The environment is a playing field where your self-imposed rules collide with the self-imposed rules of others, creating conflict. Unlike chess boards and football fields, the playing field for real-world games is some arbitrarily (and fuzzily) delineated area of volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity, with an open and leaky boundary.
VUCA Fields
VUCA is the overall environmental condition out of which games precipitate. Wrangling luck by influencing how serendipity and zemblanity slosh around is the same as wrangling VUCA.
While a lot of VUCA emerges in the physical environment, in competitive settings, much of it originates in people, in the social layer of gameplay itself. So in the context of interpersonal interactions, VUCA means the following:
Volatility: there are no pure friends or enemies; most players you interact with are likely to be allies today, adversaries tomorrow and neutrals the day after.
Uncertainty: it is hard to tell potential allies and adversaries apart at a fundamental level, because situations and optimal patterns of loyalty are fundamentally murky..
Complexity: Ever tried to diagram the set of who-hates-whom/who-likes-whom in the organization chart of a corporation? Intractable beyond about a dozen.
Ambiguity: The environment is what it is. Ambiguity is a feature of your mental model of it, characterized by ifs, buts and maybes in your thinking about a situation.
So social-origin VUCA leads to more possibilities than actualities. More flirting than commitments. More tentative probing than decisive action. A social environment with a lot of ambiguity in the collective mindspace is one where nobody wants to be the first to act because of the high risks, but where there is a huge individual and collective cost to not acting.
Risk is a function of VUCA. The higher the VUCA, the higher the perceived risk of any path.
The ifs, buts and maybes created by VUCA lead to indecision and paralysis. So unlike artificial games, where a starter’s pistol marks the beginning by convention, in real-world games, action has to be deliberately precipitated out of VUCA by an act of sheer will.
Precipitating Action
Creating a game is about precipitating action out of VUCA, by creating a zone of artificial clarity. Something as simple as declaring to yourself, ”I want a million dollars” is enough to create such a zone. But not all games are created equal. Some unleash a lot more energy than others.
A high-potential game has few rules, and unleashes a lot of collective energy. Technology revolutions are an example. A low-potential game has many rules and unleashes much less energy. Political wrangling in Washington, DC is an example.
Action precipitates out of VUCA because it is an unstable state. This instability manifests as a paradox.
On the one hand, not acting is often as risky, or riskier, than acting. This means, any decisive action might be better than the status quo.
On the other hand, acting first creates vulnerability. When you act decisively in a VUCA environment, you create a signal in a noisy environment that is likely to be immediately spotted, interpreted and intelligently responded to by competitors.
When everybody is waiting around or cautiously probing, it is hard to mask decisive movement. Because decisive movement creates an energy signature. Even if you pretend nothing is happening and act nonchalant, it is hard to hide serious, focused energy flows. Walk into the cafeteria of a major company at lunch time. You can immediately tell which project teams are just excited to be seeing some real action and which ones are trapped in a fog of indecision.
So playing VUCA chess means being good at opening with both white and black pieces. You have to know how to be the decisive first-mover, and you have to know how to be a decisive fast-follower. Both are ways of creating the game.
The Three Phases of a Game
Once somebody has precipitated action in a VUCA environment, you have to navigate an opening phase, where players jockey for position to define the rules.
Next you have to learn to play the mid-game, after the system has lost its memory of the opening phase.
And finally, you have to learn to script end-games, which, unlike in board games, are not a function of game-play rules, but conscious time to cash out/cut losses exit decisions.
These three phases exist in artificial games as well. But unlike artificial games, where everybody notices when the game starts, real-world games can begin stealthily and asymmetrically. Some players may start before others.
They can also close stealthily: early, big winners might stealthily cash out and move on and as part of the setup for the next game, to try to keep potential competitors playing the last game as though it still mattered.
Let’s examine the three phases in more detail.
The Opening
VUCA is a condition of noise waiting to be turned into information.
When you choose to play white – be the first to act under VUCA – the key is to turn noise into signal, attract cooperation and delay or misdirect competition.
This is what it means to bank a first-mover advantage. This last bit means masking your actions so that any potential adversaries either ignore you for longer than they should (i.e. you engineer a delayed reaction), or even better, start heading in the wrong direction.
Stealth and misdirection in short.
Imagine how different chess would be if you were allowed to start the game and make a bunch of moves before the opponent gets to the table, and continue making more moves on your own while he temporarily plays at the wrong board.
So you have to discover a raw signal on one end (privileged market intelligence in a business context for example) that represents a prize worth fighting over, and send a refined version towards your allies (otherwise what value are you adding?) and a noisier version towards adversaries (amplified VUCA). Think of this as the process of striking gold. You want to let your friends know to come join you, but you want to avoid triggering a general gold rush before you’ve had a chance to take all you want.
It is not easy to script this kind of white opening. Most people fumble either by ignoring the competition too much, ignoring allies too much or ignoring signal-generation too much. But when you get it right, you can develop runaway momentum and a solid trust-bank, while sending your competitors off a cliff. Amazon has mastered this type of opening, but lately, they’ve been burning up trust in favor of greater competitive maneuverability at a potentially unsustainable rate. Their future will be interesting to watch. Jeff Bezos’ philosophy of “being willing to be misunderstood” is highly effective for competitive maneuvering, but it comes with a price.
What about opening with black; fast-following? Your challenge is to first detect that moves are being made, read the opening moves of the first mover correctly, neutralize any feinting designed to send you off towards the wrong game, and pursue in the right direction, faster than they are moving, because you have to catch up and overtake.
But unlike in war or purely adversarial situations, in slightly adversarial ones, you can be too clever for your own good, especially when playing white. Your stealth and misdirection of potential adversaries might alienate potential allies and destroy trust when you are “found out.”
There is also a direct cost. One of the ways you attract allies is by giving them opportunities to imitate your successful moves. If you mask them too much, imitation and the cooperative scaling which results from it will fail. In some cases, making your moves completely transparent may be the right white opening. This is the well-known modern openness strategy practiced in the technology industry.
So opening-game maneuvering needs to protect allies (shielding), or anticipate and accommodate allied losses on each maneuver (controlled losses).
Far too many people who get interested in Slightly Evil philosophies imagine that they’re playing in a truly vicious Game of Thrones world of near-constant backstabbing and unstable loyalties. There is perverse satisfaction to be found in such dark romantic fantasies, but they
are no more realistic than the win-win-or-no-deal approach of unqualified cooperationists. Outside of perhaps parts of the finance industry, a Game of Thrones mental model is simply not accurate, and operating like it is can backfire badly.
The Mid-Game
In the mid-game, the fog of indecision gets replaced by the fog of war. Instead of I don’t know what to do, you get I don’t know what the hell is going on.
The key to the mid-game is to treat it as a fractal regime of sub-games and sub-sub-games. What prevents such dynamic mid-games from turning into stalemates is that the non-human part of the environment tends to keep changing, constantly undermining the assumptions underlying previous successes, and creating potential openings for changes in the leaderboard.
The key to the mid-game is exploiting the complacency of power. Once all players declared their nominal claims to various bits of territory, and have secured actual control over some subset of it, all players have something to lose. Which means there is a defensive agenda to preserve what has been secured, in addition to an offensive agenda to secure more.
Agendas of defense generally receive much less attention and resources than agendas of offense. This is necessary. Winning would be worthless if holding on to winnings took as much ongoing effort as gaining them. The lowered level of effort manifests as habits.
A habit is an efficient pattern of action dissociated from the logic that created it, and built around a fundamental desire or aversion.
The efficiency arises from automation and the suspension of active thought. The ongoing motivation comes from the presence of a core desire or aversion. Habits and automation are at the heart of the vulnerability that makes inside-the-tempo attacks possible. So it deserves a second special sidebar.
Habits as Vulnerability
Automation is about steady and predictable rhythms, emotions and energy patterns. A fixed tempo. At the heart of such a stable tempo is a stable decision-cycle.
To use OODA terminology, a habit is an OODA cycle where the second O, orient has been unplugged, leaving behind a non-adaptive O-DA cycle. Note that unconscious habits of adaptation simply represent more complex habits, not habits monitored by a conscious process of ongoing orientation and creative adaptation.
As a challenger who has temporarily acknowledged defeat on some front, what you need to do is create an opening to restart the competition. That means watching the environment more closely than the complacent adversary, spotting environmental changes earlier, figuring out what assumptions they undermine, and starting a subgame to take advantage.
Sometimes, all you need is the complacency of steady profitability. At other times, the incumbent adversary remains on high alert, sacrificing some profitability in order to remain responsive to threats. In these cases, creating an opening means creating distractions on one front so you can open up another in peace.
An alert adversary in a mid-game is a bundle of learned habits, both simple and complex, primed to respond faster and more instinctively to some threats than others. These are their strengths. They are also their push-button vulnerabilities.
So if you can create a false signal that suggests a watched assumption is being undermined, you can exploit the absorption of limited attention on one front to open up another. You want a special kind of distraction to create instinctive fumbling driven by zemblanity rather than decisive responses: fear-uncertainty-doubt. FUD.
FUD is artificial VUCA created to drive up zemblanity for an adversary. When you have a game in progress and an active adversary who has a strong position in the current game, creating VUCA on one front where they feel strong, in order to drain attention without triggering action, is what allows you to break a stalemate.
There is an interesting psychological effect here known as inattentional blindness – the effect that allows somebody in a gorilla suit to run unnoticed across a basketball court with a game in progress. Because there is confusing but relatively legible action going on in one corner, you miss incomprehensible action elsewhere. Your attention locks onto things that it can process more easily into active situation awareness.
But these tactics only have predictable consequences if they target ingrained strong habits in an adversary. An adversary directing attention and energy via habits is an adversary who is thinking (O-DA) but not thinking about thinking (O-rienting) in open-ended and creative ways.
The extent to which an adversary has energy left to devote to thinking-about-thinking is the extent to which he/she still has an active orientation component to their decision-making. Opening up one front may not enough to exhaust orientation potential. You may need to open up front after front in order to move all attention from withheld potential to active executive attention.
Once you manage to create an opening and gain a foothold, you’ve created a sub-game the adversary cannot shut down immediately. Sub-games are similar to top-level games, but are more constrained by existing rules of engagement, and involve smaller wins. This is because there is already a game in progress around the sub-game.
As the action develops, energy increasingly shifts to kinetic form, and each new sub-game wrinkle that develops has less potential energy – orientation potential – to draw on. VUCA turns into what is known as dynamic VUCA, or VUCA(D). We really ought to call it kinetic VUCA to emphasize the potential energy/kinetic energy analogy.
When all available potential energy has been drawn into action, and it becomes impossible to start new sub-games without stopping old-subgames, a cascade of ceded games and exchange sacrifices commences, setting up the end-game.
End Games
When everybody has all their energy fully committed to a set of ongoing games at multiple interconnected levels, you’re beyond both the fog of indecision and the fog of war. You’re entering the fog of exhaustion. Often, players who have already banked big wins secure and liquidate their assets and exit the field of play entirely if they can.
Much of the intelligence has been squeezed out of the system through the creation of layers and layers of gameplay, whose rules have captured all available intelligence and capacity for continuous reorientation.
In military thinking, this phase is often referred to as a melee, where there’s only energy left for instinctive action. You’ve learned all you’re going to learn. You’ve used up all the tricks you have. What’s left is energy and muscle memory. What follows is relatively dumb action, a last-player-standing situation, where unforced errors, attention exhaustion and resource exhaustion drive the action.
When resources are exhausted, players simply drop out. When resources remain, but attention is fully absorbed on multiple active fronts, fatal vulnerabilities open up for others to exploit, even without FUD-creation. These are unforced errors. So ceding some contests in order to create a reserve of attention, before a fatal number of unforced errors accumulate, is a necessary strategy.
In many ways, Microsoft’s loss of market leadership to Apple in the consumer market was a case of end-game exhaustion rather than clever maneuvering by Apple. Microsoft had so much going on, on so many fronts, especially in enterprise markets, that even without artificially created FUD, it did not have the attention or energy left to respond meaningfully to Apple’s moves. Now as the games created by Apple – smartphones and tablets – enter a late mid-game phase, we are seeing Apple being drawn into similar unforced errors.
Of course, you can drive competitors to this state by forcing accumulating losses on them, primarily by opening up an exhausting number of fronts for them to respond to. This is because creating games is cheaper for those with less to lose. But as endgames get underway, zemblanity also has a natural tendency to take over the action, without artificial help.
So endgames are naturally messy.
They may not be very dynamic, but when an active war is shutting down, there is still a lot of cleaning up to do. It may sound grim, but that’s what it looks like. There are broken things everywhere, wounds and corpses, general messiness. Things coll
apsing due to zemblanity forces that have been set in motion but are too large to control.
The VUCA is changing flavor once again: from VUCA(D) to VUCA(E), E for entropy.
Why “Inside the Tempo”?
So what does the phrase “inside the tempo” actually mean? I’ve described it as a process of a group of adversarial players collectively trying to outmaneuver each other by creating games and games-within-games, and continuously maneuvering until players start to exit or die.
It’s the memetic equivalent of a genetic arms race in biology.
I’ve also described it, in parallel, as VUCA turning into VUCA(D) and into VUCA(E). Potential energy (capacity for open-ended creative reorientation) turning into kinetic energy (layers of habits that account for most of the energy flow) and eventually into a state of entropic collapse.
And finally, I’ve also described it as a process of declining intelligence. From an opening phase of great cleverness, daring and imagination, where heroes are born, to a mid-game phase with increasing amounts of energy trapped in habits, to an end-game that’s mostly dumb energy, with very little intelligence and often no residual value: sound and fury signifying nothing.
But the nice thing about living in a nice little neighborhood of the universe, with the sun shining down on us, delivering a continuous stream of low-entropy energy, is that this game can create wealth. Wealth that can create a period of prosperity and peace before we have to do it all over again.
The phrase “inside the tempo” is appropriate because on the whole, partially adversarial situations drive up intelligence through open, Darwinian competition among competitors continuously getting inside each other’s heads by exploiting habits of thought. Mental models grow and strengthen all around, turning the latent truths of VUCA into the codified rules of a hierarchical complex of game play: a landscape of institutions.
Be Slightly Evil: A Playbook for Sociopaths (Ribbonfarm Roughs 1) Page 16
