{"id":304,"date":"2009-04-13T07:56:43","date_gmt":"2009-04-13T13:56:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/relaxandhavefun.com\/?p=304"},"modified":"2009-04-13T07:56:43","modified_gmt":"2009-04-13T13:56:43","slug":"thinking-in-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/relaxandhavefun.com\/?p=304","title":{"rendered":"Thinking in Time"},"content":{"rendered":"

I learned about Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision-Makers<\/a>\"\" by Richard E. Newstadt and Ernst R. May from AFSA’s recommended reading list<\/a> when I started our book club last summer.\u00a0 I assume the text is still used in many college courses, because there are multiple copies available in several local used book stores.\u00a0\u00a0 We haven’t discussed the book in our book club yet, but I was curious about why the title was highly recommended.\u00a0\u00a0 Reading Thinking in Time<\/span> is like attending a series of lectures by the authors (both professors), but lectures where you cannot interrupt and ask clarifying questions.<\/p>\n

The authors posit that government decision-makers (and their staffers) would make at least marginally better decisions if they applied the mini-methods (authors’ term) described in the text.\u00a0 The mini-methods are designed to give the decision-makers more historical perspective of the concern, the players (including organizations) and the possible solutions.\u00a0 The authors do a very good job of teaching the mini-methods throughout the course of the book by re-enforcing the learning from chapter to chapter.<\/p>\n

Drawing on examples of domestic and foreign policy decisions mainly during the Johnson, Nixon and Carter administrations, the authors describe the history behind the decisions, the facts apparently associated with the decisions, the success or lack thereof of the actions taken, and then describe a mini-method that could have been applied (or that was successfully applied unconsciously).\u00a0 Their main mini-methods include defining the immediate situation by documenting what is Known<\/em> (now), Unclear<\/em> and Presumed<\/em>; clarifying the usefulness of analogies by documenting likenesses<\/em> and differences<\/em> in the current situation; asking “What’s the story?”; and defining the placement<\/em> of the people and organizations involved in terms of their histories and experiences.\u00a0 The authors are very explicit about the degree to which these steps (and the ones I have omitted above) may help the decision-makers and may not.<\/p>\n

The whole time I was reading this book, I kept thinking about a book by a former CIA analyst called The Thinker’s Toolkit: 14 Powerful Techniques for Problem Solving<\/a>\"\".\u00a0\u00a0 The content of both books (regardless of both the differences between intended audiences and the differences amongst the authors’ backgrounds) seems to be a slightly-advanced version of common sense when you are reading it, but the tools are really things that most of us forget to do when we’re actually making decisions.\u00a0 And when we forget to apply the tools, we greatly increase the risk of making bad decisions.\u00a0 Which takes me to my favorite quote from the book:\u00a0 Good judgement is usually the result of experience.\u00a0 And experience is frequently the result of bad judgement.<\/em> -Robert A. Lovett.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I learned about Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision-Makers by Richard E. Newstadt and Ernst R. May from AFSA’s recommended reading list when I started our book club last summer. I assume the text is still used in many college courses, because there are multiple copies available in several local used book […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[16,25],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/relaxandhavefun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/relaxandhavefun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/relaxandhavefun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/relaxandhavefun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/relaxandhavefun.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=304"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/relaxandhavefun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":314,"href":"https:\/\/relaxandhavefun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304\/revisions\/314"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/relaxandhavefun.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=304"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/relaxandhavefun.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=304"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/relaxandhavefun.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=304"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}