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]
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.
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/
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.
“People in business are clueless about selling, and snobbish too. They view it as a grubby activity, though it is vital to revenue.”
This is the subheading to an article in today’s Wall St. J. (subscription required)
I mean, WTF? People who read the WSJ need to be reminded that selling is “vital to revenue”?
Talk about orientation lock. I guess that so many companies today fall into a couple of categories (occasionally, both): They are either public with a focus on creative bean counting, or they are still controlled by the founders and harbor a “better mousetrap” mindset. Neither of these see sales as anything other than an unfortunate cost.
You can easily spot such companies. When they decide it’s time for shrinking down, they cut the sales staff by the same percentage as other departments because “everybody has to do their fair share”.
Probably the most stressful position I ever held was in a professional services company (read: beltway bandit) in the DC area. But I will say this for it: It was a boot camp in selling — how to do it and how to train people to do it. I even learned to do it a little myself (a claim that would astonish my former bosses).
In the company right after that one, I watched an incompetent sales campaign blow a $350 million sale. One of the managers of the effort explained that it was no big deal: We’re the only ones making XYZs. Well, 20 years later, they’re still waiting. One of the lessons I learned back in sales boot camp was that you are never essential. Customers always have something else to spend money on.
In Boyd’s framework, the emphasis is on keeping the initiative, never assuming that your opponent will take any particular action. In business, selling is a large part of taking the initiative. You’re not assuming that your better mousetrap will sell itself because potential customers can always get a free cat from the pound or just decide to live with the little rodents. Instead, you take the initiative and try to direct the money flow in your direction.
Why this isn’t a part of the orientation of everybody in business is beyond me.
The WSJ article is a review of a book, The Art of the Sale by Delves Broughton. One point the book makes is that if you can sell, you can achieve Boyd’s classic injunction, to increase your capacity for independent action. And you don’t have to be H. Ross Perot, who famously left IBM because he was routinely making quota by around the first of February. I’ve been independent for the last 13 years, and believe me, if I can do it, so can you. Although a stretch in sales boot camp might not be a bad idea.
Fighting for Honor
The history of African martial arts traditions in the Atlantic world
by T.J. Desch Obi
University of South Carolina Press, 2008
346 pages, including 124 pages of notes and bibliography
Reviewed by Chet Richards
Kum yali, kum buba tambe! (He is tricky, so I will win by being tricky, too!)
As a southerner of European ancestry, I had long wondered how slave owners kept control over their victims. On many plantations, slaves vastly outnumbered owners and overseers, and because of the hard nature of their work, many slaves were in much better physical conditions than their owners. Why didn’t the slaves revolt or simply leave?
It turns out that many did. Most Americans are familiar with the Underground Railroad and may even recall the Nat Turner Rebellion (1831), the Fugitive Slave Acts (1793 and 1850) and the Dred Scott Decision (1857). But there are a couple of other ways slaves used to preserve their honor and sometimes even their freedom. One of these was “maroonage,” where they would abandon their plantations and settle in the swamps, rugged hills and dense forests of the South. It has been estimated, for example, that the Great Dismal Swamp of southeastern Virginia and northeastern North Carolina may have harbored maroon communities totaling perhaps 2,000 escaped slaves.
The other was simply to resist. As T. J. Obi meticulously documents in this study, Africans and their descendents brought with them an arsenal of well developed martial arts styles. These provided the basis for preserving honor withing the slave communities and even, on occasion, to resist vicious beatings by overseers.
There were two keys to making this work: deception, because an unarmed defender had to close with his attacker, and agility, to avoid weapons and complete the attack. Obi includes these under the label “tricknology.”
When fighting a white oppressor, the ideal was to strike a butting-style head blow and finish the fight before it even developed. … As such butts had to be delivered at close range to be effective, a fighter had to use trickery to close the distance under some innocuous disguise. (p. 109)
Readers familiar with Boyd will immediately recognize the concept of “operating inside the OODA loop.”
The book itself is quite academic and heavily footnoted, reflecting its origins in doctoral research. That said, however, it’s not a heavy read and is packed with interesting tidbits. Did you know that maroon communities survive to this day in the mountains of Jamaica, where they won their freedom by successful resistance some 50 years before the official abolition of slavery in that colony? And slave societies developed all manner of methods to conceal their existence from their owners. In one area, for example, the message “weevils in the wheat” meant that overseers had discovered that a meeting was planned and so it was being postponed.
Perhaps the most fascinating conclusion of the book is that African martial arts techniques still survive in the Americas. Perhaps the best known example is the Brazilian capoiera, but Dr. Obi’s research on site in the low country of the Carolinas documents their existence in the Gullah communities and their descendents into the 21st century.
[You want agility? Check out this YouTube video of a capoiera demo. The kicks and sweeps from inverted positions are typical of Angolan fighting styles.]
Minor revisions to Boyds Real OODA Loop, dated 13 April 2012 – reflecting some comments and my recent editing of Destruction and Creation.
One way to look at things: D&C describes a cyclical process for creating a system of concepts that we can then use as decision models. So the circular loop is, in a sense, built into it. Patterns of Conflict, as elaborated upon in Organic Design, says that when employing these decision models in an operation or engagement with a thinking opponent, it is best to use the implicit guidance and control link as much as possible (“emphasize implicit over explicit …” Organic Design, 22). The OODA “loop” from The Essence of Winning and Losing, incorporates both of these concepts.
The new edit of D&C is available from the Articles link above and the other briefings can be downloaded from http://dnipogo.org/john-r-boyd/
Destruction and Creation now in Articles.
See editor’s note at the end, which also includes a link to Chuck Spinney’s “Evolutionary Epistmology.”
Slightly East of New 
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