Boyd’s Theories

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Another ring?

John Boyd really liked Miyamoto Musashi’s 1645 treatise on swordfighting, A Book of Five Rings. In that same vein, he was a big fan of The Japanese Art of War by Thomas Cleary, a work that includes excerpts from Musashi and quotes from several other samurai and Zen masters of that period. Both of these books emphasize preparing an opponent mentally before risking an attack, a theme that also runs through Sun Tzu and that forms the foundation for much of Boyd’s Discourse.

As an aside, the parallels between fencing and dueling in the skies over southern Nevada are too close to ignore.

It’s always good, then, to receive a paper by someone who knows both fencing and Boyd. Here’s a new one for you, Nick Johnson’s “Boyd’s Real OODA Loop and Fencing,” which I’ve uploaded to the Articles page.

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The Pentagon Wars

Jim Burton’s classic description of his struggle to get the Army to do the right thing by its soldiers has been reissued electronically by the Naval Institute Press. Originally published in 1993, the book was made into a movie released in 1998 that starred Cary Elwes as Burton and Kelsey Grammar as, in Burton’s words, “a combination of four or five Army generals.”

Kindle users can order from Amazon.com, and Barnes & Noble has a version for the Nook.  A print-on-demand edition will soon be available from the Institute.

Col Burton, USAF (ret.) was the subject of Chapter 29 in Robert Coram’s biography of John Boyd.

 

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Boyd for Business & Innovation — Final Report

Chuck Spinney explaining some obtuse point about the OODA loop

Chuck Spinney explaining some obtuse point about the OODA loop

After my presentation, retired Marine Colonel Mike Wyly joined us from Maine via Skype to relate how the Marine Corps adopted the doctrine of maneuver warfare. Mike gave us a blow-by-blow description of a process in which he played a major role. Successful doctrinal changes by large organizations are rare: If you are the CEO of an organization considering such a change, you could do a lot worse than spending some time with Mike. His paper, “Thinking Like Marines,” is conveniently available on the Articles page. Following Mike, Sean Bone, co-founder of Adaptive Leader, demonstrated tactical decision games (TDGs) they use for training leaders in mental agility and timely decision-making under conditions of stress and uncertainty. This is real-world, practical stuff that I’m sure will be a great help to many of the participants.

Finally, for a successful implementation of Boyd’s ideas in business, Dean Lenane, then-CEO of CRH North America, described how he and his small team built CRH from no presence in the US market to a major player in their industry, explicitly using the principles of Boyd’s Discourse. Absolutely fascinating. Dean has written a thinly disguised novelization of one episode in this adventure, The Turnaround, which you can (and should!) also download from the Articles page. Continue reading →

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Boyd for Business & Innovation — 2

Before I forget, Chuck Spinney made a point about the OODA loop that bears repeating: Boyd did not want to draw the thing! In fact, he didn’t, until the penultimate chart in his very last briefing, less than a couple of years before he died.

Why not? Probably because he was afraid any “loop” he drew would become dogma, a reasonable assumption. Chuck finally persuaded him by using the logic that if he didn’t, others would. Most likely the circular O – O – D – A loop would become fixed in people’s minds. So Boyd agreed, but he insisted on calling it an OODA loop “sketch,” and putting “Loop” in quotes.

If you look at that briefing, the purpose of “OODA loops” (not “the OODA loop”) is simply to represent the process of evolving new implicit repertoire. Now, that’s a big purpose because our ability to survive on our own terms and increase our capacity for independent action rests solidly upon it. But it also suggests that people can create other OODA loops that serve their purpose better than Boyd’s sketch, at least in specific instances. All I ask is don’t make them more complicated than what we already have.

I have uploaded my presentation, slightly edited, to the Articles page. It’s a 3.1 MB PDF, and each element of each animation is saved as a separate slide, so don’t let the number of slides put you off. You can also download all of Boyd’s briefings, including the one we were just discussing, The Essence of Winning and Losing, from that page.

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Defeated by our own technology?

Paul Lewandowski suggests so in a recent blog on ForeignPolicy.com (registration required):

Insurgent techniques became simpler, low-tech. Military-grade munitions gave way to homemade explosives. Cell phone detonators regressed back to command wire. Suicide bombers and insurgents disguised as Afghan army or police proved more efficient than complex, electronic IEDs or expensive VBIEDs. After nearly 13 years of war, the terrorists have learned that the best counter to a techno-savvy force is simplicity.

While this is certainly true, another, perhaps better way to characterize what’s happening is that the Taliban, al-Shabab and others confronting Western military forces aren’t so much out-innovating us as out-learning us. In other words, they aren’t coming up with better and simpler technology to counter ours. Instead, they’ve just stopped playing that game entirely. What’s most interesting is that they’re getting away with it, that is, they’ve found another game to play that works better.

As Lewandowski notes, what they’ve done is return to the roots of insurgency:

deeply embedded in the local culture, regional in focus, and urban in operation. The new insurgent will be so low tech he will be virtually untraceable. Another face in a sea of faces.

Compare with Boyd’s description of guerrilla warfare:

  • Guerrillas must establish implicit connections or bonds with people and countryside.
  • In other words, guerrillas must be able to blend into the emotional-cultural-intellectual environment of people until they become one with the people.
  • In this sense, people feelings and thoughts must be guerrilla feeling and thoughts while guerrilla feelings and thoughts become people feelings and thoughts; people aspirations must be guerrilla aspirations while guerrilla aspirations become people aspirations; people goals must be guerrilla goals while guerrilla goals become people goals.
  • Result: Guerrillas become indistinguishable from people while government is isolated from people. (Patterns 95)

Or, as Lewandowski puts it:

The counterinsurgent could see them walking to their target, weapon in hand, and never register him as a threat … The counterinsurgent can’t tap into the local, informal network the way the insurgent can. No one talks to the uniformed government official, but everyone talks to their neighbor.

And that’s the real problem. Until “counterinsurgents” solve that one, all the technological innovation in the world is just expensive wheel spinning. Another example of incestuous amplification.

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Boyd for Business and Innovation — 1

Got back on time from San Diego last night, which is saying a lot, considering what’s happening on the East Coast.  On the other hand, fifty-five degrees and horizontal rain isn’t something you generally associate with San Diego, but it’s still one of my wife’s and my favorite cities. [As I’m typing this, we’re starting to get heavy rain here. It’s followed me home.]

The conference was great. Hans Norden along with the staff at the Rady School of Management at UCSD did a fantastic job of pulling it together. If you didn’t make this year’s event, I think they’re planning for another to coincide with monsoon season next year.

Personally, it was a hoot meeting several folks that I only know through this blog. Thanks to all of you for coming and for your enthusiastic participation.

I’ll be posting more over the next several days. In the meantime, Chuck Spinney has given me his presentation, Evolutionary Epistemology, for posting, and it’s up on our Articles page now.  I’ve been watching this pitch evolve, if you’ll pardon the expression, since about the time Chuck first gave it. It just keeps getting better and better.

More stuff and impressions over the next few days.

 

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Competition Rules

A little double entendre to start your Thursday.

First, an op-ed by Jacques Gansler in the NYT, “To Save on Defense, Hire Rivals.”

If monopolies are created in a quest for short-term savings, taxpayers eventually pay more and our country is less safe.

This is a favorite theme of mine, expressed as “If you can’t afford two suppliers, you certainly can’t afford one.” The question would be, “Who really wants to save on defense?”

And then there’s a short piece on LinkedIn by David Edelman on a favorite theme of Boyd’s, “Don’t be ruled by rules.”

And in a world of rule-based contacts, there is still important space that needs to be made for two people just being allowed to discuss a customer’s need and develop a solution. No one likes to sit through a canned set of questions when they agree to enter a chat window on a site or when they call a representative. We want a human, free-flow interaction. Many clients of ours have actually found that they resolve issues faster on the first round, cut call times, and have happier customers when they loosen the rules and give smart reps more leeway.

Slavishly following rules makes you predictable. This can be fatal in a conflict, and boring, and hence also fatal, in sales & marketing. It’s worth noting that a lot of this argument goes away if you replace most of your rules with an EBFAS-type culture.

I’m off to the Boyd conference in San Diego. More on that as it happens.

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Adding it up

By the time I had grabbed my iPhone, slid to unlock, put in the passcode, found Calculator, punched in the numbers, punched in the right numbers, and read her the result, my wife had easily figured the answer to a tax problem on a scrap of paper. Worth her studying math for 12 years in school?

“No,” is the clear answer given by Simon Jenkins in yesterday’s Guardian.com, “For Britain’s pupils, maths is even more pointless than Latin.” I completely agree. For one thing, except for what she regards as the most useless subject of all times, Euclidean geometry, she wasn’t doing math, or “maths,” as they say over there, at all. She was, basically, learning to replace a calculator.

Continue reading →

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Another note on cheng / chi

As you may recall, the idea of playing off the expected, cheng, with the unexpected, chi, plays a major role in Boyd’s conception of maneuver warfare. Following Sun Tzu, Boyd advises engaging with the cheng, and winning with the chi. This is the strategy of deception: Go in with something the opponent believes he has figured out, ideally with some effort on his part in order to set the hook, as it were, then at the moment you believe will have the most paralyzing impact, spring the chi. Boyd has a nice summary on Patterns 132.

As I’ve mentioned before, and devoted an entire chapter to in Certain to Win, this idea translates nicely over to business. Give the customer what he expects, wants, needs.  In simple terms, the product or service you provide has to work and do what you’ve told him it will do.

But customers become bored, eventually, with this approach. To hook them for the long term, you also need the unexpected, the surprising, the delightful. This may not be just the product or service itself but could include customer service or even packaging. For years, Apple was the master of this approach.

Hiroshi Mikitani had a nice cheng / chi piece yesterday on LinkedIn: “Selling distinction in the Internet Age.” Mikitani is the founder and CEO of Rakuten, the Japanese Internet retail giant that bought Buy.com a few years ago. What’s interesting about Mikitani’s approach is that he’s advising not more delightful packaging, which you could implement as well through Internet sales as anywhere else, but shifting to a new domain entirely.

What’s important is that your business think in these terms. Harried CEOs sometimes regard anything other than getting product out the door as distractions or at best “nice-to-have,” and bean counters look on them as added costs — i.e., they get points for griping about them or worse, eliminating them. Actions like these leave you open to smarter competitors.

What I recommend instead is that from the very beginning you regard your Schwerpunkt as not the chi nor the cheng but cheng / chi.

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CTW passes 10,000

Certain to Win has surpassed 10,700 sales.

MANY, many thanks to all of you who bought the book!!!

I am working on a new book, if “working” can be the right word (lots of distractions in an over-55 community …) In the meantime, my two papers, “Boyd’s Real OODA Loop,” and “John Boyd, Conceptual Spiral, and the Meaning of Life,” both available from the articles page, will have to stand in as updates.

CTW is also available in a special Indian edition and has been translated into Portuguese. Unfortunately, I don’t have sales numbers for them.