decision process design

shuku­mine wrote that the ulti­mate mea­sure of the qual­ity of a mar­tial art would be based on the actions of its prac­ti­tion­ers. with this notion in mind, he designed the core strat­egy of taido as a deci­sion process. in an unfor­tu­nate exam­ple of dis­sym­me­try, this process does not quite match up with the 5jokun — though they do express a few shared val­ues. how­ever, under­stand­ing this process is quite impor­tant in apply­ing taido to bat­tle or any other sit­u­a­tion. maybe you have seen this some­where before…

unsoku, sotai, seiho, kimegi, gentai

of course, this refers to the order of tech­nique in jis­sen. first, we must respond to the oppo­nent and make plans while mov­ing in unsoku. when we see an open­ing, we ini­ti­ate with some sen, un, hen, nen, or ten motion. while check­ing the opponent’s reac­tion, we make adjust­ments, attempt­ing to con­trol his move­ments until we can finally deliver a con­nect­ing strike. then we return to kamae at a safe dis­tance. (inci­den­tally, this where we get the say­ing that “taido begins and ends with unsoku” — since we use unsoku to make gen­tai, this is lit­eral as well as philosophic.)

i think i must have been about eleven or twelve when uchida first gave a few of us a rough expla­na­tion of all this. being that we were chil­dren who didn’t speak any japan­ese, he broke things down in terms that looked more like this:

observe, analyze, initiate, conclude, reflect

which is basi­cally the same thing, just not in jissen-specific terms. and that’s an impor­tant fac­tor to me. you see, when i first learned about this, i had no idea that is was related specif­i­cally to jis­sen. it was explained more as a process that could apply to any­thing - includ­ing jis­sen. taido was only one of the many exam­ples that uchida gave us when he described this process, which he told us was for “prob­lem solving”.

my progress in taido has been heav­ily influ­enced by under­stand­ing this process, which i have attempted to apply con­sciously to my prac­tice of taido since the early 90s. you will find it pop­ping up in many forms all over this web­site, in the prac­tice cur­ricu­lum at the geor­gia tech taido club, and in every class i teach. i believe, as shuku­mine wrote, that this process is the cen­tral strat­egy of taido. the val­ues we wish to achieve are out­lined in the 5SRs, or more-formally in the 5jokun. the method to achieve them is right here.

of course, i don’t want to make it sound as if i believe this idea is unique to taido. while shuku­mine may well have made it up off the top of his head, he was cer­tainly not the first per­son in all of his­tory to do so. there have been many cod­i­fied deci­sion processes out­lined in var­i­ous sys­tems of strat­egy. per­haps the most well known in the west­ern world is “ooda” feed­back loop, cre­ated by colonel john boyd, of the united states air force. it looks like this:

observe, orient, decide, act

boyd out­lined this process in attempt­ing to dis­cover why amer­i­can fighter pilots were more suc­cess­ful than their adver­saries in the korean war, and it has since become a “classic”.

one inter­est­ing thing about ooda, is that it ends with action. pre­sum­ably, if the action is suc­cess­ful, there is noth­ing else to be con­sid­ered. how­ever, the sys­tem is referred to as a feed­back loop, which implies iter­a­tive appli­ca­tion. so even though there are fewer steps referred to in the ana­gram “ooda”, the actual process includes cycling through mul­ti­ple instances until we accom­plish our desired outcome.

i could describe the ooda loop in detail here, but there is already a very nice arti­cle about it at wikipedia. the flow chart schematic in that arti­cle more clearly shows the loop­ing feed­back than i can describe it in words.

the ooda loop is cur­rently pop­u­lar among west­ern com­bat schools and can be seen all over the inter­net. it is pop­u­lar because it is effec­tive and (can be) sim­ple to under­stand — you can’t go wrong with an easy solu­tion that gets the job done. if four steps is the most you can count on your­self to fol­low through with a par­tic­u­lar process, i sug­gest you try to apply the ooda loop to sit­u­a­tions that chal­lenge you.

assess, plan, implement, evaluate

i recently read a man­ual of chaos magic that advo­cated the same basic process under the above terms. obvi­ously, the premise is the same. if we look around, we can find sim­i­lar processes in com­mu­ni­ca­tions the­ory, mil­i­tary strat­egy, busi­ness plans, and self-help books. most strate­gic sys­tems will offer some model of a deci­sion process, and the vast major­ity will look some­thing like the ones i am dis­cussing here. some will be very spe­cific (ie, unsoku, sotai, seiho, kimegi, gen­tai), and some may not have an explicit loop (such as ooda), but the gen­eral pat­tern remains the same:

see, think, try, practice, think, apply

that’s the “andy’s spe­cial recipe” ver­sion for this deci­sion process — com­bin­ing sim­ple terms, explicit iter­a­tion, and a rhyming pneu­monic. it applies equally to prob­lem solv­ing, strate­giz­ing, goal set­ting, fight­ing, train­ing, teach­ing, cook­ing, dat­ing, find­ing a job, doing a job, or play­ing music — i’ve used it for all of these and more. i find that wher­ever i con­sciously apply this process, my suc­cess is lim­ited only by my degree of moti­va­tion to fol­low through with the process.

though i write my first step as “see”, per­haps it wold be more accu­rate to say that the goal is per­cep­tion. we have many senses through which we can gather infor­ma­tion (opti­cal [sight], audial [hear­ing], olfac­tory [smell and taste], tac­tile [touch, pres­sure, and heat], vestibu­lar [bal­ance and direc­tion], pro­pri­o­cep­tive [move­ment, posi­tion, pain, elec­tro­mag­netic], somatic [aware­ness of our invol­un­tary inter­nal processes], rhyth­mic [recog­ni­tion of pat­terns and timing] — not to men­tion emo­tion and intu­ition), and all of them can be use­ful in mak­ing good deci­sions. in com­bat for exam­ple, our less-dominant senses are often more use­ful to us than sight. since the eyes are hard­wired to the neo­cor­tex, our brains typ­i­cally inter­pret sight through the fil­ter of thought. by the time we can rec­og­nize and inter­pret a visual event, it if often too late to decide and respond.

my sec­ond step is “think”. of course, this doesn’t nec­es­sar­ily mean we have to stop and lin­guis­ti­cally con­sider our course of action. this stage includes access of pre­pro­grammed response pat­terns (such as return­ing a neighbor’s “good morn­ing” with­out stop­ping to con­sider whether or not it really is all that good — it’s just “nat­ural”), instincts and reflexes (such as flinch­ing, tens­ing our shoul­ders, or brac­ing for impact), as well as care­ful con­sid­er­a­tion and weigh­ing of pros and cons. some­times this will be an intense outcome-based visu­al­iza­tion exer­cise; some­times it will be a sud­den release of bile into our stom­achs and the sin­gu­lar thought: “go!”.

“try” means sim­ply to give it a shot — get started. so many plans fail before they begin. if a jour­ney of a thou­sand li begins with a sin­gle step, then get­ting a raise begins with find­ing out what your boss expects from you (only then can you attempt to deliver it). too often, we sab­o­tage our­selves with self-defeating thoughts. this self-doubt pre­vents us from reach­ing our sin­cer­est dreams. after we have made our plans, we have noth­ing to gain by sit­ting around, think­ing they are pipe dreams. we must try, or we are sim­ply liv­ing the lives that are handed to us by circumstance.

of course, that isn’t to say that merely try­ing will get us where we want to be. as the lit­tle green man said “there is no try, only do”. well, in order to turn our tries into dos, we’re going to have to prac­tice. maybe our ini­tial plans don’t work out. what do we do — scrap our dreams and go back to work­ing at star­bucks? get beaten to a pulp because goliath ducked the first stone? no. we prac­tice. we try again. we fig­ure out what went wrong and fix it.

admit­ting our mis­takes and learn­ing form them is a seri­ously impor­tant skill that our egos often get in the way of. we live in a soci­ety that val­ues “com­pe­tence”, so it can be tough to admit to our­selves that prac­tice is nec­es­sary — we want to get it right the first time. how­ever, this is not a real­is­tic expec­ta­tion for most of life’s chal­lenges. we have to make mis­takes will­ingly, with the knowl­edge that they allow us to refine our plans and try again with a bet­ter approach.

one of my favorite say­ings is very appro­pri­ate here: it is a ter­ri­ble plan that can­not be changed. i can even write it in latin for those of you who think wis­dom has to sound intel­lec­tual: malum con­sil­ium quod mutari non potest. man, that makes my brain hurt; cog­ito sumere potum alterum.

the iter­a­tion “feed­back loop” (in this case, “prac­tice, think, apply/try, prac­tice...”) ensures that we con­tin­u­ally mon­i­tor the para­me­ters of what­ever “exper­i­ment” we hap­pen to under­take. then we can make incre­men­tal adjust­ments and note any improve­ment or prob­lem. this is sim­i­lar to the japan­ese prin­ci­ple of kaizen — incre­men­tal per­mu­ta­tions of a design that move ever-closer to “perfection”.

once we have prac­ticed to the point of accom­plish­ing our desired progress mark­ers, we take a moment and “think” again. as i men­tioned in a pre­vi­ous arti­cle, west­ern­ers don’t have a great track record with fin­ish­ing things. look­ing back and tying up loose ends and mak­ing men­tal notes about the var­i­ous out­comes asso­ci­ated with our actions is not only edu­ca­tional, but insur­ance against a lot of stu­pid mis­takes that arise when we under­es­ti­mate prob­lems or oppo­nents. this part of the process allows us to make sure that we have done what we set out to do and learn from the situation.

lastly, i have included appli­ca­tion. some of the process exam­ples above to not spell this part out, but i think that appli­ca­tion of lessons learned is per­haps the most impor­tant part of the entire method, so i want to make sure to do it explic­itly. we have to apply the results of our process again. then if a sim­i­lar sit­u­a­tion comes up, we will already have made a plan which has proven suc­cess­ful. while the pre­vi­ous plan may not be a per­fect match for the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion, it can serve as a help­ful heuris­tic when mak­ing new plans. appli­ca­tion means keep­ing a men­tal data­base of all our past processes and draw­ing on them to help cre­ate new ones.

stated again, in slightly dif­fer­ent words, andy’s spe­cial recipe deci­sion process is as follows:

perceive, think, try, correct, conclude, apply

my ver­sion of this process works very well for me, but it may not be a per­fect fit for you. the whole point of this arti­cle is actu­ally to get you to think about cre­at­ing your own processes, and giv­ing some guide­lines that many peo­ple have found use­ful. in taido, we use “unsoku, sotai, seiho, kimegi, gen­tai”, but the arena in which you apply your process may require a lit­tle dif­fer­ent way of look­ing at things. wher­ever you intend to use your process, it will be ben­e­fi­cial to include the fol­low­ing points, which are com­mon ingre­di­ents to all of those out­lined above:

1. obser­va­tion
2. thinking/planning stage
3. ini­ti­a­tion
4. con­clu­sion
5. iteration/reflection
6. pos­si­ble lay­ers of feedback

in clos­ing, i will present one final incar­na­tion of the process map that has man­i­fested in a very gen­eral sense in my life.

dream, plan, work, achieve, dream again

may you dis­cover and achieve all your dreams through some well-designed process of your own.