Tempo

🧠 Free Recall ❓ Quiz 🔍 Cues 🔮 Simulation 🥷 ShadowBox 📐 Encode Cards

Tempo is the set of characteristic rhythms of decision-making in the subjective life of an individual or organization, colored by associated patterns of emotion and energy.

Perceiving the tempo is a skill that needs to be practiced

Reacting to Tempo

Emotion results when you force yourself, or some part of the environment, to operate at a faster or slower tempo than it likes. To change a tempo you must add or remove energy by applying a force.

Drive up the tempo too much, and calm yields to excitement, and then to anxiety and panic (which is why driving up tempo is a big part of creating FUD, Fear-Uncertainty-Doubt, in adversarial situations; “shock and awe” is an extreme example). Add too much damping, and emotions swing the other way: calm yields to impatience, frustration, anger and finally, depressed acceptance.

Context Switching
Going With The Flow
Pace Setting
Disrupting the Flow

Tempo Archetypes

Ready Fire Aim
Character: Naruto (Deep Story: "I will be recognized")
Momentum: Get ahead and stay ahead of the world
Energy State: aggressive and charging
Rhythm: fast

Resistance is Futile
Character: Pain ("I will show the world")
Momentum: Be an irresistible force
Energy State: relentless and overwhelming
Rhythm: Slow-medium

Move Mountains
Character: Hashirama ("I will bring peace")
Momentum: One step at a time 
Energy State: gentle and steady
Rhythm: slow

Enjoy The Ride
Character: Asuma ("I'm going to go with the flow")
Momentum: Let the world carry you along 
Energy State: playful
Rhythm: slow

Do Your Duty
Character: Neji ("My agency is a myth")
Momentum:  Pull your weight
Energy State: Demanded by situation
Rhythm: demanded by situation

Next Shiny Thing
Character: Young Jiraya ("Art is life")
Momentum: What are we waiting for?
Energy State: excitement alternating with boredom
Rhythm: excited alternating with boredom

Like a Rock
Character: Kakashi ("?")
Momentum: Be immovable object 
Energy State: matches force being opposed
Rhythm: matches rhythm being opposed

Prepare to be Assimilated
Character: Might Guy ("I will be my best")
Momentum: why stop now?
Energy State: large reserves, steadily unleashed
Rhythm: beat of a drum divorced from environment

Another Day
Character: Orochimaru ("I will bring advancement")
momentum: be a force of nature
energy state: whirlwind suicidal
rhythm: manic

Narrative Rationality

Narrative rationality is 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 subjects such as risk and learning.

These are the ideas that I believe will be very important in the new future. Decision-Making, Strategy, Tactic, Risk, Learning, Game Theory, and ultimately execution -. March 25, 2023 @ 3:24 PM

Narratives, especially cradle-to-grave life narratives, are powerful, unavoidable, and dangerous tools. The dangers led one of my favorite writers, Nicholas Nassim Taleb to argue, in The Black Swan,23 that all narrative thinking should in fact be considered flawed. An entire chapter of the book is titled The Narrative Fallacy. Other thinkers in the decision-making tradition that Taleb represents (behavioral economics) adopt an even stronger position against narrative thought.

Very interesting idea and something I have to read into March 25, 2023 @ 3:26 PM

The critiques are valid, and are based on the observation that thinking in terms of stories leads to all sorts of biases. What critics miss, however, is that there is no such thing as non-narrative thought, free of possible worlds and ongoing enactments. There are always multiple narratives at work, framing our perceptions, memories, active thoughts, decisions and actions.

The idea that there is always a narrative at work is one aspect of the decision-making philosophy in this book, which is a situated decision-making philosophy. It is based on the assumption that there is no meaningful way to talk about specific decisions outside of a narrative frame and a concrete context, any more than it is possible to talk about physics without reference to a specific, physical coordinate frame (the basic idea in Einstein’s relativity). For this reason, I think of situated decision analysis as a sort of theory of relativity for rationality.

For us, it is sufficient to note that narrative rationality isn’t a single idea; it is the idea that there are many useful, local and temporary rationalities. The immediate benefit of this approach is that it allows us to take stories seriously, and make use of notions of truth other than scientific empiricism.

Deep stories represent the largest scale at which we enact meaning. Liminal passages chop up our lives into deep stories, creating the fundamental tempo of life. The character of this fundamental tempo is what people have in mind when they make assertions like “I’ve always had to struggle in life,” “I feel like I’ve finally arrived” or “I feel like I have always been a spectator on the sidelines.”

How do you find deep stories in your own life or in the lives of others? One way is to look between instances of the telltale symptom of extended existential musing. Another way is to look for acts of significant creative destruction. But perhaps the easiest way is to ask questions about motivation, until you get vacuous answers.

This works because the explanatory basis of last resort (or frame), for most intentional human behaviors, is a deep story.

What is vacuous? What is banality? The author does not do a good job describing what these mean in this context. Very weak March 25, 2023 @ 3:39 PM

Deep stories, liminal passages and the fundamental tempo together provide the foundations for narrative rationality, which is the capacity to experience time and see the world through stories. Let’s see what the ability can do for us that simpler decision-making models cannot.

Deep Stories - Overarching life narrative
Liminal Passages - Key lifetime events
Tempo - The momentum, rhythm and energy state of the individual March 25, 2023 @ 3:45 PM

This simple view is not wrong, it is just limited to simple situations that fit 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 meant when he said, “plans are nothing, planning is everything.” Marc Andreessen, creator of the Web browser Netscape, described the idea more clearly: 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. My definition is as follows:

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.

The alert among you will notice that I make no reference to reality in this definition. This leaves the door open to potentially irrational behavior. If you only demand that your actions make sense with respect to the story you are telling yourself, you could be acting rationally within a completely delusional story.

You must expend significant time and effort before a meaningful test of the validity of the narrative becomes possible, and often, the interpretation of the results will still remain ambiguous. Narrative rationality allows you to structure your behaviors meaningfully even when feedback is impoverished, delayed and ambiguous.

Powerful thought. It's similar to the idea of fixed futurism - March 25, 2023 @ 4:02 PM

The Double Freytag triangle represents a tractable level of complexity.

The Double Freytag triangle is a representation of a prototypical deep story in many domains. College, marriage, or a transformative experience at work (such as managing a product launch) can all take on this form. The enact a deep story you must remain aware of the tempo of different phases, manage the emotions they evoke, and time various shifts in optimal ways.

The Hero's Journey is also applicable here
Liminal Passage - Starting Point
Exploration - Call to Adventure
Threshold - Cheap Trick
~Sense-making~
Abyss - Valley/Heavy Lift
Transformation - Separation Event
Atonement - Retrospective
Return - Liminal Passage

In a deep story, the default, driving question is, “What’s going on, and what should I do?” The cheap trick provides an answer to this question, in the form of a key organizing insight that motivates the action in the rest of the deep story. Every such insight is flawed, since it is based on excluding some part of reality as noise. This will eventually catch up with you, so the insight merely buys you a certain amount of time.

In narrative rationality, the cheap trick is a more fundamental mental event than goal setting. Where a calculative-rational decision-maker might consider fair costs and actual values of various desirable goals in a new environment, the narrative-rational decision-maker looks for steals and bargains.

Every cheap trick is about drawing a relevance boundary in a set of information discovered during exploration.

Once you have spotted the cheap trick – a pattern that you can exploit to extract rewards from an initially incomprehensible environment – you must reflect on and reorganize the discoveries you made during exploration. A cheap trick is not just an exploitable insight, it is an or- ganizing insight. It serves as a speck of dust around which a compact mental model can crystalize and grow, within the turbulent soup of data created by your exploration. It allows you to make sense of what you’ve learned.

All that I have been doing with my reading habit is going from Liminal Passage to Cheap Trick to the next LP. I look for the relevance boundary in a set of information that I can leverage in my environment. The "Aha" moment

This is why “most compelling and elegant story” is the guiding heuristic in narrative-rational decision-making. Once you find a cheap trick, you can organize what you know in a very compact way. This compression and compaction creates a mental model where the pieces fit together in a meaningful way and lend the model significant and coherent momentum, like a generally disturbed weather pattern coalescing into a tornado.

To make sense of a complex, ambiguous and confusing set of facts, you should look for an organizing insight that dissolves the complexity and provides you a compelling and elegant way to look at your situation.

Good advice. Look for the simple thread tying ideas together - March 25, 2023 @ 5:18 PM

To be compelling your view must be comprehensive and provide you a way to organize as much as possible, from what you know.

To be elegant, the resulting mental model must be as compact as possible. In general, these models will be very local and unique to the immediate situation.

You can also understand this compaction as a process of decreasing entropy. While exploration leaves you with a large and disorderly collection of observations of the world, the entropy-lowering capacity of the cheap trick allows you to make sense of what you know. Elegant and compelling, however, do not add up to real. Remember, you are only providing an elegant and compelling account of what you already know. Your mental model has not yet weathered an encounter with new realities. Until it does, it is indistinguishable from a delusion.

The valley is a phase of initially rapid, and then slowing momentum development, eventually followed by a return to increasing entropy. In the valley, you encounter diminishing returns from the organizing capacity of the cheap trick. As the leverage provided by the cheap trick is exhausted, the enactment requires increasing amounts of raw energy. You are sustained only by the belief that you are cheating nature on a grander scale, and that beyond the valley lies a reward of disproportionate magnitude. The characteristic feature of the valley is decisive action without either reward or validation.¶ Your enactment is charging ahead in the dark. If you were to come up with a new scientific theory that permits time travel, the valley would be the period during which you build your prototype time machine. Until you turn it on, your actions must be driven by your leap of faith, and you must endure thoughts of failure. A particularly interesting kind of valley is one where little or no action is required; one that merely represents a waiting period between the adoption of an intention and the first action that irreversibly commits you to the course.

The timing of the heavy lift is driven by personality and temperament. You launch a heavy lift when you are unable to stand the valley any longer, and sense that you are approaching diminishing returns. Whether this timing is optimal depends on your estimate of the organizing capacity of the cheap trick. If you overestimate its capacity, you will stay in the valley too long, and your act of creative destruction will fall victim to the perils of perfectionism. If you emerge too early, you may find you have not extracted enough value from the cheap trick to earn the disproportionate returns you dreamed of.

Critical Insight - March 25, 2023 @ 6:07 PM

Entropy increases during a heavy lift because in driving towards a forced outcome, you inevitably begin making expedient decisions out of exhaustion, which leads to imperfections and compromises. As writers like to remark, books are never finished, they are merely abandoned.

The separation event is the moment when a significant proportion of the newly created mental model, along with its momentum, is externalized into the environment, as your act of creative destruction.

Besides being a major and irreversible encounter with reality, the separation event involves a parting of ways, and the metaphor of birth is not accidental. The externalized mental model is an organic entity, like a baby, and there is a psychological imperative that pushes us to let go when we judge that it can live outside our heads. There is relief, but there is also a true sadness, since we can no longer protect the product of our efforts.

If the separation event is successful (a successful dissertation defense, a great opening weekend for a movie), the cheap trick that drove the deep story is validated, and we extend it to explain and organize the new realities it has weathered. If the separation fails, we face an existential crisis. We must search for new meaning amongst the ashes, deny and isolate ourselves from the aftermath, or simply remain in a high entropy state, mourning over the corpse of our failed efforts.

Together rhythms and events help us think of time as material change. And if you think about it, this is the only way we can think about time. If things weren’t changing, it is not clear that we would experience a sense of time passing.

all our choices are among life stories that end with our individual deaths.

Narrative rationality deals with decisions against the backdrop of an appropriate narrative time, measured by an appropriate narrative clock.

As Lenin once remarked, “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” By contrast, calculative rationality is based on the fiction of an abstract time that stretches evenly and featurelessly into the past and future. This is why regularity, stability and precision matter.

Calculative rational decision-making finesses situatedness by working only with highly controlled clocks. When you start this way, seductive general theories of decision-making take center stage, and local conditions are forgotten, minimized or dismissed as “details.” To achieve this apparently legible and clean state of affairs, calculative rational models of decisions seek the most precise, featureless and stable clocks available.

I guess this is also how you have "War Time CEOs and Peace Time CEOs" and how the pace of an organization isn't necesarily accelerated by the actual Todos or OKRs accomplished. Narratively speaking, you can be moving very slow even though calculative rationally speaking you might be moving fast - March 25, 2023 @ 6:49 PM
 
Risk, learning and information are central to calculative rationality. The idea of mortality necessarily looms large over these topics, but is at best a marginal concern in calculative rationality, restricted to those who deal with problems that explicitly deal with mortality, such as insurance.†† By contrast, in narrative rationality, mortality is the central concern.

The relationship among risk, learning and information seems deceptively simple: every decision is based on what you know (information), and risk assessments associated with what you don’t know. Learning helps you increase usable information and lower risk.

So why is this picture of comprehensibility deceptive? The reason is that despite the awe-inspiring mathematical machinery, such models are still based on an assumption that runs through almost the entire discipline of statistical decision-making like a giant fault-line: the future is like the past. The models are only as good as the instincts of the model builders in tuning the parameters, the accuracy of the model with respect to the past, and your level of faith in future-is-like-the-past assumptions in a given situation. The models can be viewed as a way of systematically leveraging or amplifying intuition.

Open and Closed Worlds

Future-is-like-the-past assumptions are a symptom of what are technically known as closed-world models: models in which pre-defined things exist, and only events that have been modeled can happen.

The real world, by contrast, is an open world that requires that we constantly update our mental models to accommodate phenomena that we haven’t encountered before.

Calculative-rational decision-makers though, need not age. The study of calculative rationality has focused on different sorts of archetypal decision-makers over the last few centuries: perfectly logical decision-makers, bounded-rational decision makers and most recently, predictably irrational decision-makers. But all members of the calculative-rationality family tree are immortal. They are ageless bundles of logical reasoning capabilities, processing limits and systematic biases. They may have memories and histories, but they do not grow old. In contrast, narrative rationality starts with mortal decision-makers. Mortality is the central fact about them. Decision-makers can die in two ways: accidentally, through the impact of unknown-unknowns, or through the accumulation of entropy, as the open world catches up with them.

Death by Entropy

For our needs, this irreverent (and surprisingly accurate) folk version of the laws is actually more appropriate. The three laws of thermodynamics are: 
you must play the game.
You cannot win
You cannot break even
You cannot quit the game
the game keeps getting more complicated, and there are always more different ways to play.

If we are more modest in our aspirations, the vocabulary of narrative rationality allows us to craft a pair of simple but cryptic and non-prescriptive definitions. 
A strategy is a cheap trick.
A tactic is a metaphoric mapping among primitive action concepts in two or more domains.

Decision-making is ultimately about constantly looking for the next cheap trick in ongoing enactments, scripted in constantly shifting tactical vocabularies. You will occasionally get a temporary and local advantage, but ultimately nature will defeat you.

You can, however, consistently outmaneuver those who don’t recognize that there are no universal formulas, just as you can consistently outplay someone who always plays “rock” in a game of rock, paper, scissors.

Like other games Tetris is a closed world, but it models the primary processes in open-world risk management – dealing with increasing entropy and consciously choosing your path to death – very well. Playing Tetris helps you hone entropic decision-making skills.

If your current decision is poor, your next decision becomes harder, since bad decisions raise the stack height, leaving you with fewer options and less time to make the next decision.

Eventually, the stack hits the ceiling, and you die. As the stack rises and falls the evolution of the stack height over time traces out a Freytag staircase.

Starred

Dunk (exclude from study)

I am setting up a weekly Monday cadence meeting. What actions, activities, ideas, exercises, questions, etc. do you think should be in it?

# Designing Your Monday Cadence Meeting

The Monday meeting is where narratives are consciously shaped for the week ahead. Done right, it's not merely administrative – it's where you craft the collective story that will organize everyone's actions.

## Core Components

1. **Narrative Review** (10 min)
- What story did we tell ourselves last week? How did reality respond?
- Name the "cheap tricks" that worked and those that failed
- Brutal honesty here prevents compounding delusions

2. **Signal Extraction** (15 min)
- Examine key metrics but focus on pattern recognition
- Ask: "What exploitable insight is hiding in plain sight?"
- Identify where information entropy is lowest - that's your leverage point

3. **Constraint Mapping** (10 min)
- Name the 2-3 hard constraints limiting your story this week
- The most elegant responses acknowledge what cannot be changed

4. **Commitment Architecture** (15 min)
- Design the "separation events" each person must execute this week
- Be explicit about which story dies if they succeed
- Set clear triggers for when to act - too early wastes potential; too late courts disaster

## Execution Principles

- Keep it to 60 minutes maximum - compression forces clarity
- Rotate who facilitates - different narrative framings reveal different cheap tricks
- End with each person stating their "one thing" - the exploit they're betting on this week
- Document competing narratives, not just the dominant one

Remember: This meeting isn't about information sharing; it's about collectively choosing which story you're living this week before entropy has its say.

Continue Conversation...

Get Action Items

Let’s have a conversation about today so that I may start my day on the right foot. Let’s start with a single question and nothing more to help me reflect on the day ahead.

What story are you telling yourself about today, and how might finding a new "cheap trick" reframe your narrative in a more empowering way?

I need to upgrade my story and my character. Something that I need to spend time thinking about all throughout the day.

Upgrading your story and character is a powerful way to reshape your reality. As you go through your day, pay attention to the moments where you feel most alive or challenged. These are often the pivot points where new stories can emerge.

Try to identify a pattern or insight that you've been overlooking - something that could give you disproportionate returns if you lean into it. This could be a skill you're underutilizing, a relationship you've neglected, or a perspective shift that opens up new possibilities.

Remember, the goal isn't perfection, but rather finding that next "cheap trick" that allows you to compress and make sense of your experiences in a new, more empowering way. Let this process of searching and reflection be a thread that runs through your day, informing your choices and interactions.

By the end of the day, you might find yourself with the seeds of a new narrative - one that better aligns with who you want to become. The key is to remain open to these potential story upgrades as you move through your daily activities.

Continue Conversation...

Get Action Items

Why is Risk/Reward is Important to Think About When Making Business Decisions

Ah, the eternal dance of risk and reward in the grand narrative of business! Let me share a story that illuminates the importance of this crucial consideration:

Every business decision is a "separation event" - a moment where you birth a new story into reality. This story will either live and thrive, or wither and die based on how well it navigates the complex, entropic landscape of the market.

The key to success lies in discovering a "cheap trick" - an exploitable insight that allows you to compress the vast information of the market into a compact mental model. This model must elegantly balance the potential rewards of your decision against the risks it entails.

Ignore risk, and you may find your story abruptly ended by an unforeseen catastrophe. But be too risk-averse, and you'll miss out on the outsized rewards that justify the very existence of your enterprise.

The art is in finding that sweet spot - that fleeting window of opportunity where the potential gains far outweigh the potential losses. This requires a keen eye for pattern recognition, and the courage to act decisively when you spot your opening.

But remember, any advantage is temporary. The market is an open system, and unknown unknowns can always disrupt even the most carefully calibrated risk/reward calculation. The only permanent truth is impermanence itself.

So in the end, the importance of considering risk/reward comes down to this: it's the only way to write a business story that persists and propagates itself over time. Neglect it, and your story will be selected against by the implacable forces of market entropy.

But master it, and you may just create a narrative that outlives you - a testament to your ability to dance gracefully on the knife's edge between risk and ruin. Isn't that what every business decision-maker ultimately seeks?

Continue Conversation...

Get Action Items

Tempo

I am setting up a weekly Monday cadence meeting. What actions, activities, ideas, exercises, questions, etc. do you think should be in it?

Let’s have a conversation about today so that I may start my day on the right foot. Let’s start with a single question and nothing more to help me reflect on the day ahead.

Why is Risk/Reward is Important to Think About When Making Business Decisions

Review Questions

Todos

Sensemaker