Tempo: timing, tactics and strategy in narrative-driven decision-making

I describe this book "Tempo: Timing, Tactics and Strategy in Narrative Decision Making" as insightful and though provoking. It is a book that will take those of us wanting to improve situation awareness and decision making under pressure on a journey to developing, creating and nurturing the attributes and skills necessary in doing so.The book is influenced by Carl von Clausewitz, Alfred Thayer Mahan, John Boyd, Gary Klein and Malcolm Gladwell to name a popular few who study and develop decision makers. The author blends these influences with his thoughts and insights on decision making in an outstanding way telling me he understands the big picture, the moral, mental and physical dimensions decisions are made in and he does so very nicely.The author of Tempo, Venkatesh Rao a man I have never met or heard of prior to the book, began research into decision making that was funded by the United States Air Force and concerned key concepts such as mixed initiative command and control models: complex systems where humans, autonomous robotic combat vehicles and software systems share decision making authority. This research led Rao to this insightful 157 page book, packed full of useful information all law enforcement and security professionals should read.The book is also very much inspired by the decisions of everyday life and the examples he uses to make his points come from the arena of everyday, making the sometimes difficult to explain lessons (emotion and timing, situation awareness, fluidity what he calls going with the flow, pace setting, dissonance, and the skill of putting it all together with a sense of timing needed in solving complex problems, very approachable, understandable and transferable to training programs and the street."There is a tide in the affairs of men. Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their life. Is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat; And we must take the current when it serves, Or lose our ventures." ~Julius Cesar, Act IV, Scene 3Rao, has great insights into how we develop mental models and their usefulness in developing situation awareness he describes as; "our subjective sense of the immediate relevance and quality of an active mental model: an unwieldy dynamic and partially coherent construct that represents our understanding of a particular class of situations." In short our "orientation" or how we individually and collectively see a situation. This in my view expounds on the importance of experience and lessons learned. Lessons learned from every day interaction. There is power in leveraging every lesson!In the chapter he titled Narrative Rationality described as; "an approach to decision making that starts with an observation that is at once trivial and profound: all our choices are among life stories that end with our individual deaths. Surprisingly, this philosophical observation leads to very practical conceptualizations of key abstractions in decision making, such as strategy and tactic, and unique perspectives on classic decision-science such as risk and learning." Orientation and the factors Boyd discuss that shape and reshapes orientation; cultural traditions, genetic heritage, previous experiences, new information and analysis and synthesis all play a roll here. He goes on to say that the simple view "calculative rationality" or planning is not wrong, it's just limited to simple situations that fits one or more of your existing mental models very well. In complex situations, planning based on such models is merely a training exercise to sample the space of possible worlds, get a sense of the complexities involved, and calibrate your responses appropriately. This is what Eisenhower when he said, "plans are nothing, planning is everything." He also quotes Marc Anderson the creator of the Web browser Netscape:"The process of planning is very valuable, for forcing you to think hard about what you are doing, but the actual plan that results from it is probably useless."Narrative rationality is based on a very different foundation, the structure of stories."Narrative rationality is the ability to think, make decisions, and act in ways that make sense with respect to the most compelling and elegant story that you can improvise about a developing enactment."This is a powerful chapter that breaks down the differences between linear processes (calculative rationality) and the non-linear (narrative rationality) very important to understand in real time dynamic encounters.The importance of the explorer mentality is highlighted in the book."We have identified learning, in the most general sense, as the process of constructing a mental model from scratch. This process is open ended and has no goals beyond hardwired biological ones. It is unsupervised, uncertain, unbounded, unstructured, and mostly unrewarding. In more familiar terms, there are no teachers, safety belts, syllabi, grades or prizes.Given these characteristics, it should not be surprising that it is a very disorientation and stressful phase in a deep story. Things you don't know that you don't know (unknown-unknown beliefs) dominate the situation."This above attributes should sound very familiar to those in the law enforcement and security world as they permeate many encounters and interactions as we accord with an adversary.He discusses entropy, the friction and difficulty of putting it all together as we attempt to observe, orient, decide and act in unfolding circumstances."The anxiety and incoherence of exploration cannot increase indefinitely. Whether or not we have enough information to act effectively, the sheer cognitive stress of exploration makes us seek relief, even when it takes the form of safe play among children. Our minds demand relief, and this leads to the moment I call the cheap trick, when the trajectory of increasing dissonance and entropy is arrested and turned around. The moment occurs when you recognize exploitable patterns in the raw material you have collected in your exploration.Picture the stress level you have as you respond to a call and approach a potentially dangerous situation. Emotions are high, situation awareness is low. Who is setting the pace, the "TEMPO" of the encounter, you or your adversary? Now! How do you disrupt the flow and change the TEMPO? Do you even recognize the changes in TEMPO? If so is the TEMPO change to your advantage or disadvantage? What decision will you make next? Will that decision be based on some policy and procedure or will it be based on you ability to explore and gain more information before you act? Will your next action be one that is beneficial allowing you to safely and effectively solve the problem or will it be a decision that is detrimental to your safety? You are there. You have to act. Will the action you take be based on decision making abilities you posses, the tactic you choose or will it be based on an emotional response, luck or beating the odds?"As you may have guessed by my introducing the notion of entropy into our discussion, we are working towards a way to correct this unnatural state of affairs. We are going to start thinking of time in terms of a unidirectional phenomenon, entropy. It won't be even or continuous, but as we will see, those requirements are only critical for calculative rationality. Narrative rationality necessitates a bumpy, uneven ride."The book, Tempo: Timing, Tactics and Strategy in Narrative-Driven Decision Making will help you learn the problems and solutions that surround decision making. In my view if you take the time to read it, digest and think about the numerous concepts that surround decision making exposed in this book, you be much safer and much more effective on the street. I highly recommend this book. Be sure to check out [...] as well.

On the surface, Tempo is a book about making decisions using stories. More deeply, Tempo is a call to revisit how you relate to the world: whether you are cooking a meal, driving a high-powered business meeting, guiding a career, or dealing with the next stage your life, you can use both your felt sense and intellectual awareness to harmonize and even master the experience.Dr. Rao begins with an exploration of the various fundamental elements of the organism's experience of tempo. It's felt emotion is an essential sensor for cultivating situation awareness -- you can get a feel for what's going on in a situation by connecting to the feeling tone. The organism interacts with his environment in a set of key relationship modes: merging, going with the flow, pace-setting, and disruption -- knowing which mode you are in can inform your decision of what to do next.In this exploration he develops a Vocabulary of Thought, sketching a glossary of mental models of the self, others, and situations. He helps us make sense of how these mental models interact in the mind and how they externalize into the outside world, manifesting through Enactments.All of these ideas build toward the intentional key insight of the book: by developing the awareness of and leveraging the structure of the Deep Stories in an otherwise seemingly amorphous flow, one can more creatively and skillfully navigate the experience. You can make better decisions if you look at life through the lens of a story. Rao calls this approach Narrative Rationality.The book provides a patchwork of loosely anchored frozen steps across the stream of sense-making. It is a survey, not an exhaustive treatment. It is a heavy lift: a consilience of military thought, culinary arts, software development, the creative process, organization theory, psychology, systems and control theory, metaphysics, economics, improvisation and poetry.Tempo is more than theory. Rao sprinkles exercises throughout the book inviting the reader to not just contemplate but engage. Use Tempo Doodling to explore a sense of rhythm in a conversation. Help reinforce the more positive behavior patterns in others through skillful mimicry. Cultivate an awareness of the ebb and flood of energy throughout your day by seeing your calendar as an artful map, not a sequence of meetings. Pull these skills and the theory together in order to wield the central power tool of the book: the Deep Story -- a richly annotated narrative structure that can be used to orient one's self in non-trivial situations. For example, in a given circumstance, do you sense confusion and/or volatility? You might be experiencing the "Exploration" epoch of a Deep Story. In this part of the story, a good move might be encouraging creativity (through play or "random exploration")... fertilizing the field toward finding what Dr. Rao calls a "cheap trick" -- an organizing insight that provides (hopefully) significant leverage...This is theory begging to be applied.This book has been simultaneously disruptive and a normalizing experience for me. Venkat pulls together a set of ideas that were either vague and, at best, loosely connected in my own mind. He affirms many of the ways I already approach situations, firming up that understanding with intellectual rigor. He also has introduced me to a fresh set of perspectives. The material becomes quite dense as it climaxes and in parts of those sections, I simply had to allow the words to wash over me during this first reading. Even still, enough stuck that I can start using it. For example, I am addressing the question of "I want to be a catalytic leader, how do I encourage the self-organization of my team?" by recasting it in the form of a deep story: "What is the journey of a team learning to self-organize? ... and how can I help catalyze that experience?" Even if this one is not a nail, I'm at least getting some feel for the heft of the hammer. It's better-informed play.I love this book. The author has struck a beautiful balance of science and art. He explores the very personal and pulls it back to the universal. As I finished reading the book, I felt sated, energized to put these concepts to use and yearning to learn more.If you resonate with the notion of more fully connecting with the vibe of life especially to be more effective in your participation in it, you owe it to yourself to pick this book up. Price for pound, it's an embarrassment of riches.

I can see why some people might not like this book. It's densely packed with ideas and follows a fractal pattern, applying the author's central thesis to examples of increasing size and complexity. As such, it's a book that defies a simple description. If asked to say what the book is "about", I would struggle, as it's only really possible to appreciate its conclusions after you've read the whole thing at least twice.That said, there's plenty here to appreciate. The author examines decision-making at various scales, from individual decisions about what to make for dinner up to life-changing events that come to define our lives, whilst also covering organisational decision-making. The concept of "tempo" is used to illustrate how the pace and timing of our activities can shape how we think, both individually and collectively. This idea, which could merit a book in itself, also serves as a building block for grander ideas about "narrative rationality", or how whole lives can be understood in terms of stories with well-defined structures.To achieve all of this in a mere 176 pages requires that the author proceeds at a breakneck pace, and sometimes I wish he would have been a bit gentler, slower and more forgiving of the reader's unfamiliarity with some of the terms used. It's clear that the subject matter is intensely interesting to him, and can be so to others, but at times it feels as though his ideas are hurtling past me too quickly for me to grasp them. But even in saying this, I've adopted his metaphors about timing and speed, which perhaps proves that there's something worthwhile here. Personally, I appreciated the fact that there were not too many digressions, and none of the folksy anecdotes that are typical of the sub-Gladwell "My Big Idea: How It Changes Absolutely Everything" books that are more typical of the genre. It's not for everyone, but if you're prepared to work harder than normal and give the book a second read after a few months, you'll find it far more genuinely rewarding than something easily digested in a few days.

This is a book that makes you think about your life in a whole new way. It's a mix between psychology, biology, philosophy, computer science and genuine curiosity for the everyday life.This is not an easy read. I recommend go through it at least a couple of times. Totally worth it.

Endlich jemand der die Bedeutung der Musik auch für den Geschäftsalltag erkannt hat. ein Muß für jeden, der mit Entscheidungsfindung zu tun hat. Erweitert den Horizont und räumt mit Ideologien auf.

I am happy with this book. Rao has successfully given me an operational definition od tempo and the working knowledge of raising my tempo, in the gym, in my workplace and in my other activities. A great read that has brightened my life

Moving beyond rational - causal structures to think about human social behaviour and interactions, this book tries to synthesise many ideas but ends up being deeply confused and confusing.