Boyd’s Theories

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Empathy in Orientation

I tweeted a link to a Forbes article on empathy this morning, “Want more innovative solutions? Start with empathy.” by Tracy Bower.

Boyd explained his notion of orientation on chart 15 of Organic Design (available from the Articles link, above):

Orientation is an interactive process of many-sided implicit cross-referencing projections, empathies, correlations, and rejections that is shaped by and shapes the interplay of genetic heritage, cultural tradition, previous experiences, and unfolding circumstances.

I don’t recall any place where he defined “empathies,” or, for that matter, “empathy,” much less “projections,” “correlations,” or “rejections.”  These terms appear out of the ether, right after this chart:

organic_design_10

where he proclaims an “Insight” that:

Interactions, as shown, represent a many-sided implicit cross-referencing process of projection, empathy, correlation, and rejection. (OD, 11)

If you really want to have some fun, try briefing these two charts sometime.

Then, in his very last briefing, The Essence of Winning and Losing (also in Articles), he drew his infamous OODA “loop” sketch (his words), below which he recorded another “Insight”:

Also note how the entire “loop” (not just orientation) is an ongoing many-sided implicit cross-referencing process of projection, empathy, correlation, and rejection.

The Zen of Boyd?  I don’t know. Perhaps something to ponder. For example, if you squint hard at chart 10, are there other ways you could characterize these “interactions”?  And how is the Stuka pilot Hans Rudel an interaction?  Can you come up with some more relevant interactions to make a similar point about orientation?

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Is it agility or adaptability?

I tend to think of “agility” as adaptability with a time dimension, that is, the ability to adapt more rapidly to new situations than can competitors or opponents.  That may not, however, be the only or even a very good way to think about these concepts.

Here’s an alternative view:

AQ is hot right now – but is it the Adaptability Quotient or the Agility Quotient?

Kristopher Floyd
Founder and CEO, TeamMate AIDao-TheWay

November 13, 2018
Originally published on LinkedIn. Reprinted with his kind permission

Throughout military history, there have been winners and losers. Some of the winners have found disproportionate success due to strategic brilliance; when examining their successes, we find a golden braid that links them all together. This braid is the foundation of an underlying philosophy that dictates how military forces can survive and thrive in hyper-competitive, chaotic, uncertain situations. Continue reading →

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Schwerpunkt and grand strategy

Fabius points out the power of retaining the moral high ground, “Feminists’ strategy brought many wins. They’ve abandoned it.” Technically, it should be “Feminists’ grand strategy …” but why quibble?  Here’s a take from Patterns of Conflict on what grand strategy is supposed to accomplish:

grand strategy chart.jpg

If you don’t care about influencing what Boyd called “the uncommitted,” including potential opponents and potential allies, as well as the less fanatical among your own team, or you’re not worried about what happens after the smoke settles, then you can dispense with grand strategy.

However, one never knows what the future will bring, so it’s always wise to keep your grand strategy in play as long as possible.  For example, during the South African Border War (1966 – 1989), the South African government gave its military a well-defined mission:

… to create the necessary conditions for the politicians to negotiate a political settlement from a position of power. The SADF (South African Defense Force) counter-insurgency approach therefore focused on denying SWAPO the opportunity for a military build-up in SWA/Namibia and Angola and its ability to operate effectively. This it succeeded in achieving. De Vries, Burger, and Steenkamp, Mobile Warfare for Africa, p. 198.

Notice the focus on military objectives. No nation building, occupation of enemy territory, or winning hearts and minds. This last was of critical importance, but the military was given the mission of making it possible for others to accomplish.

Interestingly, this did not lead to a purely defensive strategy, where South Africa could portray itself as a victim of Cold War aggression.  As de Vries, Burger, and Steenkamp note:

From 1978 until the war ended in 1989, the SADF took the fight to the enemy. They did not hesitate to execute pre-emptive strikes into southern Angola or launch high density counter-insurgency operations in enemy territory. Naturally, these operations received great international attention, which did not do foreign relations any good at all. p. 199, emphasis added

However this was a price South Africa was willing to pay because the effect on morale (friendly as well as enemy) and the sheer costs of the attrition caused by these raids led the Cubans to withdraw and persuaded the other parties to enter negotiations that ended the conflict. In any case, South Africa was pretty much a pariah nation by this time, anyway (Nelson Mandela was not released from prison until the following year).

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Happy 45th

Last Wednesday was the 45th Anniversary of John Boyd’s Happy Hour in the Old Guard Room at Patton Hall, the officer’s club at Ft. Myer, VA (I refuse call it “Joint Base Myer-Henderson Hall”). It was great to reconnect with folks, a few of whom I was working with when we started happy hour there a couple of weeks after Tom Christie took over the TACAIR shop.

In our honor, they put up a plaque:

Happy Hour Plaque 9-2019

And here are two of John’s closest colleagues, Chuck Spinney (left) and Tom Christie:

Chuck and Tom 45th HH

Robert Coram described the scene on page 414 of Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War

The Wednesday evening gatherings were loud and raucous and filled with plans about generals to be hosed. Old stories were told and retold–of Spinney’s white wagon kill, of a general’s air-to-rug maneuver, of cape jobs and to platters and particularly effective techniques known as tube steaks and barbwire enchiladas.

All true, so true.

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Happy Birthday, Alice

Sun Tzu was a great fan of intelligence and spies in particular — check out Chapter 13 if you need a refresher —  because it’s much easier to operate inside opponents’ OODA loops if you already know what they’re going to do. As luck would have it, today is the birthday of Louise de Bettignies, AKA Alice Dubois, one of the greatest intelligence operatives of all time.

To explain why, a little historical perspective might prove useful. Although the German Schlieffen Plan failed to hook around Paris and end World War I in 1914, it left the Germans occupying a fair portion of northeastern France for the next 4 years. From January to September, 1915, this area provided the theater of operations for de Bettignies, whose network alerted the British to German plans and tactical movements  and almost took out the Kaiser himself. Among other feats of derring-do.

There are several bios of her, but historical fiction might be a good place to start. To this end, Kate Quinn has written a most readable — “page turner” wouldn’t be too strong — story of her operation, The Alice Network. I recommend it highly.

Happy Birthday, Louise.

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Creating mission-oriented leaders

Don’t you want your organization to run better? Of course you do: Get rid of the office politics, cliques, backstabbing, passive aggression — morale goes up, blood pressure goes down, objectives are routinely exceeded, competitors / opponents get trounced. Hence, the size of modern CEO offices, which need to be that big to hold all the books on how to actually do it.

Among the many approaches, “agility” proposes to use time to shape the competitive environment, and, if necessary, react to changes before they become fatal. Nestled within the agile approaches, there is a school that insists the best way to do this is to fire up creativity and initiative throughout the organization and harmonize them to accomplish the objectives of the organization. Note that “throughout” includes everybody from new hires to the aforementioned CEO.

Boyd’s philosophy is obviously in this category. He proposed an organizational climate, often known by the acronym EBFAS,* whose purpose was to produce organizations that could shape, reorient to, and exploit rapidly changing situations.  Boyd regarded conflict as characterized by deception, surprise, ambiguity, stress and threat, which can lead to fear, mistrust, and a breakdown of cohesion. “Reorient to” is a way of saying that you understand such situations better than your opponents. “Rapidly” implies that given time, your opponents will figure these things out; don’t give them the time.

The “E” in EBFAS stands for Einheit, for which Boyd adopted the English “mutual trust.” It is fundamental, so organizational cultures that focus on building mutual trust are sometimes called “trust based.”  Of the other letters, perhaps the best known is “A” for another German word, Auftragstaktik, often translated as “mission command.”  It has become something of a sub-genre in management literature.**

Last month, I featured an article by Don Vandergriff on Auftragstaktik, where he described the origins of the concept and why high performing organizations use it.

Don has now followed up with a well-documented piece on how to train people for Auftragstaktik .  He describes an emerging methodology within the Army, Adaptive Leader Soldier Training and Education (ALSTE), and an implementation, the Army Reconnaissance Course, that have proven to develop leaders who can excel under the philosophy of mission command. These programs reflect initiatives Don has been working on for years and documented as far back as Raising the Bar (2006).

*I’ve done several posts on EBFAS — please use the search feature in the right column if you’re interested.

**For an in-depth look at Auftragstaktik, I can recommend Stephen Bungay’s The Art of Action and Don’s recent book on Mission Command.

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Deep foundation for Auftragstaktik

Don Vandergriff has a nice piece at Small Wars Journal on how Auftragstaktik developed and why.  He makes what to me is an extremely important but generally overlooked point that mission orders, which is how most people explain the term, are not what defines Auftragstaktik but represent evidence that the underlying culture is alive and working.

As a culture, Auftragstaktik implies that those who can influence the organization — top leaders, board members, large shareholders, influential members of Congress, etc. — have given careful thought to and so evolved practices for selecting, training, retaining, and promoting people who embody the philosophy and separating those who do not.

If this happens, what we call “mission orders” (or something, perhaps, even better) will be the natural outcome.

http://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/how-germans-defined-auftragstaktik-what-mission-command-and-not

 

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Boyd’s personal papers, II

I’ve just posted the second part of the accession list for Boyd’s personal papers. You can find it under “John R. Boyd” on the Articles page (tab above).

I don’t have the first part. If any one does and would be so kind as to send me a PDF, I’d be happy to post it, too. In the meantime, the first part consists primarily of works on history and military topics.  Many of these, and virtually all of the ones he actually used, are included in the Sources section at the end of Patterns of Conflict.

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Mobile Warfare for Africa

Before there was ISIS, before 9/11, and before Syria, Libya, Niger, etc., there was the Border War in Southern Africa (1966 – 1989).

Mobile Warfare For Africa

I’m very excited about this book. Unlike so many recent manuals on counterinsurgency warfare, this one was not written by the losers (to quote an observation by Martin van Creveld).  Drawing on their own experiences, tempered by the events of the intervening three decades, two of its participants have written a nearly 400 page examination of this conflict, which presaged many of our experiences in the Middle East. What we could have learned …

It is a weighty tome, though, so it will be a while before I can post a complete review.  In the meantime, from what I’ve seen skimming the volume and its accompanying atlas, and carefully reading the first three chapters, I can recommend it to readers of this blog. And there’s even an OODA loop.

 

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Practitioner’s notebook, May 2018

Proponents of speed, such as “going through OODA loops faster,” can site some evidence from Boyd. Perhaps the chart that makes the strongest case is this one, from Strategic Game of ? and ? which Boyd began briefing in 1987:

Illum_Ex_Strategic_Game

Seems pretty clear: If you want to discombobulate your opponents, then just “operate at a faster tempo or rhythm.”

There are a couple of problems with this approach, though. First is that Boyd doesn’t say “Operate …”  He wrote “The ability to operate …”  At the risk of undue scholasticism, this is big deal. Boyd, like a poet, agonized over every word in these briefings. It wasn’t unusual for the phone to ring and it would be John, wanting to try out several new phrasings for some line you might dimly recall.

In other words, if he meant “Operating at a faster tempo or rhythm than an adversary enables …” that’s what he would have written. So, what’s the difference between “operating” and “the ability to operate”? How can an ability to do something, as contrasted with actually doing it, produce these effects?

Another point to ponder is what, exactly, does it mean to “operate at a faster tempo or rhythm” than an adversary?

Your answers are important. Your actions will flow from your orientation, and your answers will not only reveal something of your orientation, but grappling with these questions may also help shape it.