TSR #8 Operational Consistency
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 #8: Operational Consistency
SUMMARY
Carthage getting wiped out probably had a lot to do with them flubbing the Battle of Utica.
The Roman sneak attack could have been prevented by following existing known military best practices.
Military has a unique issue of being 90% boring and then 10% get-it-right-or-die.
The Problem
1. There’s lots of best practices that things will go slightly better if they’re followed.
2. If they’re neglected, most of the time nothing bad will happen and it won’t be noticed.
3. If they’re neglected, everything will be slightly worse all the time.
4. If they’re neglected, occasionally something extremely bad will happen.
5. Following those best practices can be very boring and they don’t have a naturally good feedback loop on learning and following them.
The General Orders for Sentries is a pretty solid example of a set of operations that have been very well designed. Read them for insight.
Design operations that respect human nature.
General steps to building consistent awesomeness
1. Codification
2. Accounting for human nature, biases, and errors
3. Stripping away inessentials
4. Training
5. Inspection and verification
It’s an iterative process.
Making a plan that involves more willpower than you can reasonably expect yourself to muster is a common example of “forgetting to account for being human”. Often, when I try to install a new productivity system, it fails because I assume that a lot of trivial inconveniences can just be willpowered. Or maybe I just haven’t thought about the system enough to realize how many trivial inconveniences there are.
Isolating and eliminating trivial inconveniences is a great way to increase your consistency. This winter, I’ve noticed that one of the reasons it’s easier to sleep in is because it’s a lot colder outside of my bed than in it (who could have seen that coming?). Now I go to sleep wearing a hoodie, which makes it a whole lot easier to get out of bed in the morning.
A good way of acting on this idea would be to examine a system/habit/set of operations that you are having trouble installing, and thoroughly question yourself on what is hard about following through on it (makes me think of hold off on proposing a solution). See if you can reach a level of specificity where ways to streamline the habit become obvious. It’s hard to eat healthy when your only hypothesis about why you don’t is, “It’s hard to eat healthy”. It’s much easier if you realize a stumbling block it, “I don’t find any of the healthy foods I’m aware of to be very tasty.”
One of the most important statements is at the end:
“This is an iterative process. Your first attempt at codification will almost certainly fail because of something unforeseen, and you’ll need to make adjustments. In the process of making adjustments, you’ll need to also set aside time to pare things back so that you don’t fail due to rigidity and bureaucracy.”
I often find myself forgetting to actually do something, because I’m so busy dwelling on The Perfect System™. On the flipside, I know people who find a system, think it is The Perfect System™, implement it, and when it fails to be perfect they give up. Keep experimenting, keep records of your processes, and keep records of your outcomes. Know what you have and haven’t tried. In general, science it up.
Concluding with two useful questions to answer:
In your operations, what are the trivial inconveniences that exist? How might you eliminate them?
Are you keeping records of the operations you are trying to instal, and are you reviewing what effects they are having?
This series has been raising weird meta thoughts in me (and I feel somewhat bad about having only meta thoughts to contribute)
Each post has seemed obvious useful—the original Sebastian posts are interesting and relevant, the exercises you add seem genuinely, obviously useful. But I haven’t actually done them.
This has been part of an overall realization that once a LW post crosses the gap between “easy-ish to read” and “requires serious cognitive labor to be useful”, I stop investing effort in it.
Which kind of bodes ill.
In particular, once something seems to take real cognitive effort to derive value from, I start wondering “is this really the best use for my [limited] Serious Cognitive Effort” (compared to, say, learning Machine Learning, which currently is a major item on my to-do list)
It’s particularly noteworthy that I think your posts are definitely useful and relevant. I’m not sure if the fact that I haven’t done the exercises is a note about an internal bug on my part, or a reflection of a System-1 belief that even if they’re valuable they’re still not the most valuable thing on my docket.
Actually doing the excerises has also been the highest friction part of writing these. For the earlier ones I would often apply the questions to something I hadn’t given thought to perviously, but for the last few I’ve been using past examples of having done the excersize, sort of copping out.
The only thing that comes to mind on for “being able to act on and do useful excersizes” is the idea of building into one’s routines a time specifically for applying whatever the most recent useful advice has been. Or a micro habit of “spend 5 minutes following through”, though I’m unsure how quickly that particular tactic would consume time, given how much one might read in a day.
Thanks for the feedback, even if it’s meta.
Weird minor point—the double stars ** at the beginning of the post make it a little hard to tell this post apart from a Curated post (and, I’m also just not sure that they add any value anyways).
I’ve been reading through this series this week based on seeing your review posts, and have enjoyed it, so thanks! I think this was my favourite of the series, maybe because it covers things I was already thinking about anyway (but also the sentry part was really interesting).
I’m really not a natural at operationalising things, but have come to appreciate it in the last couple of years, mainly through accidentally ending up in a job that’s quite ops-heavy and realising I badly needed to get better at it. I like the tone of ‘this stuff is often boring and I’m not great at it, but it really pays off’ in this series.
I’ve done a very similar thing to you with breaking down getting up in the morning into lots of steps and realising the cold was an issue—my version is putting a jumper and thick hiking socks nearby to put on immediately. The surprising thing for me was how helpful just having a bunch of steps to do is, almost independent of what they are! Every morning after the alarm goes off my brain spontaneously generates a bullshit story about how today is somehow completely different to all the other days and therefore it’s completely reasonable for me to just go back to bed, but I just keep mindlessly plodding through steps and by the time I’ve finished the voice has shut up and I’m up and drinking a cup of tea.
Yes! I’ve had a variation of this thought before, but it never fully got out into a concrete form. This feels very true. I don’t currently go for a morning walk, but I feel like it would be one of the best “Things I can easily do, by the end of which I will be more awake.”