Boyd’s Theories

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Cheetahs — inside your OODA loops

Bad news if you’re an antelope, but in that case, probably something you already knew.

It isn’t just speed. Sure, the cheetah is the fastest mammal, but its 60 mph dash capability primarily gets it into position, into the envelope. If speed were all there was to it, there would be a lot of overshoots.

The key to the endgame is agility. As the New York Times explains it in “Cheetahs’ Secret Weapon: A Tight Turning Radius“:

But it turns out that speed is not the secret to their prodigious hunting skills: a novel study of how cheetahs chase prey in the wild shows that it is their agility — their skill at leaping sideways, changing directions abruptly and slowing down quickly — that gives those antelope such bad odds.

In Boyd’s framework, a tight turning radius per se would be “maneuverability,” not agility.  But terms like “abruptly” certainly add a flavor of agility, which more properly is the ability to transition from one maneuver to another more rapidly than an opponent.

But are cheetahs operating inside antelopes’ OODA loops? Are they changing the situation more rapidly than antelopes can comprehend, thereby achieving the intention of Patterns 132:

Generate uncertainty, confusion, disorder, panic, chaos … to shatter cohesion, produce paralysis and bring about collapse.

I don’t know. Guess we’ll have to wait for more research.

 

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New editions of Strategic Game and Organic Design

Now available on our Articles page.

These two briefings are elaborations of themes that Boyd introduced in “Destruction and Creation” and Patterns of Conflict:

  • Strategic Game includes a long section on how operating at a faster tempo than an opponent can cause him to collapse. Frankly, I think Boyd made a mistake by devoting so much space to this topic (six pages) because it has fixed the notion of rapid tempo in people’s minds as the essence of Boyd’s strategy. Worse, some people confuse “rapid tempo” with “rapid OODA loop” (which appears in none of Boyd’s briefings).  It’s worth pointing out that he entitled this section “Illuminating Example,” not “essence of my theory” or some such. In fact, the very next chart explains the purpose of the “illuminating example,” which is the justification for building snowmobiles (and which is the essence of his theory as made clear in his “Revelation”):

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 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.

This is, incidentally, the only mention of the German word Fingerspitzengefühl in any of Boyd’s material.

  • Organic Design is an ode to implicitness, continuing a theme he began back in charts 78 and 79 of Patterns. The word “implicit” occurs some 20 times in this short presentation, including in his definition of “orientation” (chart 15) and in discussions of the inherently implicit nature of human beings (charts 2, 19, 21, 22, etc.). It’s worth pointing out that Boyd did not draw a clear distinction between the concepts of “intuitive” and “implicit.” The briefing concludes with his re-conceptualization of command & control.

Deletes references to d-n-i.net and belisarius.com. These URLs have been taken over by someone else and have no relation to the original sites.

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Offense vs. Defense

The question of offense vs. defense is as old as strategy and was discussed most famously by the Prussian general and author, Carl von Clausewitz. Although he maintained the superiority of the defensive (“properly understood”), he was not one to champion a passive approach to war:

Every defensive, according to its strength, will seek to change to the attack as soon as it has exhausted the advantages of the defensive, so therefore, however great or small the defense may be, we still also include in it contingently the overthrow of the enemy as the object which this attack may have and which is to be considered as the proper objective of the defensive. (end of Chapter IV, Book V) Continue reading →

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Where the action is

Boyd wrote that orientation is the most important part of the OODA loop (Organic Design, 26).

Far be it from me to contradict the master, but a good exercise for you would be to explain why each component of the OODA “loop” is the most important. I’ll get you started: Without action, who cares what the rest of your OODA “loop” is doing? As Boyd himself began the “Abstract”:

To flourish and grow in a many-sided, uncertain and ever-changing world that surrounds us suggests that we have to make intuitive within ourselves those many practices we need to meet the exigencies of that world. (emphasis added)

Because action is the only thing that opponents, competitors, allies, the undecided, and customers see.

Where the action isLooked at this way, the OODA “loop” is a device for representing how we evolve our capability for putting actions into the world. As I explain in “Boyd’s Real OODA Loop,” if you use the right one, the one Boyd put into his last briefing, you can generate any pattern of actions that your imagination and preparation allow.

This, from a recent conference. The circular pattern in blue just indicates that these links are operating and does not imply that they are firing in sequence (i.e., waiting on each other). Click for a larger view.

My paper, and Boyd’s “Abstract” are available from the Articles page in the menu, above.

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Breaking Mayer’s Trade-off?

You may recall the controversy that greeted new Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer’s decision to ban employees from working at home. I suggested that while such a decision might be useful in the turnaround phase, it does send a message of “We don’t trust you” and so could undermine Einheit if kept in place for too long.

Clive Thompson had another take yesterday on Wired.com: What Marissa Mayer Doesn’t (and Does) Get About White-Collar Work

He cites research (an innovative approach!) that shows advantages to both working at home and at the office, depending on the types of work to be done.

“Thinking work” is invisible and hard to observe accurately. Waber studied one company where a handful of superstar programmers complained that they could only be productive at home. So leave them home, right? Except Waber found that when these stars worked in the office, the firm’s productivity as a whole soared, because they’d answer other coders’ questions. Let them work from home and everyone suffered.

He recommends doing both:

Managers and employees need to assess what type of mental work they’re doing on any given day and gravitate to where it’s best suited. Doing Mad Men–style “aha” groupthink? Stay in the office. Need to crush that 90-page memo on paper-clip appropriations? Seems like the kind of thing best handled at home, possibly in your underwear. One-size-fits-all policies—like the one at Yahoo—are too crude for today’s white-collar toil.

Seems reasonable, but the big question still remains unanswered. Do you trust your employees to make this decision for themselves, or, like one of the companies he cites, do you lay down a fiat that thou shall work at the office on MWF and from wherever you want on TTh? That might solve the work-at-home-or-at-the-office issue, but what do you do when a highly productive employee finishes a critical project by working from home on Friday?

As Thompson suggests at the end, the most successful companies may be those that break the trade-off between control and trust and manage to have both. Boyd’s framework is designed to break exactly this trade-off. As I describe in Certain to Win, it rests on Einheit/mutual trust, shaped by such concepts as Schwerpunkt (focus and direction) and Auftragstaktik (roughly, mission “orders”).

Once you have done the hard work to build Einheit (also “unity” and even “team feeling”; c.f., Patterns 74-79, 118), and once people appreciate the need for both creative individual work and for team interaction (this need being part of your Schwerpunkt), then a little leadership should resolve any problems that come up in day-to-day operations.

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It’s Still a Wonderful World

My order from Apple has two parts. Yesterday, I posted FEDEX tracking information for the first.

Here’s the second, coming by UPS:

UPS Tracking

Notice that it left China on Friday and is now out for delivery to our house near Hilton Head. By the way, the FEDEX package from yesterday’s post just arrived.

If you’re a local retailer, how do you compete with this? And don’t go whining about sales taxes because Apple collects it. I can think of four approaches:

  1. Have it in stock for customers to feel and play with. This includes accessories.
  2. Instill the EFAS climate among your sales staff. This means Fingerspitzengefühl for both the product and for sales technique (do they know the product inside and out and are they aces at selling?)
  3. Provide a lagniappe. Even if you have to order it for them, give them something extra, something they can take home, in their hands, today.
  4. Sell the whole experience: Provide free coffee (most places won’t let you give out free wine), keep the shop clean, ensure that everybody’s enthusiastic and having fun, and if you do screw up on something, fess up and make it right (screw-ups are your best opportunities to build customer relationships). If you’re the owner, get out on the floor, introduce yourself and mix it up with the customers. If lines get long at checkout (you should wish) lend a hand.
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More incestuous amplification

Originally, the term refers to the implicit guidance and control link from orientation to observation, which then loops back into orientation. That loop can become locked, so that we only see what we want to see, thereby reinforcing our original orientation.

More generally, it refers to Boyd’s comment at the bottom of Chart 3 of The Essence of Winning and Losing (the infamous OODA “loop” sketch):

Note how orientation shapes observation, shapes decision, shapes action, and in turn is shaped by the feedback and other phenomena coming into our sensing or observing window.

Problems can arise when we limit the range of phenomena so that we don’t detect mismatches in time to do anything about them. Here’s an interesting example, from “What Martial Arts Have to Do With Atheism: An interview with Sam Harris about self-defense and the seduction of faith,” by Graeme Wood at Atlantic.com.

First, an aikido master demonstrating the technique of the “touchless takedown/no-touch knockout” with a group of his students:

And then what happens when he confronts a master who is not one of his students:

[I can’t vouch for the authenticity of either of these. Read the article and decide for yourself.]

Along those same lines, here’s a recent piece in the New York Times that refers to David Freedman’s summary of John Ioannidis’s paper on why so much published, peer-reviewed scientific research is wrong, in that it cannot be reproduced or is contradicted by more precise studies later on. As Freedman’s original article notes:

Simply put, if you’re attracted to ideas that have a good chance of being wrong, and if you’re motivated to prove them right, and if you have a little wiggle room in how you assemble the evidence, you’ll probably succeed in proving wrong theories right.

This is an extremely difficult habit for leaders to break because it requires you fire sycophants (who may be long-time friends or even family members), promote unorthodox or unpleasant employees who habitually tell you the truth, and establish robust ties to the eternal world, even when others inside the organization complain that you’re stepping on their toes.

You’re already doing all this? Oh, really?

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Stress and success

Stress and SuccessI met Jonathan Brown at the last Boyd Conference in Quantico, back in October, and we spent quite a lot of time discussing the role of stress in Boyd’s framework.

Boyd thought of stress as an offensive weapon. On chart 132 of Patterns of Conflict, for example, he lists one of the intentions of operating inside opponents’ OODA loops as:

Generate uncertainty, confusion, disorder, panic, chaos … to shatter cohesion, produce paralysis and bring about collapse.

Which seems like a reasonably good definition of “stress” to me. He also used to say that it was OK to be confused, so long as your opponent is more confused. Probably the same thing is true of stress.

In this new book, now available on Amazon, Brown takes Boyd’s famous definition of the goal of human activity — to survive on our own terms — and melds it with the latest research on the causes of stress.

I think you’ll find it most interesting, not to mention practical, and it might even provide new insights into Boyd’s work.

By the way, the publisher is listed as “A.L.P. Limited (Publishing), The Old Bakery, Tunbridge Wells, Kent.” The Brits still have a way about these things, don’t they?

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Is 4GW dead?

I’m sorry, Mrs. Lind, there’s nothing more we can do.

Has the concept of fourth generation warfare outlived its usefulness? The term was coined by Bill Lind and his colleagues in a paper they published in the Marine Corps Gazette in October 1989, “The Changing Face of War: Into the Fourth Generation.”  If you haven’t read this paper, you might want to take the time now.

Here is their primary prediction:

Fourth is a goal of collapsing the enemy internally rather than physically destroying him. Targets will include such things as the population’s support for the war and the enemy’s culture. Correct identification of enemy strategic centers of gravity will be highly important.

In broad terms, fourth generation warfare seems likely to be widely dispersed and largely undefined; the distinction between war and peace will be blurred to the vanishing point. It will be nonlinear, possibly to the point of having no definable battlefields or fronts. The distinction between “civilian” and “military” may disappear. Actions will occur concurrently throughout all participants’ depth, including their society as a cultural, not just a physical, entity. Major military facilities, such as airfields, fixed communications sites, and large headquarters will become rarities because of their vulnerability; the same may be true of civilian equivalents, such as seats of government, power plants, and industrial sites (including knowledge as well as manufacturing industries). Success will depend heavily on effectiveness in joint operations as lines between responsibility and mission become very blurred. Again, all these elements are present in third generation warfare; fourth generation will merely accentuate them.

Continue reading →