Neustadt and May's 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")...
- The first question is not "what's the problem" but "what's the story" (Goldberg's Rule).
- Make lists of what's known, presumed and unclear.
- With historical analogies, make lists of similarities and differences.
Find other analogies. Look out for concealed analogies.
- Make a historical time line. Focus on periods of political/policy dispute.
First ask "who", "what", "when", "where". Then ask "why" and "how".
- Now (and not before) you should ask "what are our options?"
- Make lists of pros and cons.
- How have these moves worked before?
- Classify presumptions as "maybes", "truths" or "if/then" theories.
- Ask "If you were going to bet, what odds would you quote? Can you explain why?"
- Ask "What new information would change your mind?"
- Do placement of people against history: use timelines to make personal histories of relevant players associated with the then current events.
- 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 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 they could essentially 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.
Everyone was flipping out about this dastardly Soviet act of provocation, but many--including the President himself-- didn't know 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 Missle Crisis, they show how the historical analogy of 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 judgement: 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 things like the following one 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.
They present a few examples of placement of organizations, one of the better cases I think, 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 for different areas of immediate interest.