TSR #5 The Nature of Operations
**This is part of a series of posts where I call out some ideas from the latest edition of The Strategic Review (written by Sebastian Marshall), and give some prompts and questions that I think people might find useful to answer. I include a summary of the most recent edition, but it’s not a replacement for reading the actual article. Sebastian is an excellent writer, and your life will be full of sadness if you don’t read his piece. The link is below.
Background Ops # 5: The Nature of Operations
SUMMARY
Religio → Strategy → Tactics → Operations
Zhukov was pretty cool. You should def read to article to know why.
Ops can be “hard to get” because they often seem too simple to be considered.
Guidance
“Though operations cannot be understood by the individual pieces alone, the best practices of implementing and running the individual pieces are critical to learn.”
“Study and learn how different pieces of operations fit together over time, practice analyzing where one’s operations are the weakest, and how to improve operations across the spectrum.”
I really like using this hierarchy to think about things. Just remembering that these levels of planning exist helps me notice when I’m not acting on them. How does my religio inform my strategy? How does my strategy inform my tactics? How do my tactics inform my operations? When I’m falling apart, these stay as rhetorical questions. When I’m on top of things, they get answered.
Sebastian’s definition of Operations seems pretty accurate. The coordination of tactics over time. However, I prefer to think about operations via a question. What do you do to ensure that the things you intend to do actually get done? That seems to be at the core of operations, which seem to be at the core of getting good at things and living a quality life. Lots of low hanging fruit for improving one’s life is stuff you’ve heard before. Understanding operations lets you go, “Ohhhh, that’s why nothing worked. I was only trying to try, not actually doing.”
It seems like there are two big categories of operations. The first are operations that ensure you get a particular thing done. Examples would be a weightlifting regimen that a coach makes for you, a morning routine that you use to feel ready to tackle the day, or going grocery shopping every other friday to ensure you’ve got enough food. The second are operations that allow you to get a particular class of things done. Examples would be using a calendar to keep track of appointments, or using todoist to make sure miscellaneous errands get done.
I find it powerful just to be aware of what things I do and don’t have operations in place for. I’ve got solid operations to make sure my school work gets done during the hours I want it to get done. I’ve got okay ish operations to ensure that misc tasks get done. I don’t have operations in place to eat healthy. I just recently realized that despite what I thought, I don’t have operations to ensure I make all my appointments (I put everything on my calendar, but it turns out my weeks are so routine that I don’t check it much besides when I’m planning the week).
This way of thinking let’s me start with a small bubble of control and slowly expand outwards.
So with all that in mind, here are a handful of questions to answer that might give you an idea of ways to become stronger.
Do you have strong reasons to believe that you will execute the tactics most central to your current strategy?
What are the things you actually get done? What are the things that routinely fall through the cracks? How does the nature of your existing operations fail to support the things that aren’t happening?
How could you design new operations to increase the area of “Thing you can count on happening”?
The trickle down from religio to ops view of the world seems to de-emphasise intelligence gathering.
I think a big part of operations is making sure you have the correct information to do the things you need to do at the correct time. As such the informatation gathered regularly from ops inform strategy and tactics.
There are some great questions at the end of your posts and it’s a bit of a shame you haven’t had much uptake on them. It would be a lot of work to do many of these (which is why they’re good questions!), but I’ll have a go at your ‘slipping through the cracks’ question and do a worked example. Mine is also to do with making appointments.
I thought I did have a good system. I set a lot of Google Calendar email reminders and normally turn up to things with no problems. But actually I screwed up unusually badly twice last year and didn’t do much about it other than think ‘oops that was stupid’.
One was solvable in the end with a mad dash to the train station, but was stressful and annoying. The other one I travelled for three hours to meet up with friends on the wrong day… not my finest moment.
I notice that both of these were made informally on messaging/social media, and the problem was that they never even made it into a calendar in the first place. So I need to make sure everything ends up in the same system, rather than assuming a facebook event reminder or friends talking about it will be enough.
(I’m sure this is very obvious to more organised people, but this really isn’t something that comes naturally for me.)
It’s interesting that the problem is specifically with informal social events. A dentist appointment or work meeting has a kind of serious-business aura where I know it has to go in a system, so I just do that.
To fix this, I’ll have to make sure that arranging an event informally automatically makes me think of putting it on my calendar. I haven’t worked on this much yet, but as a first step I checked to see if this applies to anything coming up, and I did find one upcoming event that was on facebook but not my calendar and added it.
Great summation and reflection.
Couple thoughts —
Smart. I like to think about it that way too.
I typically write this,
“Philosophy → Strategy → Tactics → Operations → Strategy → Etc”
Religio is the term I use for “one’s personal religion,” borrowing the Latin word from the 1643 “Religio Medici”… everyone has some core orientation to the universe and their place in it. But I typically write it as “Philosophy” for lay audiences that don’t want new technical terms. I’ll use philosophy and religio largely interchangably — it’s slightly less technically correct, but easier to understand what it means quickly.
Great stuff. One of the dominant paradigms for “making stuff happen” over the last couple decades was very willpower-based; I think thinking in terms of operations is more useful. We can only pay attention to so much stuff; offloading decisionmaking to ops and taking the time to design things so that everything happens correctly is rather useful and powerful.