Tempo: Timing, Tactics and Strategy in Narrative-Driven Decision-Making [Paperback]

It is probably the deepest book you will read this year. Rao is a meticulous thinker with original ideas.

In a sense, this book is illegible, as per the sense that this word takes in the book. That is, this book is difficult, or impossible, to summarize neatly. I am unsure where I would put it in a library. Military, business, philosophy or psychology?

There is practical, actionable advice in this book. The author tells us that we should become more aware of the rhythms around us. Wars are lost or won based on timing. I am reminded of how carefully a company like Apple times the release of its products. I am reminded of Glenn Gould's contrapuntal radio technique, where conversations are turned into music.

All in all, Rao is forcing us to rethink the world around us. If you are a creative, this book is for you.

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 3

Rao, 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.

Although I've not met Venkatesh Rao, I was introduced to him via email last summer after reading the book. In my personal letter to him I said:

"I finished, and quite enjoyed, Tempo yesterday.

I especially enjoyed Chapters 2, 3, and 4. While reading them I found myself increasingly dazzled by each new conceptual innovation, then wondering whether you would actually convince me that your conceptual innovations were useful, and then being profoundly grateful for the pay-off when it came through, over and over again. I LOVE the Freytag Staircase, an immense amount of good stuff is packed neatly and conveniently into that one concept. At one point I was thinking that this was one of the most original, interesting, and valuable books written in the past fifty years - and I read a LOT. I was also wondering how on earth you were going to land this plane, so to speak, after such a spectacular ride.

That said, Chapter 5 didn't quite do as much for me as did the earlier chapters (I've got nothing against Chapter 1, it just isn't a superstar as are 2, 3, and 4). It might be that I just haven't adequately digested your definitions of "strategy" and "tactic," and that when I do perhaps I'll be just as dazzled as I was by 2, 3, and 4.

Chapter 6, at this point, seems simply harmless and anti-climactic, almost banal in comparison to your earlier intellectual pyrotechnics - though again perhaps I will have a gestalt shift later after I've more completely digested the tools you've given me."

It is interesting, having read the other reviews, that the one negative review specified the last 30 pages as the best - those that I found anti-climactic.

This is not an easy book to digest, nor will it appeal to most casual readers. After reading it I found myself drawn to re-read Eric Auerbach's "Mimesis," a wonderfully personal, yet highly scholarly, account of the role of representation in the literature of western civilization. I see Auerbach's "Mimesis" as really the history of individuality from Homer to the present.

Now that I'm six months removed from Tempo I find that I still reflect on it. The concept of the Freytag staircase that he develops, an elaboration of the well-known Freytag's pyramid of dramatic structure, is a useful way for me to reflect on the emotional dynamics and decision-making frameworks that have been characteristic of various phases of my life. I'm a big fan of Alasdair MacIntyre's notion that a virtue culture is dependent on a lifelong framework of meaning, and as an educator I use the concept of lifelong goals to encourage young people to structure their lives in serious and productive ways. Rao's Freytag staircase, and the associated conceptual framework before and after, will provide adults who are serious about lifelong meaning with an additional lens through which to understand their own goal-orientation and decision structure.

Tempo covers so much ground across many different domains that it is difficult to summarize. It is a short book, and I would simply encourage those who are interesting in a much more sophisticated understanding of how they and others structure their personal narratives and decision-making to read it and integrate Rao's conceptual tools into your own personal narratives and decision-making.

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