TSR #8 Operational Consistency

post by Hazard · 2018-01-03T02:11:32.274Z · LW · GW · 5 comments

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:

1. In your operations, what are the trivial inconveniences that exist? How might you eliminate them?
2. Are you keeping records of the operations you are trying to instal, and are you reviewing what effects they are having?

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