A “personal view,” in the author’s words, of John Boyd’s “Destruction and Creation” and its “centrality to the OODA loop.” In V2.3, dated September 2014, Chuck Spinney has added a new slide 21 on “not-so-brilliant” snowmobiles and made minor changes after slide 40.

As Chuck notes on Slide 21, “It never hurts to remind ourselves that most ‘New Concept Descriptions’ or ‘New Startups’ do not work so well in the real world.” If you are smart about it, this is a good thing:

The presence and production of mismatches are what sustain and nourish the enterprise of science, engineering, and technology, hence keep it alive and ongoing—otherwise there would be no basis for it to continue. Conceptual Spiral 23

In other words, out in that same real world, Chuck’s observation applies to all sides. So, who is going to win?

Download Evolutionary Epistemology as well as all of Boyd’s briefings (and my scintillating exegesis of Conceptual Spiral) from our Articles page (1.8 MB PDF).