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THINKING_IN_TIME
May 12, 2015
July 16, 2015
7 Ways You Can Use History
Without Fucking Up Originally
published at
the dailykos,
July 18, 2015.
"Thinking in Time" (1984) by
Richard E. Neustadt and Ernest R. May
https://books.google.com/books?id=zsLyWT70YSEC&pg=PR7&source=gbs_selected_pages&cad=3#v=onepage&q&f=false
Neustadt & May's book, "Thinking in Time" (1984)
is something like a business management advice
book except that it's written for presidential
committees who would rather not, for example,
destroy the planet. I think they missed some of
the tricks of business writing (where number one
is number-thy-principles) so I'm going to lead
with the short-attention span summary that I think
the book lacks, which in turn will justify my
clickbait title (one of these days I'm going to
write a piece called "5 Ways You Can Keep from
Clicking on Links Like This").
(1) The first question is not "what's the problem" but
"what's the story" (Goldberg's Rule).
(2) Make lists of what's *known* *presumed* and *unclear*.
(3) With historical analogies, make lists of similarities and differences.
Find other analogies. Look out for concealed analogies.
(4) Make a historical time line. Focus on periods of political/policy dispute.
First ask "who", "what", "when", "where". Then ask "why" and "how".
(5) Now (and not before) you should ask "what are our options?"
o Make lists of pros and cons.
o How have these moves worked before?
o Classify presumptions as "maybes", "truths" or "if/then" theories.
o Ask "If you were going to bet, what odds would you quote?
Can you explain why?"
o Ask "What new information would change your mind?"
(6) Do placement of people against history: use timelines to make
personal histories of relevant players associated
with the then current events.
(7) Do placement of organizations against history: use timelines to
make histories of relevant organizations with turning-points
associated with key historical events.
*Thinking in Time* steps through all of these
points (which they call "mini-methods") applying
them to case histories of US presidential crises,
all from recent history, roughly from JFK to
early Reagan, though with some dipping into FDR.
These case histories were some of the more
interesting material to me in the book, since I
was alive through most of them though not always
paying a lot of attention (the Cuban missile
crisis happened when I was 2, just to hand you a
bit of "placement").
Let's start with The Cuban Missile Crisis (just as
Neustadt and May do), it's one of the few examples
they have of successful decision-making-- their
point is that after the screw-up with The Bay of
Pigs attack, Kennedy was gun shy enough to get his CUBA
crew to stop and think for a few days. That was
just long enough for ideas like "we've got to bomb
Cuba *now*!" to fade, and for Kennedy to get to a
negotiated solution with the Soviets.
The problem at that point was that surveillance
photos showed Soviet missiles stationed in Cuba,
close enough to American shores to be able to
attack without warning. That sounds pretty bad,
but there's an alternate take on this particular
Crisis-- the US already had similar weaponry
stationed in Turkey, near Soviet borders, and if
*that* was okay, then what were we bitching about?
The (grimly) funny bit here, is this dialog quoted
by Neustadt and May, which I'd never heard before:
Kennedy: It's just as if we suddenly began to put a major
number of MRBMs [medium range ballistic missiles]
in Turkey. Now that'd be goddamn dangerous, I
would think.
Bundy: Well we did, Mr. President.
Many people were flipping out about this dastardly
Soviet act of provocation but most, including the
President, didn't realize that the US had already
done the same thing.
The authors try to work through case histories such
as this, trying to demonstrate how the application
of their "mini-methods" might've helped the
decision-makers. In the case of the Cuban Missile
Crisis, they show how the historical analogy of ALLURING_ANALOGS
Perl Harbor was on everyone's minds-- does the
United States really want to sink as low as the old
axis powers and suddenly bomb Cuba without warning?
(Ah, what naive simpler times those were...
Once upon a time there were Presidents who
worried about the moral stature of the United
States. What a bunch of wimps, eh?).
They mulled over that Pearl Harbor analogy, arguing
it back and forth-- notably, Dean Acheson thought
it was crap, and just wanted to bomb 'em now. The
authors comment approvingly on how this process
ultimately highlighted the differences with the
Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, but also brought
out the essential similarity that continued to make
them hesitate to resort to a "sneak attack".
In some other cases Neustadt & May remark disparagingly on
the tendency to seize on a striking historical analogy, and
cling to it unexamined. Notably, with Carter there was an
idea going around that there was a "honeymoon period" for
the presidency, and Presidents could get almost anything
done in the first 100 days, but after that opposing forces
would emerge that would make it much harder. The authors
contend that this "principle" was in effect a historical
analogy in disguise, and if Carter's team had only looked
at it closely they'd have realized key differences-- they
were envisioning Presidents elected with their "coattails",
not with a Congress largely held by the opposition. They
were so stuck on the "first 100 days" idea, though, that
they hit the ground running frantically in a dozen
directions at once, and consequently had trouble doing
anything at all, let alone anything that made sense.
Carter's own variant of the Cuban Missile Crisis arose
in August of 1979, with reports that a Brigade of Soviet
troops had suddenly been discovered stationed in Cuba.
There was an immediate controversy along the lines of
"We must break off arms control negotiations
immediately! What's the point if the Soviets won't
abide by past agreements?"
The (grimly) amusing bit about this particular crisis is
that as it happens there was no past agreement
concerning these troops-- Kennedy had talked about them,
but didn't get a favorable response, and let it drop.
The authors quote Cyrus Vance on the subject:
The more resources the intelligence community devoted
to the brigade matter, the farther back in time
information about it went-- eventually all the way back
to 1962. Appallingly, awareness of the Soviet ground
force units had faded from the institutional memories
of the intelligence agencies... By late September it
was evident that the unit in question had almost
certainly been in Cuba continuously since 1962.
The (mini) lesson to be learned there is that if they'd
just put some staff to work on sketching historical
timelines, they might not've embarrassed themselves
quite so much.
(Another lesson that occurs to me is that if you'd
like to pull off a cool sneak attack on US forces, you
just need to get your guys in position early and wait
an election cycle... then there won't be anyone around
who remembers that you're ready to attack. But then,
maybe al Qaeda got to this idea already.)
In general I like this book quite a bit (and thanks
go to Brad de Long for pointing to it)-- their
mini-methods seem to be very useful in general,
though through out they make it clear that there's
no substitute for judgment: these mini-methods are
not some mechanical system where you can just turn
the crank and get the right answer.
I also appreciate the fact that they're acutely
aware that all of this thinking often needs to be
very quickly, on the fly in the midst of some
unexpected crisis (hence the double-meaning of the
title, "Thinking in Time").
Of course, this book was published back in 1984, and
it's bound to be somewhat dated. Several decades
later, we're living in a new world where stuff like
this would never happen, right?
To figure out *why* an action is called for helps in defining
the objectives of the action. If the situation was tolerable
earlier, then one possible objective is to put it back the
way it was. In any case the objectives probably ought to
have something to do with the factors that force action; if
they don't, the decision-maker should be aware that they
don't. In ordinary practice, as we have observed or read
about it, that often is not the case. Debating what to do
without much thought about why, decision-makers and their
aides can easily settle on objectives not clearly related to
the matter in hand. (p.38)
The authors present some very detailed examples of
"Placing Strangers" (just strangers, because if they're
not, you probably have them "placed" already). One of the
more interesting case studies is a comparison of two women
working in the FDR administration: Frances Perkins, FDR's
Secretary of Labor and a "holdover appointee", Mary
Anderson, director of the Women's Bureau in the Labor
Department. You might start out thinking that these two
people would get along smoothly-- they're both women
working on labor issues under Roosevelt-- but that was not
the case, and the authors make the point that you can see
why by looking at their personal histories, e.g. Perkins
had an upper class background, Anderson a lower class one.
Neustadt & May are conscious of the fact that their
idea of "placement" is essentially a fancy kind of
stereotyping, but they don't claim that it's the last
word, just a good place to start. At the outset,
you're stuck with using rules of thumb like
"stereotypes", but it's better to use a more
sophisticated form like a placement analysis rather
than just go "hey, they're both women".
Surveys of former students (Neustadt and May taught
classes using this material) showed that the mini-method
they found most useful was the one I've numbered (7),
the placement of organizations. Apparently this approach
to thinking about the character of organizations is
unusual enough that it doesn't occur to people if they
don't learn it from Neustadt and May. One of their
better examples is the CIA, where they make the point
that if you don't understand the organization's history
you wouldn't understand that it's a cobbled-together
collection of multiple independent groups that are only
nominally unified.
This usage of timelines is one of the things that I
found most interesting about this book: I've always
liked historical timelines, but largely as
intellectual curiosities. The notion that they can be
very useful tools in practical decision-making is new
to me, and I'll have to think about what to do with
that insight. Notably, there seems to be some decent
software around for *displaying* timelines, but I'm
not aware of any that focus on comparing timelines from
different areas of immediate interest.
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