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What are the chances of that?

Wellington had considered the relative probability of a French attack at various points; he concluded that the sector from Torres Vedras to the Atlantic was the least likely and could be left mainly in the hands of his static force. Jac Weller, Wellington in the Peninsula, 145.

Deep into Patterns of Conflict, John Boyd finally got around to defining (more or less) the phrase “operating inside the OODA loop”:

Second Impression

To me, though, the most intriguing thing about this slide is what’s not on it: No mention of probabilities or likelihoods. In fact, the words “probability” and “likelihood” don’t occur in Patterns of Conflict, and you’ll find “likely” just twice, both times as paragraph headings, (“Likely result”).

Why is this? Why wouldn’t you put most of your preparation into what the opponent is most likely to do? Why would you waste time, men, and machinery preparing against something the opponent is highly unlikely to do?

I was reminded of this question again while reading Laurie R. King’s latest, Knave of Diamonds. Sherlock Holmes is passing time practicing his card handling skills dealing three card monte. In that game, the dealer shows the other player three cards, one of which is special — the Ace of Spades, for example — and the other two can be anything, say a couple of minor hearts.

The dealer shuffles the three cards and places them face down. The player, then, wins by picking out the ace. Win and you get back twice your bet.

What is the probability the player wins?

If you said “one third,” you are wrong. The correct answer is zero, which is why in the trade, the other player is called the “mark.”

And which is why my book is called Certain to Win (quoting Sun Tzu), not, More Likely to Do Better.

Wellington, incidentally, virtually always operated inside his opponents’ OODA loops. This explains why, even when outnumbered, he was able to defeat all of the marshals that Napoleon sent against him, and finally defeat Napoleon himself. In the process, he indeed became an extraordinary commander.

We really don’t know what Wellington was thinking in October 1810 when he was disposing his forces at the Lines of Torres Vedras. What I’ve quoted are Jac Weller’s reconstructions a century and a half later for a non-specialist audience. My guess is that instead of rolling the dice, Wellington was thinking something like: If they want to come that way, more power to them. I can hold them with my less capable units while I shift my better forces to deal with them. Wellington was a master of mobile defense, a tactic he often used against the French.

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Auftragstaktik for Whole Foods

“The feedback I’ve gotten from team members and employees is that ultimately, we’re wasting time,” (Whole Foods CEO Jason) Buechel said. “It’s taking too long for decisions and approvals to take place, and it’s actually holding back some of our initiatives.”

As quoted in “Amazon’s Whole Foods boss slams ‘ridiculous’ bureaucracy in meeting,” by Eugene Kim in Business Insider, June 25, 2025

Balthasar van der Ast, Still Life with Basket of Fruit, 1622

Yay for Mr. Buechel. Eliminating unnecessary procedures is always a good idea. It’s the definition of “unneeded.” But I’ll give him an even better idea: Rather than fiddling with the existing approval and decision process, create systems and culture so that virtually no approvals — and many fewer decisions — are needed in the first place.

It can be done. Here’s the basic idea, courtesy of the late USAF Colonel John R. Boyd:

The German concept of mission can be thought of as a contract, hence an agreement, between superior and subordinate. The subordinate agrees to make his actions serve his superior’s intent in terms of what is to be accomplished, while the superior agrees to give his subordinate wide freedom to exercise his imagination and initiative in terms of how intent is to be realized.

As part of this concept, the subordinate is given the right to challenge or question the feasibility of mission if he feels his superior’s ideas on what can be achieved are not in accord with the existing situation or if he feels his superior has not given him adequate resources to carry it out. Likewise, the superior has every right to expect his subordinate to carry out the mission contract when agreement is reached on what can be achieved consistent with the existing situation and resources provided. Patterns of Conflict, 76

So once agreement has been reached, no further decisions or approvals are needed or expected. You have your mission and your resources, so just get on with it.

I’m sure by now that many of you have recognized the concept of auftragstaktik, an English word newly borrowed from the German word for “contract.”

How to do it? To get started I’d recommend any of the books by Don Vandergriff, particularly Adopting Mission Command, and Stephen Bungay’s The Art of Action. Both available from Amazon. Incidentally, “mission command” is a common English substitute for auftragstaktik.

While you’re at it, here’s a practice that will start paying benefits immediately:

One area Buechel is keeping a close eye on: the competition. He said he visits rival stores weekly to stay inspired and monitor industry shifts. “I am a grocery geek,” Buechel said. “I love going into our stores, but I love going into competition.”

This is an incredibly good idea. Boyd again:

Living systems are open systems; closed systems are non‑living systems. Point: If we don’t communicate with the outside world—to gain information for knowledge and understanding as well as matter and energy for sustenance—we die out to become a non‑discerning and uninteresting part of that world. Strategic Game, 21

There may be forces inside your organization that work against this seemingly obvious idea. Many organizations, for example, have picked up the insidious habit of using only their own products and services as some type of loyalty test. So employees of a particular car manufacturer only drive cars from that manufacturer. “Loyalty,” in other words, has closed their system. And think about it. Your least productive, least innovative, most disruptive and most toxic people often score extremely well on such loyalty tests.

I rant about this pathology in Certain to Win. Unlike other forms of sycophancy, it’s not hard to spot: Just go count cars in your parking lot.

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Evolutionary Epistemology Evolves

Version 2.62, dated March 2025, is now available for download from our Articles page.

In his biography of Boyd, The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War, Robert Coram observed that when, after some 4 years of intense research and editing, “Destruction and Creation” finally appeared in September 1976, it had “a specific gravity approaching that uranium. It is thick and heavy and ponderous, filled with caveats and qualifiers and arcane references that span theories never before connected.” (323). Yet, everybody who has studied Boyd agrees that it is fundamental to Boyd’s body of subsequent work.

It was to make this masterpiece (for that is what it is) comprehensible to human beings that one of Boyd’s closest associates, Franklin C. (Chuck) Spinney, created a briefing entitled Evolutionary Epistemology. To illustrate Boyd’s ideas, Chuck chose the field of cosmology, how our knowledge of what’s going on above our heads has changed over time. For thousands of years, nothing much happened. Then in a space of less than 500 years, the Earth has gone from the center of all creation to just one minor hunk of rock circling a nondescript star in an unremarkable galaxy. Evolutionary epistemology.

Cosmology provides an accessible framework for illustrating the fundamental ideas in “Destruction and Creation.” I mean, stars, planets, the sun — things we all see every day, unlike perhaps, charm quarks, muons, and Z bosons (although the standard model of particle physics is a contemporary example of evolutionary epistemology).

My hope, and I’m reasonably sure Chuck agrees, is that by opening up “Destruction and Creation” to a wider audience, Evolutionary Epistomology will not only make a dense scholarly work more accessible but will provide you with a new set of tools so that, to quote Boyd (Conceptual Spiral, 38), you “can comprehend, cope with, and shape—as well as be shaped by—that world and the novelty that arises out of it.”

Chuck has kindly provided the following set of comments to this edition:

The only significant change is the addition of Slide 4 in this version, which is a kind of historical vector diagram showing my understanding of the evolutionary sequence of Boyd’s thinking.

Taken together, slides 4 and 5 place the role of “fighter pilot” in a perspective for those who claim (incorrectly) that his ideas are the tactical idea of a fighter pilot. His paper “Destruction and Creation” placed him on a totally different intellectual pathway. The addition of Slide 4 to the EE briefing reinforces Chet’s point in Slide 5 — which is an accurate and imaginative way to portray the intellectual sourcing of John’s thinking.

First, in D&C, John focused on the evolution of hard scientific/engineering knowledge. John was trying to understand how he and Tom Christie synthesized Energy-Maneuverability Theory in the 1960s. E-M theory revolutionized ideas for designing fighter aircraft. This was new and very important, particularly for the front-end conceptual design level. Ironically, E-M started off as a way for uncovering the best air-to-air tactics for dogfights between two dissimilar aircraft, but then it morphed into a way for identifying the crucial tradeoffs in a conceptual design of a new aircraft. John and Tom won all sorts of scientific and engineering awards for this latter achievement.

John was obsessed with trying to understand why he uncovered this revolutionizing idea when far better scientists and engineers had not. At the time, he had no idea where this effort in his D&C paper was taking him, other than trying to understand how he created such a novel and effective way of looking at a long-standing design problem. Some of his closest long-time friends thought his musings were crazy.

I am quite certain of this, because we talked about the fact that he had no idea where his D&C research was taking him. Ray Leopold, John, and I talked about this continuously when I first met John in 1973. At the time, Ray and I were only 28 years old, and having technical backgrounds, we were both fascinated with his research.

Chet was in the D&C picture then, but Ray and I did not know him yet. Chet’s chart, Slide 5, can be thought of as an evolutionary caricature or, more accurately, a synthetic portrait, of where John evolved the ideas that underpin his ideas for the OODA loop — particularly with regard to his OODA sketch and its subtle relationships to the nature of competition, learning, and ultimately the creation of novelty as expressed in his Conceptual Spiral briefing [Note: Also available on our Articles page].

The Appendix is for an unstructured informal “classroom style” discussion on how Boyd’s ideas might be used in a general sense to relate to some known military campaigns. I used it from time to time in classroom discussions with military officers in a variety of low-level to high-level DoD schools.

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Confused about the OODA “loop”? Let AI explain

For those of you who still harbor questions, misunderstandings, even doubts about John Boyd’s OODA Loop model, help is finally here.

My colleague, LtCol Johan Ivari of the Swedish Defense University in Stockholm, fed my paper, “Boyd’s OODA Loop,” into Google’s NotebookLM. You can listen to the resulting podcast at https://play.fhs.se/media/Boyd’s%20OODA%20Loop%20by%20Chet%20Richards%20(2020)/0_9wflxxm1

Personally, I find this fascinating if not a little scary. For one thing, it wasn’t clear who was doing the talking, until my brother (who also uses NotebookLM) pointed out that the two interlocutors, one with a male voice and the other female, were generated by the system. OK.

They did a very good job. This podcast could serve as a useful introduction to the OODA Loop concept. However, as Colonel Ivari points out, best to use it as an accompaniment to the actual paper (which you can download from our Articles page, along with all of Boyd’s briefings* and lot of other stuff).

Colonel Ivari has posted an entire panoply of AI-generated podcasts, https://play.fhs.se/playlist/details/0_09pafeoh

They’re all fascinating, but if you’ve never read Chuck Spinney’s Evolutionary Epistemology, his podcast would be a good place to start.

I’m not sure why the female discussant sounds like a Valley Girl (“Totally!”), but somehow, I don’t think Boyd would mind.

*I haven’t updated the covers, yet, so please don’t try to go to dnipogo.org or d-n-i.net. These domain names are no longer maintained by either the Project on Government Oversight or myself and may contain malicious content.

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Influence strategies

c. 1900. Library of Congress Digital Collection.

Once again, social science can help us understand behavior and why, or why not, certain influence strategies may be effective. Jeffrey Pfeffer, Thomas D. Dee II Professor of Organizational Behavior, Stanford University.


What he’s talking about is leadership. Here’s my definition:

Fire up the creativity and initiative of everybody in the organization; harmonize and focus this energy to accomplish the purposes of the organization.

And here’s Boyd’s:

Implies the art of inspiring people to enthusiastically take action toward the achievement of uncommon goals. Organic Design for Command and Control, slide 37 (available from our Articles page)

If you could magically reach in and influence everybody’s mind, leadership under either of these definitions would be much easier. A couple of years ago, I gave a presentation on leadership, The Lost Arts of Leadership, (31.4 MB PDF) to the Kanban Global Summit in San Diego. My thesis was that what Boyd, Pfeffer and I are all talking about is mind control, in particular, over groups of people.

Now before you laugh too hard, note that there are performers who make a good living doing just this, as in the picture above. For a contemporary example, go to Derren Brown’s YouTube channel. If you haven’t watched any of his videos, try one. It doesn’t take much of a stretch to imagine how these techniques could serve the purpose of leadership. And, as I tried to show in my presentation, they have been employed by effective leaders down through history (for better or for worse).

The principles that support leadership also enhance strategy, which can be thought of as leadership but over the opponent rather than within your own organization. The idea of influence strategies — controlling the enemy’s mind, rather than just reacting to his moves — goes way back. Here’s Miyamoto Musashi from 1645:

Using your knowledge of military tactics, think of all the enemies as your own soldiers. Think that you know how to make the enemy move as you wish and try to move the enemy around freely. You are the general. The enemy are soldiers under your command. The Book of Five Rings, Bradford Brown, et al. (1982), p. 78.

I’ve revised the presentation to feature a longer quote by Professor Pfeffer and added a reference in the accompanying notes (152 KB PDF) that provides data on the deleterious effects of picking some arbitrary percentage of employees judged to be poor performers and summarily firing them.

Speaking of the notes, which I highly recommend since they provide commentary and sources that I found interesting but would have made the presentation itself too long, I’ve gone through and (I think) reconciled the notes to the slide numbers.

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Tom Barnett’s OODA Loop

Dr. Thomas P.M. Barnett, who is probably best known for his 2004 best-seller, The Pentagon’s New Map, gave a presentation last November featuring an OODA Loop. Because it is not the traditional circle, or John Boyd’s own sketch from my last post, I thought you might be interested in it. As an extra added attraction, he uses it to build a snowmobile a la Boyd*.

Question for my audience: Does what Barnett has constructed satisfy the purposes of an OODA loop (or “loop”) in Boyd’s sense? The link goes to my presentation “The Essence of Winning and Losing — Deconstructed,” and the roles Boyd prescribes for OODA loops (any OODA loops) are on slide 9.

Very Important Note: This is not a blog on geopolitics, so I am not going to comment on the specifics of Barnett’s conclusions. I know some of you have strong feelings on these issues, but this is not the place.

On a personal note, I have known Tom for many years and can attest he is quite familiar with Boyd’s work. His second book, Blueprint for Action, mentions me on p. 10. I have great respect for his curiosity and intellect, although we have had, over those years, spirited discussions on some of his recommendations. His latest book is America’s New Map, and he maintains a website and posts daily on substack.

*For those unfamiliar with Boyd’s snowmobile analogy, please download his briefing Strategic Game of ? and ? from our Articles page. He introduces his snowmobile starting on slide 6.

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Deconstructing The Essence of Winning and Losing

If all men by nature desire to know, then they desire most of all the greatest knowledge of science. Duns Scotus

Download my new presentation, The Essence of Winning and Losing — Deconstructed. Or, where did the OODA loop come from, and what is it supposed to do? 505KB PDF

A pencil draft of the OODA loop arrived in the mail one day in early 1995 with a note from John Boyd asking me to turn it into a computer graphic. We went back and forth several times — I’d mail him updates, and he’d call up and want to talk. As I recall, the big bone of contention was the shapes of the arrows within the Orient block: which should be solid and which dashed, and in which directions the arrows should point.

He was particularly worried about the arrows from new information and previous experiences into genetic heritage. In the end, though, he decided not make any distinctions and just connect each of the bubbles to each of the others with solid arrows. Over the next several months, he added three more slides explaining what he wanted the OODA “loop” to do. Again, lots of back-and-forth.

By January 1996, Boyd had finished his revisions to The Essence of Winning and Losing. It was his last work, significant because in it he defines for the first time on paper what he meant by an OODA loop. Although he had been using the term since his first major presentation, Patterns of Conflict (created 1977 – 1986), It was virtually always combined with the preposition “inside,” in phrases like “operating inside their OODA loops.”

In fact, in the 319 slides that he created before TEoWL, he used the phrase “OODA loop” by itself, whether abbreviated or spelled out, on only 5 pages. On none of these did he actually define it

Portrait of the philosopher Duns Scotus (c. 1265-1308), artist unknown, c. 1650. Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford

If it meant “Observe, then orient, then decide, then act,” there would be no need for further explanation, other than defining the terms. The fact that we’re talking about TEoWL suggests Boyd had something else in mind.

To guide us through Boyd’s process of constructing the loop, TEoWL begins with the concept of an “implicit repertoire.” These are the practices we need to “make intuitive within ourselves” as Boyd put it, in order to deal with those urgent and unpredictable requirements that the situation, including opponents in a conflict, throws at us. TEoWL asks where this set of practices comes from and how we add to it as circumstances change.

Put another way: From the infinite set of possible practices that we might create and train for, and given that there are only 24 hours in a day, how do we select? That is the question at the heart of TEoWL, and the answer he came up with is an OODA “loop.”

A few points to keep in mind:

  • The purpose of the “OODA loop ‘sketch’” on page 3 is to “clarify” a set of statements he makes on the first page of the presentation and the interactions among them. These statements all address how we manage our implicit repertoire.
  • He called it a “sketch.” To use his snowmobile analogy from Strategic Game (1987), you might think of it as Model 1.
  • However, we know from research into his files at the Library of Marine Corps University, he created many prototypes before he settled on this particular one. My personal guess is that if he had lived (he died on March 9, 1997), there would have been additional releases.

What I have done is to break down the elements of TEoWL into what I hope are digestible portions in a largely graphical format. My primary audience is the collection of people who are adapting Boyd’s sketch to serve their various purposes. I thought it might be useful for them to briefly review Boyd’s derivation of the “loop.” In other words, it is for those philosophical engineers who are developing Models 2, 3, etc., which is, I am sure, what Boyd would be doing if he were alive today.

This presentation, along with all of Boyd’s presentations and lots of other stuff, are all available from our Articles page.

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If OODA was a (revised) Venn diagram

Codde, Pieter Jacobsz (b.1599-12-11 – d.1678-10-12), Intérieur de corps de garde (Titre principal), 1626. Huile sur bois. Petit Palais, Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris.

Clinton D. Pope
Chief Quality Officer
Indian Health Service, Phoenix, AZ

[Editor’s note #2: Mr. Pope has revised his Venn diagram at the bottom of this post. Kaizen for Boyd’s snowmobile.]

[Editor’s note: When people start playing around with Boyd’s OODA “loop” sketch from The Essence of Winning and Losing — available from our Articles page — what usually emerges is something even more complicated than what Boyd produced. Although many of these reveal interesting insights, my personal feeling is that we need someone to come along, absorb all these various efforts, and experience an “Aha!” moment that produces a new OODA “loop” sketch as elegant as, but no more complicated than, Boyd’s. To help that process along, it might be useful to revisit Boyd’s purpose for that sketch: a framework to help us “to comprehend, shape, adapt to and in turn be shaped by an unfolding evolving reality that is uncertain, everchanging, and unpredictable.” Perhaps meditate upon and internalize this objective before we start drawing more arrows? With that in mind, here’s an OODA “loop” without any arrows.]

This will likely be lost on some as the Venn diagram doesn’t mention observations, orientation, decision, or action.

However, OODA is a model of how we interact with the environment, both shaping and being shaped by the environment.

Mental concepts and observed reality are both ever changing and expanding.

To “survive” (e.g. obtain more favorable interactions with the environment), we need better means to observe what’s really going on as accurately as possible and from multiple perspectives; we need to analyze and synthesize new and existing information to orient current state in relation to desired state with a sense of how to position for a more favorable state; we need to facilitate decision making that is timely (not the fastest, but well timed) and based on available indicators; and we need to confidently act with the intention to learn (this is to test the hypothesis or prediction of the decision).

The OODA Loop is cyclical, but not linear in nature. For instance, orientation and observation are always happening. They don’t stop so that you can make decisions and act. Likewise, in every action or inaction, in every decision or indecision, you are always interacting with the environment. You don’t exist except in the environment. The “dialectic engine” is always humming.

The difference between those who survive and those who are eliminated is the ability to effectively orient and adapt to the changing environment.

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If OODA was a Venn diagram

Codde, Pieter Jacobsz (b.1599-12-11 – d.1678-10-12), Intérieur de corps de garde (Titre principal), 1626. Huile sur bois. Petit Palais, Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris.

Clinton D. Pope
Chief Quality Officer
Indian Health Service, Phoenix, AZ

[Editor’s note: When people start playing around with Boyd’s OODA “loop” sketch from The Essence of Winning and Losing — available from our Articles page — what usually emerges is something even more complicated than what Boyd produced. Although many of these reveal interesting insights, my personal feeling is that we need someone to come along, absorb all these various efforts, and experience an “Aha!” moment that produces a new OODA “loop” sketch as elegant as, but no more complicated than, Boyd’s. To help that process along, it might be useful to revisit Boyd’s purpose for that sketch: a framework to help us “to comprehend, shape, adapt to and in turn be shaped by an unfolding evolving reality that is uncertain, everchanging, and unpredictable.” Perhaps meditate upon and internalize this objective before we start drawing more arrows? With that in mind, here’s an OODA “loop” without any arrows.]

This will likely be lost on some as the Venn diagram doesn’t mention observations, orientation, decision, or action.

However, OODA is a model of how we interact with the environment, both shaping and being shaped by the environment.

Mental concepts and observed reality are both ever changing and expanding.

To “survive” (e.g. obtain more favorable interactions with the environment), we need better means to observe what’s really going on as accurately as possible and from multiple perspectives; we need to analyze and synthesize new and existing information to orient current state in relation to desired state with a sense of how to position for a more favorable state; we need to facilitate decision making that is timely (not the fastest, but well timed) and based on available indicators; and we need to confidently act with the intention to learn (this is to test the hypothesis or prediction of the decision).

The OODA Loop is cyclical, but not linear in nature. For instance, orientation and observation are always happening. They don’t stop so that you can make decisions and act. Likewise, in every action or inaction, in every decision or indecision, you are always interacting with the environment. You don’t exist except in the environment. The “dialectic engine” is always humming.

The difference between those who survive and those who are eliminated is the ability to effectively orient and adapt to the changing environment.