An e-mail appeared a few weeks ago asking an interesting question about Fingerspitzengefühl:

I am particularly interested in the concept of Fingerspitzengefühl, which I interpret as an intuitive understanding of a situation. This concept sounds something like what my wife described to me about her work. She’s a surgeon who talks about being able to “see with her fingertips” during an operation. This sounds a lot like “Fingerspitzengefühl”. What do you think?

I think he’s right. We sometimes regard Fingerspitzengefühl as the simple component of Boyd’s organizational climate, EBFAS (for an explanation, please see my paper and accompanying presentation, “All By Ourselves,” available for free download from the Articles page.) But Boyd certainly did not. In fact, it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to conclude that it lies at the core of his philosophy — simply put, if you don’t have Fingerspitzengefühl for some capability, then you don’t have the capability in any meaningful sense.

Here’s what Boyd wrote about tactics, for example (Strategic Game, Chart 45):

We can’t just look at our own personal experiences or use the same mental recipes over and over again; we’ve got to look at other disciplines and activities and relate or connect them to what we know from our experiences and the strategic world we live in.

If we can do this, we will be able to surface new repertoires and (hopefully) develop a Fingerspitzengefühl for folding our adversaries back inside themselves, morally-mentally-physically—so that they can neither appreciate nor cope with what’s happening—without suffering the same fate ourselves.

[All of Boyd’s unclassified works are also available for free download from the Articles page.]

With that in mind, I asked Chuck Spinney if we were on the right track. Here’s what he wrote back to me and to the author of the original e-mail:

You are correct about Fingerspitzengefühl being a reference to an intuitive understanding of a situation. Boyd (and I) first became of aware of its importance during some debriefing sessions a group of us had with Col. Hans Rudel, the famous German Stuka pilot in WWII in the late 70s. [CR Note: For more detail on Rudel see his autobiography, Stuka Pilot and the transcripts of the Rudel interviews at this link.] Rudel used the term repeatedly and very casually, and we were not entirely sure what he meant, but it became obvious that Rudel thought it was important. That captured Boyd’s attention, and Pierre Sprey, Boyd’s close colleague, who was present at these meeting and speaks fluent German, was able to explain the term to the rest of us. It took a while for all of us to appreciate the import of what Rudel meant when he used the expression. And in fact, the German military attaché, Col. Hasso von Uslar {sp?} helped Boyd develop this idea.

Fingerspitzengefühl is one of those delightful German mashed-word expressions that, once understood, conveys a far richer meaning that the words themselves, which literally (I think) mean something like finger tip touch. I remember particularly one discussion a small group of us had when Rudel was talking about returning to a battlefield after being away from it for a few days. He said that was when the battlefield was most dangerous because his Fingerspitzengefühl was not up to date (my words). Essentially, as I came to understand it (or at least the way Boyd understood it and explained to me), the word conveys a general summing of a fluid situation by continually probing and testing the environment. It is a synthesis (as opposed to an analysis) of the situation, if you will, and it becomes implicit or buried in one’s Orientation to that situation. It enables one to intuitively and quickly understand the flow of Observations flowing into and subtly changing the Orientation — in that sense Fingerspitzengefühl is at the heart of the functioning of the OODA loop in a competitive or time sensitive situation requiring quick decisions and actions.

I find your wife’s impressions extremely interesting in this regard. Her “little voice” is, I think, a variation of what Rudel was referring to. What is most fascinating is that her experience is quite literal, in that she is actually seeing with her fingertips during a procedure. Of course Rudel could not do this literally, but his actions, including spending time with troops on the ground and doing reconnaissance before he led his squadron on missions, was a constant probing and testing to evolve an intuitive feel for the unfolding situation — which is what I suspect your wife is doing, whether consciously or not.

Incidentally, Sun Tzu emphasized a continuous projection into and testing of the environment, as did Napoleon and the Mongols. One sees hints of this in Grant’s memoirs in the way he learned from mistakes. I believe they would immediately understand Rudel’s intuitive feel for the battlefield and perhaps even what your wife is talking about. Clausewitiz, on the hand, might throw Fingerspitzengefühl into the intellectual black box he called “genius” — he knew something was there, but he did not understand it. Boyd’s OODA Loop, for better or worse, is one man’s attempt to get inside and understand that black box.

One thing I am quite positive about is that Rudel’s discussion of Fingerspitzengefühl had an enormous impact on Boyd’s thinking with regard to the intuitive character of the OODA loop. I saw it when it happened and we talked about it tens if not hundreds of times afterward. Boyd was probably fascinated in part because he saw something of himself in it. He used his intuitive side when he was a fighter pilot and later when he evolved the revolutionary Energy-Maneuverability theory of basic Newtonian physics. As Chet can tell you better than I, Boyd was a mathematical genius (i.e., he had an amazing, really eery, Fingerspitzengefühl for evolving original mathematical ideas — an he was entirely self taught as a mathematician!) If you have not done so, you might want to look at this briefing about the intellectual foundations of the OODA loop — particularly the sections about implicit guidance and control toward the end of it. Those ideas were definitely a reflection of the impact Rudel had on the evolution of Boyd’s ideas.

I hope this helps — remember it is just one person’s Orientation.