on every major new concept I incorporate into the second edition.

Please let me know if I missed any key concepts from the book, or if you have suggestions for borrowed terms that pass the “sufficiently close” test. If it doesn’t pass, I may still link to an external reference on an under-construction references page.

Now that I have this out of the way, I plan to do more posts building explicitly on concepts in the book. Specific requests are welcome.

Hopefully the glossary should be enough for me to not lose readers who haven’t read/finished the book and keep the blog posts stand-alone.

Does Culture Eat Strategy for Lunch?

January 28, 2012 By

In Culture Eats Strategy for Lunch, Shawn Parr at Fast Company makes an extremely seductive argument. Though he doesn’t mention it, this type of analysis goes back to Alfred Thayer Mahan’s The Influence of Sea Power Upon History. Except that Mahan does not fall into this trap of concluding that culture matters more than strategy.

I don’t mean to pick on Parr’s article in particular, but it is representative of a lot of very well-intentioned, feel-good writing about strategy that seems to be appearing these days. Parr’s is one of the more solid ones. Here’s an excerpt.

Get on a Southwest flight to anywhere, buy shoes from Zappos.com, pants from Nordstrom, groceries from Whole Foods, anything from Costco, a Starbucks espresso, or a Double-Double from In N’ Out, and you’ll get a taste of these brands’ vibrant cultures.

Culture is a balanced blend of human psychology, attitudes, actions, and beliefs that combined create either pleasure or pain, serious momentum or miserable stagnation. A strong culture flourishes with a clear set of values and norms that actively guide the way a company operates. Employees are actively and passionately engaged in the business, operating from a sense of confidence and empowerment rather than navigating their days through miserably extensive procedures and mind-numbing bureaucracy. Performance-oriented cultures possess statistically better financial growth, with high employee involvement, strong internal communication, and an acceptance of a healthy level of risk-taking in order to achieve new levels of innovation.

You could summarize this emerging school of thought as “focus on people and strategy will take care of itself.”  It is not a superficial and careless error, but one made by thoughtful and serious people who do give such matters serious thoughts. It’s not all Kumbaya (though admittedly, this particular article that I am riffing off of is rather Kumbaya-ish). It is a logical consequence of following the dominant school of strategic thinking today.

You fall into this trap if you fall into the Jomini-Porter tradition of strategy, which is a very procedural and structuralist model that decouples the human and non-human elements of strategic thinking.

If you follow the Clausewitz-Mahan-Boyd tradition, which does not make such an artificial separation of people and non-people parts of strategy  you will not make this kind of mistake.  In the Clausewitz-Mahan-Boyd tradition, strategy is about human insight operating on chaotic shared mental models, seeking special, unfair advantages to exploit. The resources you have available, and the strengths and weaknesses of those resources (people and culture included), naturally get accommodated in this model.

To get a sense of a more sophisticated way to make “people and culture” arguments around companies like Zappos or Southwest, it is useful to look at a much more thoroughly studied example.

Mahan’s Analysis of Sea Power

Mahan’s analysis of the naval race between the French, the English and the Dutch in the 17th and 18th centuries reads such situations right.  He notes that for a few decades, during the time of Jean-Baptiste Colbert (the very capable minister of Louis XIV), France made progress on all matters naval with leaps and bounds. For a while, the English and Dutch felt very anxious indeed.

For a while, the French were actually far ahead of their competitors in the sophistication of their naval technology (remember, during this period, Continental, especially French, mathematics and engineering were still well ahead of English).

But when Colbert broke with Louis, the naval capability eroded within a generation or two, and would not be revived again until Napoleon, a century later (with equal lack of sustained success; as Nelson’s victories would prove).

Mahan concludes that the fundamental difference was in the presence of a robust seafaring culture in the Netherlands and Britain that went all the way down to commoners. And in Britain, it was also a military naval culture (rather than the very mercantile one of the Dutch) led by a nobility that actually knew what it was doing, and threw up great naval commanders frequently, unlike in the French case, where the nobility viewed naval appointments as rent-seeking opportunities, and strong leadership emerged less frequently.

This cultural difference, in turn, grew out of the fact that France is a large, pleasant country with many affairs on land, while Britain is a relatively miserable little archiepelago, whose inhabitants have been historically more eager and willing to get the hell out and take to the sea. Note the very concrete characterization of culture here, in geographic terms. It isn’t about feel-good and ultimately empty abstractions like “respect” but a richer, ethnographic characterization of differences. Happy? The French were possibly much happier during this period, in their lovely country. They didn’t itch to run away to sea.

But the lesson here isn’t that “culture eats strategy for lunch.” The lesson is that culture is what allows you to double down on a successful strategy. You still need the non-cultural parts of strategy to create an opening. You will not be able to double down on all openings.

Strategy Subsumes Culture

I have posts coming up, looking at examples like Southwest in more detail, but the basic point I want to make is that winning is still about human insight looking at chaotic realities (Clausewitz’ coup d’oeil) to find those opportunities and unfair advantages that, if pursued with vigor, turn into success entirely disproportionate to effort.

Culture is about the capacity to sustain that victory for longer-term rewards. In the Golden Age of airlines, before Southwest turned it into a game of budgets, many airlines had equally great cultures (watch Pan Am or read the once-famous Coffee, Tea or Me? books).

Take away the elements of Southwest’s strategy (short-hop, quick-turnaround, single aircraft type, non-assigned seating) and you just get a bunch of happy employees who will soon cease to be happy as the company’s profitability plummets, their jobs get exposed to risks, and disengagement sets in. There are plenty of examples of happiness-focused companies that promptly failed because they were not pursuing the right kinds of opportunities.

What do I mean by strategy subsumes culture?

I mean that culture is merely another variable in the chaos of inputs that you must organize and think through to craft your strategy. If you are looking for a quick in-and-out strategic opportunity, where you hope to make a killing in a month and have no intention of sustaining anything, culture does not matter. If you are looking for an opportunity big enough and long-lasting enough that you can build and grow a company to exploit it, culture matters a great deal.

On the flip side of the coin, you can say that culture renews strategy. Think of it as a yin-yang symbol (the black fish is non-culture parts, with a white eye of culture, and the white fish is culture, with its black eye representing non-cultural elements).

Culture Renews Strategy

If the opportunity is a really long-term one, spanning multiple lifetimes, you will need to think about leadership succession planning, since every big strategic opportunity depreciates in value and expires within a certain period of time, unless it is bolstered  by smaller strategic moves that renew and revitalize those options.

These renewal/revitalization moves come from the minds of talented strategic thinkers, who in turn arise with sufficient frequency only in the right kind of culture. Apple is an example of a company that might well be crippled if it turns out there was no cultural capability in place for renewing strategic talent. Just as naval geniuses cropped up more frequently in Britain than in France, product-visionaries will need to crop up with more frequency at Apple if they are to sustain their current edge.

This specific function of culture — to renew strategic capability — is often ignored. As with the article I am riffing on, a lot of thinking about culture focuses exclusively on operational culture in the rank-and-file, and aspects like morale and disengagement.

Often there is a trade-off between this aspect of culture (which is about making people happy) and the other aspect: routinely producing great strategic leadership (which is about making people smarter and more clear-eyed).

You over-optimize for happy employees and you are in danger of not generating enough leaders for tomorrow, because the talented leaders are exactly the ones who will get annoyed by happy-employee-itis and leave for more challenging games.

On the other hand, if you over-optimize for throwing up great leaders, and brutal internecine competition will erode the happiness culture so that operational capabilities suffer.

It is a delicate balancing act.  Yin can devour Yang or vice-versa.

People or Process is a Strawman Debate

When talking about such things, you will often encounter a people-versus-process debate, which is also a consequence of Jomini-Porter style thinking. Jomini-Porter thinking not only separates people (and therefore culture) from the other variables, it focuses on codified processes and models for the non-people/non-culture part (like Porter’s five forces and value chain models) over insight into the state of play of fluid and open realities.

This is a strawman debate in the Clausewitz-Mahan-Boyd school, since culture is subsumed within strategy, and strategy is more about insight than process.

One of the few commentators who has recognized this in recent memory is Jim Collins of Good to Great fame. His famous “bus” principle is the right way to frame the people vs. non-people components of strategy:  Get the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and then decide where to go. Nowhere in this bus metaphor is any mention of processes or lean six sigma. Those do matter (in creating operational discipline, which is critical at certain phases of a company’s exploitation of a market opportunity), but not at this level of full-lifecycle thinking.

This principle completely finesses process-thinking and proposes the right trade-off. The shared mental model you build will be the source of whatever strategic insight you choose to pursue (“where to go”). This shared mental model depends on having the right people at the table, having the right kind of vigorous conversation.

A terrible group will paint a useless picture that suggests bad opportunities. Napoleon might have been great at strategic insight, but chances are, he also had the right people on the bus, painting fertile pictures for him to ponder.

Steer, Ready, Fire

January 19, 2012 By

I like various permutations and adaptations of the phrase ready, aim, fire to think about decision-making between the extremes of pure contemplation and pure action. Playing around with this phrase led me to this 2×2 (I seem to be thinking a lot in 2×2 form these days). I’ll connect the dots in a minute.

 

Aiming versus Feedback

The apparently logical sequence, ready, aim, fire describes a feedforward model. You get your mind in the right place, then you figure out how to be effective (aim can map to waterfall planning at any level), then you take action.

The phrase ready, fire, aim, preferred by the action-oriented in uncertain and dynamic environments, is a response to the analysis-paralysis that can happen if you try to get to ideal starting conditions and perfect information before starting to act.

The absurdity of aiming after firing can only be resolved via appeal to the logic of iteration and feedback. You converge on the successful course of action through feedback from failed actions. This works well as a motto for startup types and others who believe in the release early and often, and fail fast approach to projects.

Then there is the phrase, ready, fire, steer. I am not sure who came up with that one, but I’ve heard it attributed to Paul Saffo.  This replacement of aim with steer suggests that real-time feedback and control can be continuous. It is the logical limit of iterating faster and faster. Heat-seeking or radar-guided missiles are perfect examples.

The Role of “Fire”

The variant ready, fire, steer made me wonder about why fire is even necessary. Within your basic firearm metaphor, firing gives you all your momentum (kinetic energy) in one big dose. Of course, you also have whatever positional advantages (potential energy) you possess.  It maps well to situations like getting investment in a startup, coming into a trust fund, or using a rocket to launch satellites.

But there are also cars and airplanes, with more continuous energy-generation models. There are also renewable energy models like sail ships, and models that create a net surplus of energy, like a solar car with more energy than it needs.

These don’t need a fire step. You could do with just ready, steer thinking (or ready, start, steer if you insist). A lot of bootstrapped business models would qualify, as you use tiny or zero cash investments to get started, and nurture cash flows slowly to get where you want. You may be accumulating a surplus of cash or attention that you can conserve for later use.

It takes a lot more foresight to work without the boost of a fire stage, but in return you get more control and efficient use of resources, in cases where the fire represents borrowed energy, provided on terms that you don’t like.

In fact, you can often dispense with ready as well. The idea that you need a ready, independent of information preparedness is more psychological fiction than reality. While you are contemplating doing anything, your readiness level changes over time, even before you adopt any sort of intention. As you process relevant information, your situation awareness may increase or degrade in quality, and you may become more or less oriented.

Ready really only matters in situations where there are decisive go/no-go thresholds defined by irreversible (or very expensive to reverse) actions, such as quitting your job or getting married, but ready as an internal state doesn’t really capture that. You’ll never be really ready. But as a continuously-changing state, your readiness may cross a minimum threshold associated with a given irreversible decision.  That threshold is set by external conditions.

This means that you start steering the moment even a tiny amount of readiness bubbles up into your consciousness. After that, the feedback process that is steer automatically moves your readiness level along.

So steer is really at the heart of it all. Continuous feedback control of energy, using information.

Ready is useful to add in where there is an important, unavoidable and irreversible decision inside the decision process.

Creating an Opening

Fire can actually come at the end as well, and this is the case that interests me the most these days .

In cases where you maneuver for an opening starting from unfavorable conditions (ready, steer), you could be accumulating a surplus capacity for action while waiting for a good opportunity to use it.

This could be a purely passive wait, or you could be actively trying to engineer an opening through “set up” moves.

This accumulating surplus might be money, information, a slowly-grown marketing asset like a blog, or going to night school to get a degree. Or it might simply involve waiting and watching for environmental conditions, trending in a certain direction, to hit a threshold.

Within a large corporation, this could be a matter of making specific allies and accumulating a strong position around a currently unattractive business asset (such as a dog of a product that people think cannot do well in the future, or a sales region that nobody wants) and waiting for, or engineering, a way to work it.

For example, there was an optimal window of time for streaming video businesses to be launched, based on falling bandwidth costs. If you were in that business, you’d have been wise to adopt a ready, steer hold-and-accumulate strategy, waiting for your moment to fire.

Today, the emerging sector of 3D printing is in the wait zone for many people: once the technology becomes sufficiently cheap and some basic technology to exploit it has emerged (such as stable, cheap and easy to use software for generating designs), a lot of people are going to jump in.

Bootstrapping to Big

Since ready has to do with crossing externally-determined irreversibility thresholds more than being in some mystic state of perfect readiness, the steer, ready, fire sequence is great for maneuvering to create an opening, and then triggering an irreversible action that requires a burst of informed energy. This is what is typically referred to as a go-big-or-go-home moment.

One application of steer-ready-fire thinking is bootstrapped businesses that intend to grow big at the right time. These days, we’ve somehow bought into the illusion that bootstrapping is for lifestyle businesses and that you need professional investors to go big.

This is obviously false. If you steer to ready with sufficient foresight, carefully build cash-flow assets, and  wait for or create the right opening, you can bootstrap and go big. Many big businesses before the 1940s were grown in precisely this fashion. Before investment banking  became a big business in its own right in the 1870s in America (and later, the sub-sector of venture capital in the post World War II era), big fortunes — including those of the two biggest Robber Barons, Vanderbilt and Rockefeller — were built through this sort of bootstrapped, leveraged model. There were times when Rockefeller in fact had more capacity to move the markets from the outside, than his famous finance contemporary, J. P. Morgan, had on the inside.

Stepping back a bit, what’s common to all these approaches to thinking about decision processes is the interplay of energy and information in some abstract sense (where energy can be money or marketing potential for instance, in our running startup sector example). Acting with either too much or too little information, given your energy levels, is inefficient.  Having neither information nor energy is of course a stable situation.

Mindfulness is when energy and information dance together well. Note that you don’t necessarily have to keep them balanced at a specific moment. You can store both. So you might wait for energy to catch up with information, or vice-versa. Or you can accumulate both and unleash a ferocious burst of mindful action driven by a store of heavily-informed energy.

Sudden Actions, Entropy and OODA

That last part (accumulating both energy and information to enable sudden movements) took me a while to get to. For a long time, I was unable to reconcile sudden, high-power movements with the idea of mindfulness because I was fixated on the thought that mindful actions are necessarily smooth actions. They needn’t be. Jerky movements have a role to play in our world.

But there is a deeper level at which “slow” and “smooth” matter. This is where an abstract notion of entropy is relevant. Slow, smooth actions cause low increases in entropy. Quick, jerky actions cause high increases in entropy. Unfortunately, you cannot always work with low-entropy behavior because there is a lot of messiness in the outside world — the world that you don’t completely control. The smaller and more closed your world, the more you can approach the idea of working purely with slow, low-entropy actions.

This is why readiness is best thought of in relationship to irreversible-action thresholds determined by external conditions. In thermodynamics, isentropic processes (those that don’t increase energy) are reversible. Entropic processes are not.

When you unleash a sudden action, entropy will increase. In decision-making terms, it means you’ll trigger action that is so fast that you cannot process the information being generated by feedback, so it will effectively act as noise. But there are situations where you know enough to know that this chaos you are unleashing will mostly favor you. This is reflected in the attitude that “I think it will all work itself out.” Eventually, when the dust settles, you will be able to get back to a more mindful engagement with the situation.

And of course, there will always be net entropy increases even after the dust settles. Being mindful about this realization is the same as accepting the inevitability of death.

Of course, this extended thermodynamic metaphor needs to be carefully applied in abstract situations, but I believe the correspondence is a very close one. This thermodynamic metaphor, and the interplay of ready, fire, aim and steer in various permutations and combinations, is one approach to understanding how Boyd’s OODA model really works.

Smart Money and Dumb Money

You can extrapolate this sort of thinking to larger groups and organizations, and think about how energy (usually money in the human world) and information are distributed within a organization and the environment it operates in.  You can talk about whether energy drives information or vice-versa.

In larger systems of people, power distributions often emerge out of the interplay of energy and information. Smart money represents information in control of energy. Dumb money represents the converse situation.

In the world of dumb money, entrepreneurs must chase investors. In the world of smart money, investors court entrepreneurs. Why?

In entrepreneurship, smart money is often used to refer to investment from people who can also provide information and advice. This is actually not particularly smart money. If an investor holds all the cards — money and information — what exactly does the entrepreneur bring to the table besides talent? That sort of relationship defines employment, not investment. Truly valuable information comes from unlikely places. Information from well-known sources, such as seasoned investors or former entrepreneurs, is unlikely to be particularly special or exclusive.  It is in fact likely to be common knowledge — it will help you lower costs of doing business, but not provide a competitive advantage.

A collaboration between a party with too much energy, and one with too much information, is fraught with tension. It is very hard to merge the two in mindful ways. One party is impatient and the other party is frustrated. Meetings between parties with unbalanced and complementary assets, who are also mindful about what they have and what they need, are quite rare.

The result is that power dynamics are triggered while things are sorting themselves out. This is one reason I advocate a slightly evil philosophy. Engaging the world outside your personal control means dealing with all this. Trying to be purely good is like trying to work with just smooth, slow, isentropic actions. It is just not workable when there are transient openings and irreversibility thresholds in the environment.

So it isn’t just individuals who have to gradually become more mindful decision-makers, gradually lowering the amount of sloth, impatience and frustration in their thinking. Organizations have to do it too. I can think of many frustrated, slothful or impatient organizations and groups, ranging in size from married couples to Fortune 500 companies and entire nations.

 

Squeakastination: The Opposite of Procrastination

January 4, 2012 By

I recently made up a 2×2 that’s proved rather useful. If you classify behaviors based on whether they relate to unpleasant or pleasant tasks, and based on whether we delay doing them or over-prioritize them, you get four classes of prioritization behaviors.

 

This post is about our tendency to prioritize certain unpleasant tasks too much. This tendency has no commonly accepted name, so I’ve decided to call it squeakastination for reasons that will become clear in a minute. It is the opposite of procrastination, and in my opinion, far more dangerous.

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Tempo: Year One

December 22, 2011 By

It’s time for a roundup of all the posts in this first year of the Tempo book blog and a review of the performance/impact of the book itself. I wrote the book with the expectation that I’d evolve it through multiple editions and spin-off  activities over at least a decade, so the book blog has been especially important in my thinking and planning.

This is where I hope to test out ideas to add to future editions, maintain a sort of notebook of ongoing research, and prepare an online home for the book for when the paper book finally becomes a relic.

If the book endures, I expect editions beyond about 2015 to be purely digital, with paper copies being mostly souvenirs. Books seem to be heading inexorably towards continuously-updated-and-versioned digital entities. I predict that beyond the 2nd or 3rd edition, I’ll end up converting the book into a sort of a la carte online thing with mechanisms for readers to keep up with updates and new material.  I’ll probably still keep producing paper versions even if there is no real market, because the dead-tree finality of a paper edition serves to enforce a kind of extreme discipline on the writing process.

Anyway, here is a report on the year’s happenings, a preview of 2012, and a list of blog entries for those who want to catch up.

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What Really Happened Aboard Air France 447

December 7, 2011 By

Popular Mechanics has a fascinating and terrifying look at the decision-making failure in the Air France crash:

“We now understand that, indeed, AF447 passed into clouds associated with a large system of thunderstorms, its speed sensors became iced over, and the autopilot disengaged. In the ensuing confusion, the pilots lost control of the airplane because they reacted incorrectly to the loss of instrumentation and then seemed unable to comprehend the nature of the problems they had caused. Neither weather nor malfunction doomed AF447, nor a complex chain of error, but a simple but persistent mistake on the part of one of the pilots.

Human judgments, of course, are never made in a vacuum. Pilots are part of a complex system that can either increase or reduce the probability that they will make a mistake. After this accident, the million-dollar question is whether training, instrumentation, and cockpit procedures can be modified all around the world so that no one will ever make this mistake again—or whether the inclusion of the human element will always entail the possibility of a catastrophic outcome. After all, the men who crashed AF447 were three highly trained pilots flying for one of the most prestigious fleets in the world. If they could fly a perfectly good plane into the ocean, then what airline could plausibly say, “Our pilots would never do that”?”

Read full story.

Tempo now available on the Nook

December 2, 2011 By

You can now get Tempo on the Nook. I hope I’ve now got 90% of you covered. If you’re on some other reader (Sony, Kobo), you’ll have to wait. Seriously, get with the monopolists program and get on one of the big guys already.

Kidding aside, should have  other outlets covered by year-end.

Nook away. I don’t own one, so would appreciate an all-ok note from one of you Nookers.

The Pomodoro Technique

November 29, 2011 By

The last few times we’ve chatted, my good friend and fellow time-management-hacker, Erik Marcus, has been urging me to try out something called the Pomodoro Technique (there is a book that’s available free at the website). The idea is deceptively simple: to organize work in 25 minute uninterruptible sessions, with forced 5-minute breaks in between (and longer breaks every 4 sessions), using a clearly visible time signal. The 25-minute session is called a pomodoro (named after the tomato-shaped kitchen timer that the author, Francesco Cirillo, first used when experimenting with the idea).

 

Reading it, I realized that I’d encountered versions of this idea before (I recall my 9th grade biology teacher making us try something like it back in 1989), but had never stopped to consider the psychology of the idea. I recommend reading the book (it is free like I said, and very short at 45 pages). Here are my initial thoughts on how/why it works and how it relates to the ideas in Tempo. If you’ve used it, I am curious about your take.

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Tempo Now Available on Kindle

November 21, 2011 By

Tempo is finally out on the Kindle.  The link is to the US version ($9.99), but it is available on all the international Kindle stores as well.  In case you weren’t aware, you don’t need the Kindle device to read a Kindle book. You can use your smartphone or PC (just download the appropriate free reader app from Amazon). You can also give Kindle books as a gift (hint, hint!).

Curious factoid I thought I’d share: I now have the Kindle device, as well as apps installed on my iPhone, iPad and laptop (PC). Since the apps all synchronize, I often find myself reading a book in small or large bursts across multiple devices and reading sessions. Surprisingly, I get a lot of the reading done on the iPhone, since I always have it with me, and often have a few minutes here and there (while waiting in line at the post office for instance). The tempo of my reading habits has changed.  I now finish most books via a series of 5-minute sessions rather than a few 2-3 hour sessions. It is somewhat more inefficient, due to the switching costs and getting back into the flow of the book. I suppose I’ll be thinking about this new behavior of the book medium a lot more with my next book. Maybe design it to be coherent at both the 5-minute burst level and the extended-session level.

I’ll get to other readers (Nook and the rest) shortly. I’ll also be sending out the promised free copies to those who played the pass-it-along game with the early beta edition.