From the organizer:
Boyd and Beyond III is a go for this fall.
Dates are 12 and 13 October, a Friday and Saturday.
We will begin in the Command and Staff building onboard Quantico, same room on the second deck. I am hoping we can move over to the much nicer Expeditionary Warfare School building on Saturday as we did last time; stand by for more word on that.
For information, please monitor Scott Shipman’s blog, To Be or To Do.
In a speech to the recent Joint Warfighting Conference in Virginia Beach, Army GEN Martin Dempsey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, reached a conclusion that could have come straight out of Boyd:
In the end, said Dempsey, “our best hedge against degraded environments is mission command and adaptive leadership” — the ability of leaders at all levels to think for themselves and find a new way to achieve the objective without waiting for orders. That’s a cultural challenge for the military given a long-established preference for detailed, centralized planning, and modern networks that give top commanders constant computer connectivity to their subordinates only makes micromanagement easier. [From: “Humans, Not Hardware, Will Get Military Through Tough Budget Times: Dempsey,” By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr., AOL Defense, Strategy & Policy, May 17, 2012]
“Mission command” is a common translation of Auftragstaktik, and some of you may recall “adaptive leadership” from Don Vandergriff’s book Raising the Bar.
One way to think of it is that Auftragstaktik makes strong use of the implicit guidance and control feed from orientation directly to action. If you become too explicit, you’ll defeat the entire idea.
On the other hand, adaptive leadership requires the ability to rapidly size up the unfolding situation and get the organization going in a way to influence it. The fact that it is “adaptive” means that you aren’t just using pre-programmed responses but have gray matter engaged. If you think about it, that’s the classic observe-orient-decide-act pattern, employed to quickly come up with and test new actions on the fly (that is, while under fire), as Boyd described in Conceptual Spiral.
Put them together, you have Boyd’s OODA “loop” sketch from The Essence of Winning and Losing.
The concept of mission control + adaptive leadership harmonizes well with Boyd’s idea of leadership: “implies the art of inspiring people to enthusiastically take action toward the achievement of uncommon goals.” [Organic Design, 37]
If you don’t usually peruse The National out of Abu Dhabi, you might have missed this story about the creation of a “private navy” to counter piracy along the shipping corridor between the Red and Arabian Seas:
Private navy planned to counter pirate raids
Can you believe that it’s been 21 years since Martin van Creveld published The Transformation of War? My.
Once the legal monopoly of armed force, long claimed by the state, is wrested out of its hands, existing distinctions between war and crime will break down (204)
Much of the day-to-day burden of defending society against the threat of low-intensity conflict will be transferred to the booming security business (207 — remember, this was 1991!)
He made several predictions about the future of the state, none of them encouraging. Here are a couple:
Any community able and, more importantly, willing to exert itself to protect its members will be able to call on those members’ loyalty (198)
Armies will be replaced by police-like security forces on the one hand and bands of ruffians on the other, not that the difference is always clear even today (225).
Perhaps most discouraging:
America’s current (1991) economic decline must be halted; or else one day the crime that is rampant in the streets of New York and Washington, D.C., may develop into low-intensity conflict by coalescing along racial, religious, social, and political lines, and run completely out of control (196).
As in “bill of material.” The parts list.
In Chart 141, Boyd presents his synthesis, outlining a solution to the problems mentioned on chart 2:
The idea is to look around in other areas (“domains”), including previous solutions, pick out concepts, and then recombine them to create a new model of reality, a “snowmobile.” The idea wasn’t new to Boyd, of course. Taiichi Ohno, for example, wrote that the backbone of the Toyota Production System came from power looms and American supermarkets.
This illustrates one of the subtleties of this approach: How many auto industry execs had walked through American supermarkets and taken home nothing but groceries?
As Boyd put it in “Destruction and Creation”:
It is important to note that the crucial or key step that permits this creative induction is the separation of the particulars from their previous domains by the destructive deduction. Without this unstructuring, the creation of a new structure cannot proceed—since the bits and pieces are still tied together as meaning within unchallenged domains or concepts.
Somehow, Ohno was able to pick out a crucial concept from supermarkets, as Boyd would say, to “shatter the American supermarket” domain, in such a way that the concept of pull/JIT stood revealed.
There’s no sign that Boyd ever tried to shatter the supermarket domain or would have found anything useful there, even if he had.
With that in mind, you might look back over the analytical section of Patterns, roughly pages 2 – 125, and watch as Boyd shatters domains and picks out pieces. Not that any of these pieces will go into any of your snowmobiles, although they might, but it’s the process that’s instructive.
We’ll do more in another post, but for now, look at chart 13. Here are a few of the pieces he finds when he shatters Sun Tzu:
He puts these into a parts bin labeled “key asymmetries.” By the way, even as he was picking out pieces, he was starting to play with them, to see how they could be made to fit together. So it wasn’t “deception” and “subversion” but “deception and subversion.” Another point: In each pair, the two elements seem similar and even appear to reinforce each other. Except “dispersion and concentration,” which seem like opposites. Did it just turn out this way?
Precious little in Boyd, though, can be laid to chance.
What artillery and air power are in Third Generation war, cash is in the Fourth Generation: your most useful supporting arm. [FMFM-1A, Fourth Generation Warfare, 12 August 2009, p. 68.]
It’s an old idea:
In England, the rotten-borough system flourished, and the nabobs outbid all other purchasers. Franklin deplored the American war for a peculiar reason: “Why did they [the Continental Congress] not let me go on? If they had given me a fourth of the money they have spent on the war, we should have had our independence without spending a drop of blood. I would have bought all the Parliament, the whole government of Britain.” [Will and Arial Durant, Rousseau and Revolution, p. 733.]
All the 4GW manuals are available at DNIPOGO, http://dnipogo.org/strategy-and-force-employment/fourth-generation-warfare-manuals/
As a synthesis of all that comes before it, chart 141 will repay a little more study. Like, if you’re at the snowmobile dealer’s, you might want to do more than just admire the paint scheme.
The first thing that might strike you is: What is it with all these levels? There are six, and “grand tactics” has three bullets all to itself. Does it have to be this complicated? Rather than accepting Boyd’s scheme or (God forbid!) trying to memorize it, you might think about this question. If you’re not into large-scale combat on land, then you should ponder whether the notion of “levels” even makes sense for you.
On the next chart, Boyd suggests that for armed conflict, you’ll need at least two levels, a constructive ideal, represented by the top two, and some concept for compelling opponents to accede to your wishes (the bottom four). So one thing you might start with is asking if such a scheme makes any sense for other forms of conflict, such as business.
My guess is that because Patterns is primarily concerned with armed conflict on land, Boyd started with the levels that are familiar to practitioners of that art: tactical, operational, and strategic. Roughly these are:
tactical — fighting the battle
operational — what you do between battles; maneuver
strategic — overall concept for the campaign; what you’re trying to accomplish with the battles you do fight
First thing he did is rename the operational level to “grand tactics.”
Next, remember back on chart 2, which I mentioned in an earlier post, one of his purposes was to “help generalize tactics and strategy.” He doesn’t say anything about “grand tactics” or “strategic aim.” In fact, when he briefed chart 2, he would always caution against becoming rigid or dogmatic in your definitions of “tactics” and “strategy.” He’d tell the audience, “strategy” is what you’re trying to accomplish, while “tactics” is how you’re going to do it. If you look at chart 141 again, each level can be thought of as tactics to the more strategic level above it. Put another way, for each level except tactics, the level just below it answers the “how?” question.
This is really interesting. If you are familiar with lean production or the Toyota Production System, you may remember something called the “five whys.” As one of the system’s creators, Taiichi Ohno (Toyota Production System, 1988, p. 17), illustrated it:
1. The machine stopped.
Why?
2. There was an overload and a fuse blew.
Why was there an overload?
3. The bearing was not lubricated properly
Why?
4. The lubrication pump wasn’t working right
Why?
5. The shaft of the pump was worn out.
Why?
6. There was no strainer attached and metal scrap got in.
As Ohno pointed out, if you didn’t go through this process and get to the root cause, you’d replace the fuse and sometime, probably in the near future, you’d have the same problem (and stop production again).
In “The Five Whys,” we’re asking “what caused it?” If you start at the top of chart 141, you are, essentially, asking, “what are we going to do to make this happen?” or equivalently, “what’s going to cause it?” The distinction is inconsequential. Both produce the insight that leads off IOHAI.
If you start at the top level and ask “How?” five times, you get … six levels.
I’m reasonably sure that Boyd was not aware of the “five whys” when he created chart 141. I have a version of Patterns dated September 1981 that contains this chart with the same six levels (although the definitions did change some in the intervening five years), but as far as I know, Boyd didn’t encounter the five whys concept until he started reading about the TPS in the mid-1980s.
Coincidence? Probably. From his study of Sun Tzu, though, Boyd was familiar with the philosophical infrastructure that underlies both maneuver and moral conflict as well as the Toyota Way (of which the production system is a component). So perhaps five “hows?” just intuitively seemed right to him. This suggests that if your field isn’t armed conflict, you’re still going to want some structure inspired by the five whys/hows.
There’s more we can milk out of chart 141, but this should get you started.
Patterns of Conflict is long and complex, so I’m going to try to make it more accessible by commenting on a few of its charts.
We’ll begin with chart 141 (out of 185). No, it wasn’t picked at random but because it plays a unique role. This may seem like an odd statement because it is only the last in a series of similar charts, including 57, 70, 90, 105, 108, 128, 132, and 134. If you look at these other charts, though, you’ll see that 141 is the culmination, a final synthesis of the ideas in its predecessors.
This makes a lot of sense because it is near the end of the section called “Synthesis.” But what is it a synthesis of? One way to answer that is to go back to the beginning of Patterns, to chart 2. I think you’ll see that at the least, it summarizes answers to the last three points of the “Mission,” if not the entire chart.
To grasp the significance of this, it helps to recall that Boyd had completed “Destruction and Creation” shortly before starting on what became Patterns. In D&C, as you may remember, Boyd is discussing systems of concepts to represent reality and how these can never be complete or final. As our models of reality encounter the inevitable mismatches, we need to form new models by “shattering domains” (his term) — including our previous concepts as well as ideas from other fields such as the history, biology, physics and mathematics that Boyd examined and Steve Jobs’ calligraphy — sorting through the bits and pieces, and forming a new synthesis.
Following the lead of D&C, you might expect that the stuff before Synthesis (which begins on p. 126) would be “analysis,” and if you glance through those pages that’s what you’ll find. He’s pulling things apart looking for interesting pieces that he can then put back together to make the synthesis represented by chart 141.
In the language of a later (1987) briefing, Strategic Game of ? and ?, chart 141 is a snowmobile or at least the blueprint for one. A key point, though, is that it is a snowmobile to solve the problems outlined on chart 2, which relate to conflict and in particular to armed conflict on land. If you have problems in a different arena, it would be much better (as he insisted in the “Abstract” to the Discourse on Winning and Losing) to learn from Boyd’s method than to try to use this particular snowmobile in an environment for which it was never intended.
Strategic Game and the Abstract and are available at http://dnipogo.org/john-r-boyd/
Legendary bluesman Sam Chatmon (1899 – 1983) would never fly to concerts. If he couldn’t go by car or bus, he didn’t go. When asked why, he explained:
It ain’t that I’m scared of flying. It’s just that if I’m up there and it’s somebody else’s time to go … I don’t want to have to ride down with’em.
You have to let that one sink in for a minute.
Chatmon was from Hollandale, once a vibrant hub of the blues in the Mississippi Delta, on Hwy 61 about 20 miles from my wife’s home south of Inverness.
[Many thanks to the article “Sittin’ on top of the world,” by Hank Burdine in the May/June 2012 issue of Delta Magazine, pp. 38-40.]
Now available on our Articles page.
At 185 pages plus seven pages of sources, Patterns is by far the longest of Boyd’s briefings. Chronologically, it sits in the middle of Boyd’s post-retirement corpus, completed (if that is the word) about 10 years after “Destruction and Creation” and about 10 years before The Essence of Winning and Losing. For many people, it represents the entirety of Boyd’s work; it is “the Boyd briefing.” It was certainly the most presented — estimates range into the hundreds — and is still the one I get the most requests for.
In this edition, I have corrected a half dozen remaining typos and brought the punctuation more in line with modern usage. I have also simplified the formatting to try to make Patterns more accessible to readers who did not have the opportunity to see Boyd deliver it in person, the last such event probably 20 years ago. With the corrections as noted, all the original text is present. The “Sources” section was not edited.
The original version of Patterns was typed onto regular 8.5 by 11 paper turned sideways and then run through a machine that made “transparencies.” Some of you will remember this process. For the rest of you, all you have to know is that changes, even the most simple, usually required retyping the entire page. And Boyd didn’t type, so after a while, there were no more changes and certainly for nothing as insignificant as correcting commas or hyphens.
Still, Boyd kept building snowmobiles. On his infamous calls, he would be discussing some esoteric point and then happen to mention that he wanted to change something in Patterns, and he expected you to go to your reference copy and make the change in pen and ink. Perhaps the best known is in the “Theme for Vitality and Growth,” chart 144, which in about 1989 or so went from “insight, initiative, adaptability, and harmony” to IOHAI: Insight, orientation, harmony, agility, and initiative. I have left the original but added IOHAI as a note (Boyd did not supply concise definitions for orientation and agility, so I have also provided a little explanation).
Chuck and I have also added several notes where we feel strongly that Boyd would have made additions had he the opportunity because these are remarks he made every time he gave the presentation. We have left Boyd’s telegraphic style intact because that’s how he wanted it: “Need fighter that …” not “Need a fighter that …” on page 4, for example.
Underlines in the original are indicated by bolding in this version (an option that Boyd didn’t have, of course, but which adds to readability in an age where underlining usually indicates a hyperlink). Back then, an underline was an instruction for the printer to set the text in italics (another option Boyd didn’t have), but italics are too easily lost on the screen.
If you’d like to see the original, it, along with originals of all of Boyd’s other works, are available as PDF scans at http://dnipogo.org/john-r-boyd.
If you find any more typos, please let me know.
This reminds me so much of the mp3 player market before October 2001:
Worse, the screen updates fairly slowly — maybe one frame a second. … Over the weekend, I missed a turnoff because the screen showed that I hadn’t reached it yet. Oops.
Like most modern cars’ ambitious electronics systems, this one requires some learning and some studying of the incredibly wretched user manual. There are plenty of typical car-company baffling interface decisions and error messages.
This in the midst of an otherwise glowing review of the new Toyota Prius V in today’s New York Times: http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/03/the-prius-v-and-its-entune-system
In other words, it’s cool, and it sort of works, but it’s not insanely great.
Slightly East of New 
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