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?

You can take any logistically convenient, but otherwise random shared social variable, such as birth year or spatial collocation, and through sorting, grading and training operations, create a raw social unit that is functional on paper. But you won’t have any cohesion. But you do have something that can be forged, under the pressure of live fire, into a cohesive unit.

The result is something amazing: the forged group.

Military units are among the strongest anchors of social identity known to humanity. Soldiers fight primarily for the guy next to them because they share a forged-under-fire bond with him. They do not fight for their families, countries, emperors, generals, nations or abstract patriotic feelings because, valuable as those might be, they are far away.

Soldiers fight especially hard for units that are about as large as a paleolithic hunting party (between 15-30 members; this tends to be the size of the smallest effective military groups).

They fight hardest of all for units with which they’ve already shared hell-and-back experiences.

Every shared forging experience has the effect of making the group more socially homogeneous and therefore predictable. It is important to recognize that the homogeneity and predictability arises not from functional similarity among member roles, but emotional bonds forged among individuals by shared combat experiences.

Beyond forging, the metallurgical metaphors of tempering and annealing apply. The whole category of techniques known as heat treatment in fact. By using calculated thermal loading and unloading patterns, you can create very different properties in a metal. The same holds true for groups.  Subjecting a  group to an arduous 12 hour hike through the jungle is a different kind of heat treatment than making them fight an intense one-hour battle that tests their skills to the utmost.

There is a reason military units have mottoes and nicknames, expressing the collective identities forged in their first-blood experiences. These are expressions of unit-level combat doctrines.  Extrinsic distinctions, such as fighter pilots versus bomber pilots, or infantry versus cavalry, only matter for unforged units.

It is possible to apply these ideas beyond the battlefield, but most people go about it in a naive way: offsite leadership retreats, ropes courses, and the much-satirized trust fall.

Real forging-by-fire in business happens through such experiences as launching a product together, being laid off together, banding together in a coalition to defeat a sociopathic executive, and so forth.

There is another reason forged groups are interesting: they can be treated as individuals for all practical purposes. The complexities of group dynamics don’t really enter into the picture. You can think in terms of group archetypes, doctrines and narratives.

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.

Good, Bad and Ugly Circadian Heuristics

Here is a sampling of good, bad and ugly circadian heuristics. Good ones have robustly positive effects. Bad ones have robustly negative effects. Ugly ones are positive if properly qualified, but go negative easily if misunderstood or understood simplistically.

Good

1. Keep a notepad by your bed and write down thoughts that keep you awake
2. Exercise every day
3. Don’t watch more than an hour of TV a day
4. An apple a day keeps the doctor away (most people are likely to liberally interpret this as “get some fruit and vegetables in your daily diet)

Bad

1. Make a list of things to do every day, and do them (works for a minority of people, but for most people, this is far more likely to backfire)
2. Do the toughest thing on your to-do list first thing in the morning (the “Eat that Frog” strategy. In theory, getting a minor tactical win should fuel you up with motivation for the rest of the day. In practice, you are just as likely to fail or do a poor job due to not being a morning person, and killing the rest of your day).

Ugly

1. Don’t check email first thing in the morning: I want to like this idea, but I find it very inconsistent in its effects. Many kinds of work require an email pass to develop situation awareness. Many lifestyles rely on the minor spike of social energy that can come from email. I once knew a guy who’d wake up at 5 AM and do a couple of hours of solid creative work and then an hour of yoga before letting email (and “real life”) hit. The minority of people who can set up their lives to make this happen is miniscule.
2. Designate one day a week when you can eat whatever you want: this one often accompanies diets. Unfortunately, emotional eating is a fact of life, and it doesn’t just cover feeling better when you are depressed. You may binge on pizza and beer on a day when you are attempting a marathon work session (such as during a heavy lift). Being doctrinaire about an important self-control variable like food is never a good idea.

The Game of Daily Ugly 

When a heuristic is ugly, it means you have to think about whether to use it on a given day. Even if you have a default position about it (either using it or not using it), exception days are nearly as frequent as days when you let the default ride.

So thinking about whether to use a given ugly heuristic on a given day creates a game of daily tactical maneuvering based on whether necessary/sufficient conditions are met or not. If you don’t play this game well,  daily life dissolves into chaos.

I call this the game of “Daily Ugly.” It is exhausting.

It is better to adopt a few good daily heuristics, and limit your use of ugly heuristics, so you don’t have to play the game of Daily Ugly everyday. But it is important to increase your use of ugly heuristics gradually, because they generally cover more complex situations than the good or bad ones. No pain, no gain. If you only use good heuristics, you’ll stabilize at happy mediocrity.

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.

Here’s an example of the sort of lesson you get. Kasparov recounted a phase in his career when he was so dominant and so experienced that young players tried the strategy of trying very unusual, little-studied variations, in the hope of neutralizing Kasparov’s experience. Turned out to be nearly always a bad move. Kasparov’s conclusion: those unusual variations were unusual and rare for a reason, they mostly suck. When a domain of practice has as long a history as chess does, you can be fairly sure that if some patterns don’t show up much, it’s more likely because people have concluded they don’t work, rather than people having missed innovation opportunities.

There are plenty of other such anecdotal lessons.

If the book has one flaw, it is the lack of conceptual generalization. Kasparov manages half the job very well: getting rid of the chess-specific elements in the wisdom. But he doesn’t really finish the job by offering constructs or concepts that make it easier to apply in other domains. You kind of have to do that yourself, using the raw material of all his individual insights, presented somewhat unsystematically.

I haven’t finished the book yet, but I am taking notes to incorporate in the next edition of Tempo.  So far I’ve been very pleased to discover that Kasparov’s wisdom, drawn from decades of high-level practice, strongly validate my own more armchair-inspired ideas.

For many of us, desks are where a lot of life happens. I realized about a year ago that psychologically, there are two different types of desks, which most people combine into one physical desk.

The two types are creative desks and administration desks.

Even if you have multiple desks (at home and at the workplace for instance) chances are, you combine both psychological types in each.

Creative desks are where you do serious maker work. Writing, coding, design, pen-and-paper math, spreadsheet analysis and so forth.

Administration desks are where you do all the overhead stuff. Expense reports, invoicing, book-keeping, contract signing, faxing, filing, travel arrangements, GTDing, certain kinds of email and calendaring, and so forth.

The two don’t go well together because people who get a high off  creative work are generally depressed by administration work, and vice-versa.  Basic systems and processes are also different around the two desks. If you consider emotion/energy aspects and system-process aspects, you could say that the two types represent very different field-flow complexes, with different tempos. Mixing them up results in a cacophony.

So how can you cope with both kinds of work? The solution is to separate the psychological desks physically to the extent you can afford to.

If you are like most people, you don’t have an administration assistant. At best you share an admin with a dozen or more people, and the person is more like an administration coach and facilitator rather than a true brings-you-coffee type assistant. If you are a free-agent, and you have a virtual assistant, chances are, you can only carve out a small piece of the administration pie (calendaring say) to outsource.

Paper is a big factor in an administration desk even today. As a relatively new independent consultant, I have to constantly be printing off, signing and scanning contracts and NDAs,  mailing paper checks to my bank, filing away paper documents (there is still a significant fraction of work that cannot be done digitally for practical or legal reasons).

I don’t mind admitting I hate this work. I thought going free agent would free me from the paperwork and bureaucratic hassles of a paycheck job, but I am discovering (rather stupid of me not to anticipate this), that you actually have to deal with more paperwork and bureaucratic hassles.  I am in the ugly phase of the growth of my business where I have enough going on to generate a lot of overhead, but not enough that I can afford to hire an assistant.

The first step in fixing your life is to separate the two desks.

The creative desk is very easy for most people. It is just your laptop. You can take it with you anywhere and work. Physically, my creative desk is whatever uncluttered surface I can set my laptop down on in a pleasant place. The only place that is excluded is my administration desk. In general, my creative desk of the day might be a random Starbucks table, a co-working location or a hotel room.

My administration desk is my home office. It’s a corner of my home office with a desk, a chair, a couple of shelves, a couple of fileboxes, a printer and a scanner. There are office supplies here: a stapler, pens, erasers, paper clips, mailing supplies.  Administration desks can be shared among multiple people, so long as each person has separate room for paper inboxes and filing.

Since I dislike administration work, I have to literally force myself to do an administration-desk session now and again.

I once tried to eliminate the home desk altogether, and discovered that administration work is simply not very portable. You cannot carry all you need to Starbucks. So you need a static location. On business trips, I simply defer administration work by dumping relevant material into a folder in my backpack, until I get back.

There are times when I wish for a fixed creative desk either: large, with big screens, a large writing/drawing surface (maybe even an easel), good lighting, a whiteboard, and an armchair nearby for reading, armed with a coffee or single malt. This is really a studio.

So my ideal work situation would be an administration office, staffed by a part-time administrative assistant who comes in physically (my life wouldn’t benefit much from a virtual assistant) a couple of times a week, and where I can also do my own administration work when needed. There would be a completely separate (other end of the home would be ideal) studio. I’d spend maybe 15% of my time in the administration office, 35% in the studio and 50% mobile, working at a cafe or something.

Unfortunately I move too often and cannot yet afford this kind of set-up. But if you can, you should get yourself set up this way.

There are some ideas that keep popping up. They’re like Rome. All roads lead there, and you end up finding different viewpoints for the idea depending on the path you take.

The Maker-Schedule/Manager Schedule idea from Paul Graham is one such. It may be his most fertile idea.

Once you get used to thinking of work-tempo management around the idea of two fundamental frequencies (4 hour maker upcycles and 1 hour manager upcycles) you have a  framework for analyzing many different types of creative class work. One conclusion I’ve reached is that if you do both kinds of work, you’ll end up working 6-hour days. Here’s why.

The industrial era workforce (laborers and supervisors) invented the 12-hour day, which later got negotiated down to the 8-hour day. It was a limit set primarily by raw energy levels. Even supervisors were basically in very physical roles. Only business owners did what we would recognize today as creative-class work: letter-writing, working with ledgers, meetings, blueprints, and so forth.

The late industrial age achieved a clean division between the two basic types of creative-class work: making and managing. As Graham’s original essay points out, the workplace until the 90s was designed around manager schedules because they had the power and arranged schedules to suit themselves. There was enough slack that the maker-inefficiency was absorbed without fatal impact on profits.

When the entrepreneurial era started, the tables were turned. Manager schedules started adapting to maker schedules. Meetings came under attack. The idea of “Office Hours” grew. A subset of the maker-manager workgroup (which doesn’t specify size or relative proportions of the two archetypes) emerged: hacker-hustler, generally used to refer to a minimalist, balanced two-person maker-manager team.

In the hacker-hustler mode of entrepreneurial work, the hustler sees his/her job primarily as carrying out an offensive campaign in the marketplace and a defensive campaign to protect the hacker from disruptions to his/her schedule. Keep the money flowing, keep the meetings minimal.

But now, even this is not enough. It is increasingly hard to find great hacker-hustler pairings that create a lot of impact. So a lot of people try to do both. You have hackers trying to pinch-hit at hustling, and hustlers trying to pinch-hit at hacking.

These mixed schedules are very hard to develop and maintain in a disciplined way.

Having experienced all three (pure maker, pure manager and mixed), I’ve concluded, based on anecdotal evidence, that a pure maker on average, can sustain 8-hour workdays indefinitely, provided there is no managerial interference. Pure managers can generally sustain 12-hour days for long periods (this is because many meetings allow you to relax instead of being “on”).

But a mixed maker+manager schedule seems to hit its ceiling at about 6 hours. This is often a 3-2-1 pattern. A 3-hour session of maker-work, a 2-hour block of messy mixed work (such as email), and a 1-hour meeting.

If you are forced to do both kinds of work, try to break them out by entire days. If you cannot, and end up with a lot of 6-hour mixed days, you’ll be somewhere between 75% to 50% as productive as on pure-mode days.

This is an idea that simply refuses to go away. Ever since the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and its debunking in the original naive form, the idea that language shapes thought keeps popping up. Now the behavioral economists weigh in to show that decision-making changes when you switch languages. The research is reported in a Wired article, Thinking in a Foreign Language. 

This looks like it is primarily about the mere fact of shifting gears to a different language causing greater deliberation. But I strongly suspect there are going to be patterns related to mental model construction and use in the to and from languages as well (i.e., specific ordered language pairs, (A, B), will likely have measurable and characteristic effects on the nature of decision-making).

You’d need more subtle tests for that though.

The researchers next tested how language affected decisions on matters of direct personal import. According to prospect theory, the possibility of small losses outweigh the promise of larger gains, a phenomenon called myopic risk aversion and rooted in emotional reactions to the idea of loss.

The same group of Korean students was presented with a series of hypothetical low-loss, high-gain bets. When offered bets in Korean, just 57 percent took them. When offered in English, that number rose to 67 percent, again suggesting heightened deliberation in a second language.

To see if the effect held up in real-world betting, Keysar’s team recruited 54 University of Chicago students who spoke Spanish as a second language. Each received $15 in $1 bills, each of which could be kept or bet on a coin toss. If they lost a toss, they’d lose the dollar, but winning returned the dollar and another $1.50 — a proposition that, over multiple bets, would likely be profitable.

When the proceedings were conducted in English, just 54 percent of students took the bets, a number that rose to 71 percent when betting in Spanish. “They take more bets in a foreign language because they expect to gain in the long run, and are less affected by the typically exaggerated aversion to losses,” wrote Keysar and colleagues.

The researchers believe a second language provides a useful cognitive distance from automatic processes, promoting analytical thought and reducing unthinking, emotional reaction.

Grand narratives are probably the most frequently mentioned subject in reactions I get to Tempo, even though I carefully restricted myself to individual narratives in the book. Apparently the urge to apply narrative models to collectives is irresistible. Several readers have gone ahead and sort of hacked the narrative models I discuss in Tempo, and applied them to grand narratives. To be frank, I don’t completely understand most of these attempts. I know of applications to unconventional crisis response, the political process in Honduras, the history of Western art, and the history of debt/finance.

But as I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I am treading carefully here.  I’ve learned something from each hacking attempt people have told me about (do share if you’ve tried this sort of thing), and I’ve made two experimental attempts myself: applying the model to 19th century American business/technology history and on a smaller scale, to software projects. I am starting a third experiment: applying narrative analysis to wannabe-Silicon-Valley tech hubs like Boulder and Las Vegas. But overall, I am not satisfied that my models (or anyone else’s) are good enough yet.

But let me try and lay out the problem here, and have you guys weigh in.

From Narrative Hacking to Narrative Engineering

Narratives are a hot topic right now, and a whole bunch of people seem to be jumping in with vague approaches to applying storytelling to everything from business strategy to community development.  The big market is at the level of collective entities, not individuals. If I had a truly credible killer formula for applying narrative theory to cities, companies and nations, I’d probably get rich quickly.

The problem, simply stated, is to develop conceptual models that frame large-scale collective decision making in narrative terms, and effective approaches to synthesis and better decisions based on storytelling.

Anyone who tells you they know how to do this is either clueless or lying. I’ll point out some of the hard parts of this problem later in the post. I am personally most interested in the first part of the problem. I’d be happy with a good account of collective narratives, even if they aren’t particularly useful as prescriptions.

Call this vision narrative engineering. Something that represents a grown-up version of the sort of random Grand Narrative hacking that we’re all doing right now. We’ll still need a hacker ethos at the edge of narrative theory, but right now it is all edge, no core.

The State of the Art

The state of the art today in applied narrative theory is a mix of informal storytelling craft, uncritically ported from literary theory, quite a lot of cynical (or just plain stupid) snake-oil, and a great deal of self-absorbed childishness (people basically attempting to solve tough problems by writing children’s stories about them at leadership retreats).

Applied narrative theory is probably best developed (but not codified) around brand narratives, but frankly, I’ve been unimpressed by even the best examples there. There is something fundamentally superficial about how how advertising agencies approach the problem.

I’ve been tempted more than once to develop a quick-and-dirty e-book+seminar offering along the lines of “How to develop a Grand Narrative for your brand.” But fortunately a certain amount of intellectual snobbery has been keeping me honest and resistant to such expedient pandering.  I suppose I am going to pay the cost of such snobbery. I am bad at navigating fads even when I accidentally time a table-stakes contribution right, as I appear to have around narratives. It is possibly dumb of me to tread so cautiously instead of jumping in with both feet and applying the ideas in Tempo to everything in sight.

But oh well. I think I prefer tortoise strategies to hare strategies when it comes to narrative. I’d like my ideas to still be worth something in 50 years, even if it means I make much less money off the book. Because narrative is fundamentally a worthwhile subject that deserves to be taken seriously. Not sacrificed to the fadoconomy.

Why Grand Narrative Theory Matters

There is also a better reason to take it slow and steady in developing narrative theory, particularly Grand Narrative theory. This stuff is genuinely hard to think about. It is at least as hard as science. Narrative is where the major humanities subjects —  psychology, sociology, history and literary theory among them — come together. The adjective Grand is justified. This is the stuff of Grand Unified theories (humanities GUTs).

Isolated explorations aside, we are only just starting to think about narrative systematically. Postmodernism was the first genuinely disciplined stab at the subject (a pretty lousy one in my opinion, but still serious and credible, with some genuine accomplishments). If the subject is as hard as I think it is, it will take a couple of hundred years to mature to the point where we can do meaningful things with civilization-scale Grand Narratives. But we should be able to make a meaningful dent at smaller scales even today.

Those of us interested in this stuff also owe it to ourselves and our intellectual opponents (primarily behavioral economists and other radical empiricists) to construct really solid and rigorous ideas around narrative. The rigor does not have to be the kind of empiricist-academic rigor that anti-narrative thinkers believe in, but it has to be equally tough-minded and unsentimental, and represent an equal amount of intellectual labor by equally smart people.

We don’t have to convince (say) Tyler Cowen or Nicholas Nassim Taleb that we’re on to something. That divide may be too wide to bridge in this century. But we should be able to convince ourselves that we’re building something equally solid that’s worthy of engaging in a dialectical struggle with the anti-narrative world for a century or two.  That we’re on course to graduate from alchemy to chemistry.

I think the models we have today are a good starting point, but far from sufficient to serve as a foundation for Grand Narratives. They explain perhaps 30% of the phenomenology of individual narrative decision-making that interests me, but only about 10% when it comes to collective narratives.

The Contours of the Problem

Going from narrative to Grand Narrative is a scaling problem. There are conceptual issues as well as pure scale issues.

I first encountered a good characterization of this individual-to-collective scaling problem in the philosophy of action/AI literature around intentions.

The classic Bratman Belief-Desire-Intention model is great for thinking about individual decision makers, but there are tricky problems when you jump to collectives, especially if you are trying to define things with sufficient formal rigor to support AI projects. Here is a good 1992 paper by Bratman if you want a starting point for exploration. I am sure there’s been more in the 20 years since.

Two solutions that have been pursued by the philosophy/AI community (I haven’t kept up) are the following. The first is to think in terms of the abstraction of “collective intentions.” The second is a trickier approach that relies on the distinction between “Intent To” and “Intent That.” The former refers to intentions to be pursued by the agent holding the intention, while the latter is a sort of supporting intention. I intend to make dinner tonight, I intend that X is the next President.

The value of the latter approach is that it finesses the dangers of reification. You don’t need to think in terms of abstract “collectives” and deal with thorny issues around what it means for a construct like a “nation” to hold a belief or intention. The cost is greater complexity at the primitive level, and messier models for the calculus of alignment.

Agent-based modeling has explored a ridiculous amount of this territory with simulation models, but the subject lacks a meaningful metaphysics. Much of what has been done (including my own minor contributions to multi-agent theory) has been a little too practical-minded to be philosophically interesting or applicable to human culture. It is mostly useful for things like swarming UAVs and robots.

The problem of scaling intention theory and notions of agency to collectives is one of the conceptual challenges for a theory of Grand Narrative as well. I am inclining towards the former strategy. I think it is safe to reify “nation” or “business” into collective constructs and apply archetype-thinking to them. So Uncle Sam might be the hero of the Manifest Destiny Grand Narrative that spanned the century between the Civil War and World War II. There are of course serious and tricky traps hidden in this process, but it is somewhat useful most of the time.

There are other elements to the problem. An obvious one is to define the scale at which the adjective “Grand” applies. Another obvious one is how to aggregate the data from individual enactments. If you had a corpus of 1000 oral histories (say stories of startup exits told by founders), how would you roll them up into a Grand Narrative?

Then there is the problem of named and nameless agents in the narrative. Is there a conceptual difference between the Founding Fathers and their plebian contemporaries in the American Grand Narrative? Is it a matter of ideology (Howard Zinn versus David Hackett Fischer vs. Stephen J. Ambrose), or are there ideology-neutral things to be said?

And how do micro and Grand narratives interact? I took one experimental stab at illuminating the question in my previous post on nuclear trigger doctrines, distinguishing the relative roles of the President (a micro-narrative figure) and the rest of the military infrastructure (which I modeled with a reified Godzilla archetype).

And before I close, I should mention what seems to be a pet theme with a few people: connecting narratives to fractals. I mentioned in passing in the book that the Double Freytag model could be fractalized, but I didn’t pursue it. I found that it didn’t really add enough value to justify the additional effort for individual narratives. But fractal models are obviously more interesting for coarse-aggregate collectives enacting Grand Narratives. But fractal concepts come with their own problems. Again, many are rushing in where I am, for various reasons, very wary.

Like I said, this stuff isn’t as easy as you might think.

Sample Problems

I am starting my thinking with a set of three sample Grand Narrative analysis problems. You may want to think about them too.

The first is small, crucible-sized groups of less than about 12. An example is the cast of the Lord of the Rings or the members of a small startup. For the former, we clearly have at least 3 Campbellian monomyths embedded in the story. Frodo, Aragorn and Gandalf each have an encounter with a dark unknown force of death (the spider, the forest with the ghosts and the Balrog respectively).  In a typical startup, the Hacker may have an encounter-with-death moment (perhaps the first huge traffic spike) and the Hustler might have his own encounter-with-death (the train-wreck VC pitch perhaps).

How does this “band of heroes” set of subplots fuse together to form a collective-narrative? How do reified archetypes appear?

The second is things like sports teams and the tribes that form around them and sometimes get institutionalized, with the institutions manifesting archetypal qualities (like the Hogwarts houses). What is the story of the Wolverines versus the Buckeyes in Grand Narrative terms (this is the football rivalry between my alma mater, the University of Michigan, and Ohio State).

The third problem is large in terms of scale of agency, but small in terms of time: things like acute crisis response (like Katrina) or the city of London coming together to host the Olympics.

These are not easy problems. I am not going to offer facile answers. But I am thinking quite hard about them.

We use the phrase nuclear option rather casually as an everyday metaphor for highly consequential, irreversible and consciously triggered decisions. But chances are, you’ve never actually considered how the actual nuclear option is managed. The turning of this one little key — the picture is of an an actual nuclear trigger –  is easily the most analyzed decision in history. The design of the decision process around it is one of the greatest feats of narrative engineering every accomplished. That the trigger has  (knock on wood) not been pulled since World War II is an engineering accomplishment comparable to the Moon landing.

The nuclear option is the most extreme example of a special kind of decision narrative that I call a trigger narrative: one built around a major decision requires an explicit triggering action after all the preparation is done: things like proposing marriage, submitting a manuscript to an editor or issuing a press release. Not all major decisions are framed by trigger narratives, but for those that are, the nuclear trigger narrative has much to teach.

In Tempo I focused on narrative-driven decision-making: managing the stream of individually inconsequential, but cumulatively consequential and irreversible, decisions that make up our lives. In this stream, true “fork in the road” trigger moments are actually quite rare.

But where a trigger does exist, the challenge is to script a narrative around it that reduces it to the equivalent of a coin toss. An absolutely pure decision-fork where all relevant information has already been factored in as intelligently as possible, leaving you with only a stark leap of faith into an unknown-unknown future. When the moment comes, there should be no more arguments left to debate. No cost-benefit calculations left to make, no probabilities left to estimate. No personality issues or psychological factors left to consider. No moral or ethical issues left to ponder. Just you, a trigger and a future where the unknowable consequences are the most important ones.

So let’s talk about trigger narratives in terms of the building blocks of narrative-driven decision-making: archetypes, doctrines, tempo, key climactic events and so forth. I’ll be focusing specifically on the American trigger narrative during the Cold War.

Speak Softly and Carry a Big Stick

Perhaps the single most important factor in the design of a trigger narrative is to model the main decision-maker with an appropriate archetype. Truly consequential decisions cannot be trusted to a wildcard personality. Trigger narratives have to be designed around a specific assumed personality (or related range of personalities, from hawk to dove in this case). When multiple people occupy the role of the decision-maker over time, they must conform to that archetype as closely as possible even if it goes against their grain. What’s more, those affected by the consequences of the trigger being pulled — the Soviets in the case of the Cold War trigger — must believe in the archetype. This point has rarely been emphasized in nuclear deterrence theory: credible deterrence includes credible central archetypes.

A remarkable feature of the American nuclear trigger narrative is how contrary the central archetype is to common perceptions of Americans: loud, boastful, impatient and ready-fire-aim citizens of a violent country.

Yet, when it comes to nuclear posture, the trigger-pulling archetype that the world has come to believe is best described by Teddy Roosevelt’s uncharacteristically subtle dictum: to rule the world, one must speak softly and carry a big stick.

This archetype is evident in the nuclear decision process, and is expressed by the two critical pieces: the President who officially pulls the trigger, and the rest of the nuclear launch infrastructure, with its human and mechanical moving parts, which constitutes the gun. The President speaks softly, the nuclear infrastructure is the Big Stick.

I have been to over a dozen Air and Space museums in the US, and they are usually not shy about loudly proclaiming their presence.  You’d never mistake the Smithsonian Udvar-Hazy Museum, the museum at Wright-Patterson AFB or even the Strategic Air and Space museum near Omaha for anything other than what they are: huge, impressive buildings containing huge, impressive war machines. If you randomly drove by, you’d definitely notice them. They are all distinctly American in character.

The Minuteman Missile National Historic Site outside of Rapid City, South Dakota (very near the historic trigger-happy Wild West town of Deadwood) is very different. If you don’t know to look for it, and understand what you are looking at, as you drive by on I-90, you are likely to miss it entirely.

In fact, even to get there, you have to drive to an isolated gas station at the entrance to the Badlands National Park, just off Exit 31 on I-90, and get yourself a ticket (free) from the small, squat ugly building next to the convenience store.  The gas station has no street address. It’s easiest to get to by plugging in actual coordinates into your GPS (43.833571,-101.900441). If it weren’t for the modest sign, you’d have no idea what it was.

Once you get your ticket, you drive back up the highway, take an exit, trundle down a dirt road and come to a flimsy chain link fence.

This is the Delta 01 Launch Control Facility (LCF). The location was never a secret, but it wasn’t exactly loudly publicized either. The Soviets knew where American silos were, and vice-versa. In fact, during the Cold War, many missiles were targeted at enemy silos rather than population centers.

I’ll get to what’s inside in a minute, but let’s take a quick look at the the actual big stick. When active, D-01 was the LCF for a squadron of Minuteman II missiles scattered all over South Dakota. One of these — Launch Facility Delta 09 — is another inconspicuous fenced-in compound off a few exits away. The site has no staff, just a sheaf of brochures by the gate and a number to call for a self-guided cellphone audio tour.

The compound is so chillingly understated, it feels surreal.  All around it you can see the vast American prairies, with cows and horses dotting the landscape. Nothing else.

And then you go in and look inside the glass-encased silo (I suppose the hatch was all-metal when it was operational).  This Minuteman II carried a W-56 warhead, of about 1.2 megatons. Or about a 100 times the size of the Hiroshima bomb (war history buffs, please correct me if I am wrong about the specifics).

The Doctrine of Brinkamnship

A classic idea in nuclear geopolitics is known as brinkmanship, a term coined by John Foster Dulles and perhaps best explained by Thomas Schelling, author of the Cold War classic Arms and Influence.

Brinkmanship is about presenting an opponent with a system designed to go out of control in predictable ways, with the opponent being responsible for the actions that cause the loss of control.

If that sounds irresponsible in the context of nuclear weapons, you haven’t thought it through. When practiced by irresponsible individuals like Kim Jong Il or Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, it is definitely irresponsible. But when you are dealing with (relatively) responsible democracies where the trigger finger is attached to a rational archetype like a speak-softly-and-carry-a-big-stick President, the only responsible way to use the nuclear option at all is via brinkmanship. Otherwise you might as well retire the weapons.

One way to understand it as follows: pulling the nuclear trigger is always a crazy decision, and if you want somebody to be influenced by the thought that you might actually make that crazy decision, he has to believe that the system is capable of getting to crazy, and that he has ways to prevent it.

Signalling Crazy

When a decision is as consequential as unleashing a 1.2 megaton/100 Hiroshima level of destruction, a visibly sane person threatening to use a 0/1 switch is useless. Your opponent will either believe you’ll never pull it, or believe you absolutely will and strike pre-emptively. One of the most brilliant elements of the nuclear trigger narrative was to make the central archetype believably decisive and rational (“speak softly/big stick”), but to make the process capable of gathering runaway irrational momentum. 

If you ever suspected that the Hollywood version — ominous sirens, flashing lights, tense standoffs between hawks and doves, and stern people announcing “We’re at DEFCON 5″ — was an exaggeration, think again. If anything, that’s something of an understatement. My guide — an actual retired trigger-finger officer — told me that there were not just the DEFCON levels, there was also a set of numbered Defense Posture levels from 1-9.

That graded series of threat assessment levels and posture levels are essentially about signalling levels of crazy that must be believed by both the people within the decision narrative and the people outside it.

Stand-up comics sometimes make jokes that make them look clueless to better-informed people. I recently heard one such comic joke about the threat-level color-coding used by the Department of Homeland Security since 9/11: all that Orange/Yellow stuff. His joke, what’s the point of those colors? What are we supposed to do differently? Ha ha.

That’s a perfect example of clueless humor from someone who does not really understand narrative-driven decision-making. The color coding from cooler to warmer colors serves simply to put you increasingly on edge, changing the tempo of the environment by modulating emotion. The DHS model is the doctrine of brinkmanship applied to deploying the citizenry against embedded terrorists. Faced with an unconventional terror threat, the White House needs a mechanism by which to rile up the citizenry all the way to the brink of panic, without sending it off the edge.

The nuclear trigger was designed similarly for the Cold War context. It is unique in that it is practically designed such that the only person who can cause it to be pulled is the enemy.  The human archetypes are mostly presented as sane. It is the system that can build up to crazy. As threat levels escalate and the posture gets increasingly aggressive, the probability of a single random event — like the captain of a front-line combat vessel firing at an enemy — snowballing into a pulling of the nuclear trigger should increase. In system-theoretic terms, the system gets closer to criticality. It’s pulse races, the systemic fight-flight response gathers momentum.

You’ve probably heard of the little 13th century ditty, for want of a nail, the kingdom was lost. Managing the nuclear trigger is all about having an opponent believe that the nail-to-kingdom path of destruction can be traversed very fast, and that his actions affect the probability that it will happen.

Crazy Breaking Out

A central idea in Tempo is that systems and processes (or more generally what I call fields and flows) are externalized mental models. One useful way to build a coarse, top-level model of a field-flow complex is to project an archetype onto it. Only one nation in the world has actually seen this lunatic unleashed: Japan. And one of their creative responses was the Godzilla character. Godzilla is the perfect impressionistic model of the nuclear-launch process.

The nuclear weapons infrastructure is the externalization of a single powerful mental model: keep Godzilla from breaking out. Or more precisely, make it so the only way Godzilla can break out is if the opponent chooses to break him out, and design the system to make that easier and easier as a situation escalates.

This is not inconsistent with the Big Stick metaphor. Godzilla is what you get when the Big Stick takes on a life of its own.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki were exceptional in ways besides being the first and only nuclear bombings. They also lacked proper trigger narratives. This is one reason why, even though the US was arguably the moral victor in the Pacific theater in World War II, we still feel some ambivalence about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They were the biggest sucker punches in history.

Deep down we realize they were not “fair” uses of nuclear weapons. The US was not really to blame. It took a couple more decades for the surreal idea of “fair” nuclear conflict to even get defined in terms of mature trigger narratives. It is hard to imagine a “fair” counterfactual for Hiroshima– perhaps the US could have removed the veil of secrecy around the Manhattan project late in the game and heavily publicized the last test explosions, signalling the start of brinkmanship; but it is unclear whether the Japanese military establishment would have known their lines in that script. You cannot dance if your partner does not know the moves.

Given that the nuclear trigger is basically pulled by a sane archetype within a narrative designed to build up to crazy, you can think of the design of systems and processes — or fields and flows — as the design of a mental asylum designed to keep a crazy systemic process in check, but not too in check. The opponent has to believe that Godzilla can escape and that he is part of the system of protections designed to keep that from happening.

Ask yourself this: when you think of nuclear weapons installations, what is your worst-case scenario? Terrorists breaking in and stealing the weapons? Enemy spies breaking in and sabotaging things, or merely stealing secrets of how the system runs?

The first scenario is not actually a very realistic one in America, but it is in other parts of the world. It would be far too complicated for a terrorist organization to actually break into a silo and get a warhead out of a live missile and escape with it.

You can call this class of scenarios, “crazy breaking in.” It is actually not that important.

The important class of scenarios is actually the other kind: “crazy breaking out.” These are the scenarios for which the system was originally designed.  So you need slippery-slope controls.

Slippery Slope Controls

Once you understand that the system is design to keep crazy in, but make it easier for the enemy to cause it to break out as a situation escalates, you look at its elements in a completely different way.

Here’s a picture of the control panel showing various stages in the launch sequence.

The apparent purpose — to prevent accidental launches or other dangerous errors — is actually secondary. The main purpose is to provide a calibrated series of steps to aid maneuvering on the brink. If that seems schizophrenic, it’s because it is.

There are (or rather, were, since this is the 1960s vintage process) multiple safety mechanisms. Launch commands had to be okayed by two geographically separated locations. There was a carefully scripted exchange of multiple encrypted messages to convey mission profile, targeting information and launch authorization. With each move, the system could be moved closer to the brink. Each side could read external signals showing how the other was moving towards or away from the brink.

When everything was ready, the two officers in the launch pod had to simultaneously turn their keys, within a few seconds of each other. The pod was designed so that if a rogue officer attempted to turn his key and then leap across the room to turn the other key, the other officer would have enough time to fight him. “Design for crazy breaking out” was evident even in the last step.

There are many other fascinating details involved in the launch process, and I am tempted to put in and comment on all the pictures I took during my visit, but I’ll stop here.

The basic point is this: the launch process is a nested set of Godzilla cages, which are unlocked one at a time.

The Trigger Narrative

If you try to frame the nuclear launch narrative using the Double Freytag model from the book, you can view the exploratory phase as the escalation of tension into the nuclear range. The cheap trick moment is the point at which the nuclear option is seriously contemplated. The sense-making part is the arraying of forces in preparation for brinkmanship rather than conventional warfare.

Then you have the tense valley, where nothing much happens, but tension increases. Surreal-normalcy descends, as everybody gets used to being in operational readiness around a nuclear decision.

And then, a threshold is crossed and steady escalation and active brinkmanship commences.  When all stages have been passed, it’s down to the President making one last decision. Two keys turn, and Godzilla steps out of his cage.

Nuclear Postures and Doctrines

Cold War nuclear posture and doctrine was entirely designed around a symmetric situation where both sides adopted similar rules for the game, with a certain level of assumed mutual visibility of brink-maneuvering.  The result, paradoxically, was four decades of tense peace, a detente. The trigger narratives were so effectively designed that things got to the brink only once.

The US Cold War nuclear posture derived directly from the Truman doctrine. The latter was a political rather than a military doctrine, but the nuclear option is essentially a political option, not a military one. The military doctrine was mostly a set of corollaries (involving ideas that derived from the basic containment model in the Truman doctrine, which I don’t have room to get into).

It is the only trigger so consequential that by default only the President, as Commander-in-Chief, can pull it. There is no delegation. There is no definition of a broad set of rules of engagement that allow others to pull the trigger at their discretion.

Nuclear Postures for post-Cold War Scenarios

The description in this post is mostly of historical interest. Cold War era nuclear postures and doctrines are increasingly obsolete today. They do not make sense in the cases of Iran or North Korea. They are not good frameworks to apply to a potential India-Pakistan nuclear conflict. Or even US-China for that matter.

The proliferation of smaller “tactical” nuclear weapons has also muddied a trigger narrative that is fundamental about strategic use by politicians (in the conventional military sense, not in my sense of the terms in Tempo). In a way, tactical nuclear weapons designed for contained damage are scarier than the big strategic warheads. There is a chance that they will some day be deployed for purely military reasons (such as bunker busting), but the result will be that a key psychological barrier will have been crossed, and the idea of nuclear weapons will start to seem dangerously normal. The whole world will edge a little closer to doomsday if that ever happens.

That said, we can still learn a great deal from the original example. What archetypes should the President conform to in the new era of unconventional warfare situations? Does “speak softly and carry a big stick” still work for unconventional threats? Is “caged Godzilla” a good perception to project to Al Qaeda or Iran? Is it even possible to script a trigger narrative that will work at all, or are the weapons obsolete because the narrative engineering is beyond us? What sort of “Islamic nuclear trigger narrative” is evolving in Pakistan and Iran?

We don’t really know. All indications are that these ideas haven’t been seriously updated in 30 years. I am sure the modern launch control centers are full of snazzy computers and advanced electronics, and look very different from D-01. I bet tons of intelligence is streaming into wall-sized situation room dashboard screens. But I am not convinced the narratives have been updated at all. I suspect the same old frames from the Dr. Strangelove era — mutually assured destruction, second-strike capability, launch detection, brinkmanship —  are being clumsily applied to new situations.  As a species, we have a great capacity for allowing technological advances and gloss fool us into believing that our thinking has evolved.

And so our demons slumber on.

I’ll stop here for now. One of these days, I’ll blog about other, less consequential trigger narratives, such as marriage, divorce, accepting and quitting jobs, moving to a new city or country, and so forth.  For now, I’ll leave you to ponder the surreal insanity that still lurks beneath the surface of our world.

I originally had a much lengthier and more ambitious take on nuclear trigger narratives in the works, but since I haven’t had time to research this as deeply as I’d have liked, I’ve flushed this post out in a preliminary form. If there is interest, I’ll develop these ideas more carefully.

At ALM Chicago last month, I did a talk titled Breathing Data, Competing on Code. It was a lot of fun, and a big part was applying ideas from Tempo to software development. I did this once before at the SoCAL Lean/Kanban meetup, but this time, I took the ideas in a significantly different direction. It’s an hour-long talk, so you’ve been warned.  The talk was pretty well-received, so looks like I am gradually improving at this talking-head game.

There are also quite a few bits that are somewhat interactive, so you may lose the thread during those parts.

I am always amused by time-management amateurs who have found a system that works for them and a few of their friends, and start imagining that they’ve created a perfect system.  ”Universal time management system” is the perpetual motion machine of the self-improvement industry.

The zeroth thing you need to know about personal time management is that in a certain theoretical sense, there are no universal  systems. Only calendar hacks. What’s more, you cannot pick some compendium of calendar hacks and easily sort out the ones that will work for you. You need to learn the art of calendar hacking.

That’s what this post is about: the fundamentals of calendar hacking. I’ll be straight with you: the ideas in this post are going to be somewhat tough to grasp if you haven’t already encountered them, but I’ll keep it non-technical and provide several hopefully illuminating examples along the way.

The key is diagrams like the one below.

Diagrams like this are known as empirical computational complexity phase transition diagrams in computer science. I’ll show you how to read and draw informal, non-technical versions in a minute, but the key idea behind them is that an impossibly hard scheduling problem is not impossibly hard everywhere and at all times.

The key to calendar hacking is separating out the hard and easy regimes and dealing with them differently. This is one of my favorite technical ideas, and my excuse for playing fast and loose with it, as I am about to, is that my heart is in the right place. I mentioned this idea in a footnote somewhere in Tempo, but I figured I ought to do a proper post on the idea.

Defining “Impossibly Hard”

The “impossibly hard” bit (which is why there are no universal systems) is a worst-case feature rather than a typical-case feature. And by impossibly hard I mean you wouldn’t be able to solve them even if you had all of Google’s ninjas hammering away at the solution for you on a 1,000,000-server farm.

That’s actually a pretty good metaphor. If somebody built a “what to do next” engine that looked like a search engine, you’d get an answer back pretty quickly most of the time, but for a subset, the engine would just hang instead of delivering an answer in time. The calendering engine would be of no use during your worst weeks.

Imagine if regular Google search behaved that way. Search (at least in the form Google has defined and offered it) is not impossibly hard in this sense. You always get some answer.

But there is good news. It turns out, you can usually isolate these worst cases by partitioning the space of instances of the problem in the right way.

Once you master this divide-and-conquer principle, calendar management will remain a hard problem (assuming you’re up to something worthwhile with your life). But at least you won’t waste time doing futile things, and you’ll be able to pick your battles as you hack away at your personal workflow. Let’s see how.

How Good Can it Get?

The first order of business is to get a realistic sense of how good your calendar management can get in your life. Some lives are just more hellish than others.

To do that we need a rough definition of a calendar-management problem. Here’s mine.

For an individual, a calendar management problem is the problem of deciding if and when to do each of an unending, somewhat unpredictable stream of varied work and opportunities coming at you, with various criteria determining the actual or potential value of each item in the stream. The work and opportunities may arise from your own ideas or from demands other people make on your time. It doesn’t matter for our purposes.

Usually, the value of doing something varies with when you decide to do it, making things even more complex. And there are usually hard and soft constraints besides the presence of pre-existing tasks on the calendar, that determine whether you can do something at a given time. For example, just because you are idle between flights at an airport does not mean you can finish your grocery shopping.

Here are three things you should know about how good it can get in general:

• Some calendar management problems are impossibly hard only if you want an optimal solution that makes the best possible use of your time in some appropriate sense.
• But you’re not out of the woods even if you are willing to give up on optimality and live with “good enough.” Some scheduling problems are impossibly hard even at the “good enough” approximation level.
• And some are near impossible even if you want to find any solution at all, even a terrible one.  Yes, sometimes your calendar can kill you.

Unfortunately, without formally modeling your life in mathematical terms, defining a formal version of your specific calendar management problem, and hiring a computer science PhD to do the formal analysis, there is no easy way to tell how good your life can get. But a good default answer is “not very.” Most realistic calendar management problems for working adults are going to be impossibly hard under worst-case conditions.

Fortunately, you can usually get a good sense of how good it can get by looking at people with similar life-and-work styles.

So it is useful to keep a variety of different examples in mind, when thinking about calendar management. I call these calendar archetypes. Let’s take a quick tour of a few before talking about how calendar hacking.

Some Calendar Archetypes

The definition of calendar management problems reveals the enormous range possible. A GP at a busy American medical practice has a much simpler calendar management problem than a venture capitalist, who in turn has an easier time than a busy CEO.

For a GP, both the difficulty and financial value of each case is confined within a relatively narrow range, since tough cases get kicked up to specialists and the fees for each visit are standardized by HMOs in America. It is enough to schedule based on severity of condition and a first-come-first-serve secondary principle. Furthermore, clinic hours can be easily partitioned from the rest of the schedule. Due to the need for specialized diagnostic equipment, regulations and social norms, people don’t generally ask doctors for complicated medical advice at random times. The actual work of being a GP may be hard, but the calendar management is not.

For a VC on the other hand, the potential value of a deal can vary hugely, and the difficulty of assessing a given deal can also vary hugely from no-brainer fantastic deals to valuable but complicated ones requiring tricky due diligence. It is also harder to separate obvious deal-flow work (entrepreneurs asking for meetings) from serendipitous opportunities that arise at unexpected times, or opportunities that need to actually be created (for example, by doing some backstage match-making).

A CEO has an even tougher problem, since everything is deeply coupled, and no single, simple mental model like “portfolio management” will serve to frame the problem of managing the calendar.

In case you think only people who make pots of money have difficult calendar management problems, it doesn’t get any easier on the down-and-out end of the spectrum. The difference is that for the latter, the problems are often not worth solving, financially speaking. Nobody has an incentive to care.

Consider a student trying to pick the right classes to maximize bang for the buck in the college experience, with a view to maximizing lifetime returns, a problem that is surprisingly similar to the problem of a VC picking deals to invest in. Historically, this problem has not been worth solving properly. These days, it is. There  is an increasingly valuable product waiting to be built here.

Or consider a homeless person in a new city, faced with the problem of deciding where to panhandle and when, taking into account foot and car traffic at different times of the day at different intersections, presence/absence of cops, local laws, the role of the local underworld in running life on the streets, and the generosity of locals.

This calendar management problem is surprisingly similar to the CEO problem. There is a great Hindi movie called Gardish that has a comedic subplot involving a Bombay beggar rising from a struggling solo operation to CEO running a city-wide organization of beggars. This problem probably will not be worth solving in the foreseeable future, even for a nonprofit, unless George Clooney takes an interest.

Some calendar management problems involve enough financial value that smart people will swarm them and make progress. Others don’t, and the people affected by those problems must simply suffer.

Phase Diagrams as Default-Switching Curves

A note to the cognoscenti here: suspend your craving for rigor for a bit. I will appropriately qualify all this hand-wavy stuff at the end.

When you take a problem like a calendar management system for a given broadly defined situation such as “CEO life,” you are faced with a bundle of instances.

For a GP, a natural unit of analysis is a patient visit. For a CEO, you need a periodic analysis session simply to define the units of analysis. It might be “meetings” or “trips” for instance.

But once you have a space of instances, you can view your life as a stream of such instances coming at you, that need to be handled. Sometimes the stream has one character, and at other times it has a different character.

“Character” is of course a loose, qualitative notion. For a calendar, you might use words and phrases like empty, full, messy, chaotic, packed, wide open, grueling, on-the-road, humming along and running smoothly to describe the character.

The basic problem in hacking a calendar is figuring out the single most important measurable variable that captures a key watershed distinction in the space of “characters” that your calendar can assume.

So the first thing you need to do is find some sort of “knob” in the space of instances, such that when you turn it from minimum to maximum, you get a class of easy problems, a narrow class of worst-case hard problems, and another, different class of easy problems.  So your work stream will always be in one of the two easy phases or the hard phase.

Then you figure out the likely default answers for the first and third phases. This is something like designing a triage system, but not quite. It’s more like designing two parallel triage systems.

The phase diagram is basically a switching curve from one default answer to another, when faced with a particular instance. That’s it. You figure out whether you are in one of the easy zones and follow a specified default calendar-management behavior if you are, and put in more computing effort if you are not.

You can loosely interpret the black line as the probability that the correct answer is one of the defaults and not the other, and the red line as the computing difficulty in coming to an answer that is likely to be right. Obviously if the probability is high that one of the defaults is right, the computing effort is low: you can just use the default (or some simple heuristic) and live with the low probability that you were wrong.

Typical Phase Diagrams

The specific tuning knob depends on the problem, but a good general candidate for calendar management problems is subscription level, the ratio of demands on your time to time available. This is the one illustrated in the first diagram.

As your calendar gets increasingly packed, you go from a default yes answer to new opportunities/work to a default no answer.

This probability of yes is almost 100% in the left half, and almost 0% in the right half, so you won’t go wrong very often by simply saying yes/no by default in those zones, respectively. Which means you just need to know which side you are on, and that you are reasonably far away from the danger zone.

When you have a set of work items and opportunities, if there’s nothing at all in the calendar, it’s easy enough to prioritize things in some meaningful order (like “most valuable first”).  Something usually beats nothing.

Equally, when the calendar is nearly completely packed and you are heavily oversubscribed, it is easy to discard most waiting tasks and opportunities, because they won’t fit in any available hole, and are unlikely to offer a higher value than something that’s already on your calendar.

The hard part is the transition zone, when your schedule is somewhere between X and Y% packed. The crucial insight is that this range tends to be relatively narrow. For your particular situation, the hard cases may lie between 130-140% oversubscription.  Above that, the answer is nearly always “can’t do it” and below that, it is nearly always, “yeah, I can take that on.”

In between, life is fiendishly hard.

Non-Typical Phase Diagrams

Subscription level is a good default tuning knob because most of us are neither permanently under-subscribed or over-subscribed, though we may go through temporary phases in each state. It is a variable that naturally wanders over its full range.

But when you are dominantly under or over-subscribed, you typically have to look for other variables. Be careful not to look only at obvious “scheduling” type variables involving time, money or energy in some form.

The tuning knob for a particular CEO’s schedule might be the volatility of the company’s stock for instance.

Meaningful diagnostic questions for saying yes/no to demands on calendar time might be “does it help manage the company?” when volatility is low, and “does it help manage stock market expectations?” when it is high.

I am totally making this up, since I’ve never managed a public company, but not out of thin air. This particular pair of defaults is suggested by the Jack Welch quote that “anyone can manage for the short term, and anyone can manage for the long term, the challenge is managing both at once.”

If you equate the two to managing stock price and managing the company (which almost by definition is managing it with a view to long-term health fundamentals), you get the following hypothetical phase diagram, which I suspect is true for a lot of Fortune 100 CEOs. On the left you prioritize company management stuff. On the right, you prioritize stock-price management stuff.

Simple, Wrong Answers to Oversubscription

A particularly valuable feature of the phase diagram approach is that it helps you avoid a common failure pattern that oversubscribed people are prone to.

They are so flattered by the demands on their time that they make up calendaring heuristics that fill up time in pleasant rather than effective ways.

1. A CEO might pack his/her calendar with meetings with top reports, big clients and other “important” people, and convince himself/herself that they are spending their time in the most valuable way possible. They might actually be filling up time in ways that make them feel “important.”
2. An in-demand speaker/writer/consultant may say yes to every invited talk/seminar, enjoying the adulation and fat speaking fees, studiously ignoring the possibility that the fad driving demand might pass next year.
3. A VC with a big pile of money to give away might stop seriously analyzing people and markets with care and begin to rely entirely on pitching rituals and performances to make decisions, an American Idol model.
4. A President might shy away from tough legislative battles and spend all his time managing popularity ratings and trying to outmaneuver opponents in Congress around easy battles, to earn political points.
5. A surgeon might pack the schedule with high-success-rate surgeries.

The shared pathology here might be called “resting on laurels.” A successful person (hence the oversubscription) simply milks the success by taking on only easy challenges.

There is no shortage of purely arbitrary prioritization principles to help you rest on your laurels.

The value of the phase-diagram approach is that it forces you to be sensitive to at least two different easy modes of operation separated by a tough mode. It forces you to extract at least one bit of actual intelligence from your surroundings.

If your system of calendar management has at least two different gears, and you encounter the occasional period of extreme chaos (the “hard” regime), you pass at least a basic test of thoughtfulness.

I already gave you one candidate tuning knob for the CEO case, but you might want to think about good knobs for the other four cases.

The “Hard” Zone

The hard zone, once you’ve identified it, cannot be handled in automated ways. You may not get optimality, “good enough” (what computer scientists call “satisficing”) or even feasibility when you are in that zone.

The best you can do is muddle along, sigh that it is “one of those weeks,” look for ways to just survive, and hope for the best.

Here’s a pointer though: if you find that you are always in the hard zone, you’re in deep trouble. 

The hard zone being hard means that you will make mistakes while you’re in it. In fact, in the heart of the hard zone, you are going to do no better than coin tossing. The calendaring part of your job can be outsourced to a dime.

Generally what makes life constantly hard is not that the individual instances of calendaring decisions are so hard in an absolute sense, but that there are simply so many of them, coming at you non-stop.  This means they must be solved faster. Any problem can be made impossible if you demand that it be solved faster and faster.

Occasionally you should make the super-human effort and try to do better than random, but in general, you should rearrange your life situation so that you get a full range of play in your calendaring. Simplify things so that you’ve got a full phase diagram.

In fact, if you don’t mind getting absurdly meta, you can even think in terms of a phase diagram of tuning knobs, with the tempo of your life as the tuning knob. If the tempo of calendaring decisions coming at you is sufficiently sedate, subscription levels will nearly always work as a tuning knob. If you speed up any life sufficiently, nothing will work, and you’ll do no better than a coin in deciding what to do/not do.

A Concluding Example

Take my own situation. I find Paul Graham’s Maker Schedule/Manager Schedule a useful guide in managing my time. The defaults are to manage your time in 4-hour blocks (Maker time) or 1-hour blocks (Manager time), and deal with others differently whether they are themselves in Maker or Manager mode.

In my own life, I’ve had periods when I’ve been largely a Maker, and periods when I’ve been largely a Manager. Those were fairly easy to deal with. It was also easy to deal with periods when I had both types of activity going on in my life, but they were separated by infrequent switches. When I used to work a day job at Xerox, my work-day was mostly Manager time, while my personal life was mostly Maker time (writing).

Now, as a free agent, the two are getting mixed up in very muddy ways. My calendar was in an “easy” Maker-dominant zone in the past year, when my consulting load was relatively low, allowing me to easily separate writing and consulting time, and within both, Maker and Manager types of work.

Now that I am getting busier, I am heading towards the “hard” zone. I am not so busy or rich that I can afford to just say “No” to new interesting gigs, but on the other hand, my life is complicated enough that saying “Yes” or “No” is much harder. It’s not just a case of deciding whether the project interests me. I also have to figure out whether I can fit it into my life without everything going to hell.

I still try to do Maker/Manager work separation. My most basic time management decision these days is asking, thrice a day (when I get up, after lunch, and in the evening) whether I am going to try and Make something for the next 4 hours, Manage a bunch of things for the next 4 hours, or simply slack off and let myself dissipate energy by idling away on Facebook, Quora or reading randomly. The last category is important, it represents relaxation, social time and general situation awareness upkeep.

For me currently, subscription level still works as my tuning knob, but I am getting just oversubscribed enough that I need a different knob. I am currently struggling to figure it out.

I’ll stop here, as far as the main post goes. If you’ve already discovered this principle in your own life, I’d be curious to hear about tuning knobs that have worked for you.

Note to Technical Types

You can completely ignore this section if you are not familiar with computational complexity theory. If you are, you’re probably a bit mad about how I’ve mangled rigorous ideas.

If you some familiarity with recent research, you will have recognized the ideas in this post as being loosely derived from the work that started around 1991 with Where the Really Hard Problems Are by Cheeseman, Kanfesky and Taylor and Finding Hard Instances of the Satisfiability Problem by Cook and Mitchell. I kept up with the literature until about 2005.  There has been a flood of work in the two decades since the original findings, and phase diagrams have been developed for many NP-Complete/NP-Hard problems that map to everyday scheduling problems, including k-SAT, Hamilton Circuit, Traveling Salesman and so forth.

To my knowledge, nobody has figured out a theoretical model around this stuff or systematic ways to parametrize problem spaces and discover phase transition boundaries. I expect the latest editions of classic complexity texts probably have a more digestible technical treatment of the subject of empirical complexity. If there has been serious progress, somebody please educate me.

Three caveats are needed for the kind of loose application I’ve outlined here.

The first is that many apparently thorny problems, when you actually analyze them, aren’t NP at all, and the phase diagram model is moot. You can simply develop good polynomial time algorithms to solve even the worst cases.  My justification for making the leap of faith that typical personal planning and scheduling problems are NP is that most scholars in the field seem to do the same (in fact there was a remark along these lines in a paper that I cannot recall; I think it was a Dean/Kambhapati paper). The real-time constraint is key here.

The second caveat is that the problem space parametrization that somebody might come up with through an informal qualitative analysis might turn out to be not be the right one at all, upon further analysis. The leap of faith I make here is that for a sufficiently large number of people evolving a set of hacks through imitation and tweaking, the process can probably be relied upon to pop out good “folk” candidates (such as stock price volatility for a CEO’s life).

And finally, the third caveat is that an informal analysis, even if it somehow uncovers the right problem space parameterization, will certainly not yield usable bounds for the phase transition zone. Actually figuring out (say) oversubscription levels that mark the threshold is likely to be a seriously hard problem.  But for informal use, I don’t think this is a problem. Chances are, with practice applying a particular tuning-knob heuristic, the decision-maker will develop good intuitions for when he/she is near or far away from the phase transition zone.

With those caveats, I think this informal DIY empirical complexity analysis model is a fairly safe tool even in the hands of people without the appropriate technical background.

If not, oh well. Sue me.