John Boyd coined the term “OODA loop” some 25 years ago, but it’s always fun to watch a pundit, particularly a business guru, breathlessly discovering this amazing new strategy.

Here’s the latest one I’ve found, “What a Fighter Pilot Knows About Business: The OODA Loop,” on Forbes.com.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m a firm believer that anyone who writes about the OODA “loop” and credits Boyd (as this article did) is doing good work. Once people start down the path, a few will look deeply enough to make Boyd’s framework a powerful strategic tool.

Having said that, how much trouble would it be for authors such as this one, to Google “John Boyd” and learn a little about what he actually wrote?

For example, the article insists that:

4. Action refers to business process management (BPM). The right actions may require workflow or process orchestration, whether manual or via software, to control the flow of work and to trigger the execution of human (or automated activities) at the right time.

Does this, perhaps, give you a top-down flavor? People are “triggered” and presumably sit around with their thumbs up their you-know-whats in the interim. Boyd, by contrast, is all about creativity and initiative.  For example, on chart 74 of Patterns of Conflict, he wrote:

A common outlook possessed by “a body of officers” represents a unifying theme that can be used to simultaneously encourage subordinate initiative yet realize superior intent.

Nobody in an organization run according to Boyd sits around waiting to be “triggered.”

Oh well. As I said, anybody who spells Boyd’s name right is doing good.

[If you’d like to know what Boyd actually wrote about the OODA “loop,” I modestly recommend my paper, “Boyd’s real OODA loop,” available on our Articles page.]

Ester Dyson, Internet entrepreneur and venture capitalist, reinforces the point about physical proximity building Einheit:

So, yes, online work can make a lot of sense in many situations, but when you are trying to fix a broken corporate culture, you need the commitment, human engagement, and creative interaction that happen most consistently in a physical workplace. In the end, it is up to good managers to decide who can work where, and to make meetings short and useful.

It’s an interesting article, especially since Dyson doesn’t work in an office:

Personally, I come at this from the opposite direction. As an independent angel investor with no real day job, I don’t have an office to report to every day. But I would miss the companionship of people working around me – even if they do not necessarily work with me.

And she confesses that same of her viewpoint may be colored by personal interests:

And the benefits of human contact and interaction are why salespeople still call on customers instead of using Skype, and why Meetup (which supports organizers of face-to-face meetings; I am on the company’s board) changes lives in ways that Twitter and Facebook rarely do.

She makes a good point about salespeople, many of whom, ironically, work from home: Face-to-face contact is very high bandwidth because  voice tone and body language are often better indicators than the words themselves, particularly if you’re trying to sense when it’s right to pop the closing question. And Skype, Facetime, and Google+ still only give you a window, still filter something essential out. You can still look much deeper into a prospect’s emotions in person.

Anyway, I guess that all-in-all, I’d have to give Mayer the benefit of the doubt. In a turnaround, you have to do something dramatic. Check out The Turnaroundby Dean Lenane on our Articles page, for some examples perhaps more in tune with Boyd’s framework. If you have the same system / culture, then people are going to act in pretty much the same ways and produce pretty much the same results. The question is whether now that she’s shattered domains, as Boyd might put it, she can build a new snowmobile at Yahoo! Time is of the essence because what she has right now is a potentially poisonous stew containing lots of resentful work-from-homers.

Perhaps 2,500 years ago, the Tao Te Ching observed that if you don’t trust people, you make them untrustworthy. You will get burned every now and again, but even then, the vast majority of the organization will see that you have their best interests at heart and that the violators were only looking out for themselves (and deserved what they got — see previous post).

Marissa Mayer’s (CEO of Yahoo) recent edict cancelling a long-standing policy allowing telecommuting headlined the message “We don’t trust you!” The immediate downside is that those who were not abusing the system will feel betrayed, and it’s safe to assume that these were among the company’s best performers. Ms. Mayer should expect many of these to leave and be prepared for resentment on the part of the others. In other words, there will be damage to the trust that still remains at Yahoo.

Here’s the key point: You can’t compare the situation at Yahoo with with successful organizations, such as Ms. Mayer’s previous employer, Google. A recent article in the New York Times noted that:

It should probably be obvious at this juncture, but Google doesn’t require employees to work from the office. It doesn’t even keep track of who’s there. The notion seems to have never occurred to anyone. “I don’t think we’ve ever had a policy on that,” [Google spokesman Jordan] Newman said, but “we do expect employees to figure out a work schedule with their team and manager. It’s not a free-for-all.”

But Google is an effective and successful powerhouse (10 times Yahoo’s revenue, and roughly 30 times its EPS) that by all reports already has a high degree of trust. So Ms. Mayer’s first task is to rebuild a basic level of mutual trust, Einheit, and strange as it seems, forcing people back into the office may be a way to do it.  As noted in the last post, Boyd suggested that you build Einheit by putting people into situations where “each individual can observe and orient himself simultaneously to the others and to the variety of changing situations.” This sort of implies an advantage to being together during the rebuilding phase.

If she can get the trust engine going again, lots of options become available, and then you can start comparing Yahoo to Google. Until then, don’t forget the old saying about desperate times.

The German word Einheit would literally translate as “one-ness” or “unity,” but Boyd (who did not speak German) often used the phrase “mutual trust.” In his framework, it also has the connotations of “cohesion,” “similar implicit orientation,” and even such awkward phrases as “overall mind-time-space scheme.” As you can see, it’s a powerful concept, and we often say that without Einheit, don’t worry about the rest of this framework because you won’t be able to use it anyway.

Building Einheit is a process:

Expose individuals, with different skills and abilities, against a variety of situations—whereby each individual can observe and orient himself simultaneously to the others and to the variety of changing situations. Why ? In such an environment, a harmony, or focus and direction, in operations is created by the bonds of implicit communications and trust that evolve as a consequence of the similar mental images or impressions each individual creates and commits to memory by repeatedly sharing the same variety of experiences in the same ways. (Organic Design, 18)

Difficult to build, but not difficult at all to destroy. One easy way is to not take action when people openly violate the underlying moral code, whether it be implicit or explicit. You can turn this into a weapon by employing propaganda and rumor to accuse people within the target organization of such violations and mocking the organization for not taking action.

With all that in mind, read the article “When trolls come out from under their bridges, it’s bad news for scientific discourse,” in Science News.

When you do take action, especially if your troll is a top performer as measured by the numbers, keep one primary consideration in mind: The other members of the organization must see your action as fair and deserved. So you probably want to start with a gentle reminder and a suggestion for an apology. Another thing to consider: Are you a troll? How do you know? One final thought: How many trolls do you have? If the answer is “lots,” then being a troll is the company style, hardly a violation of the moral code, and you’d look (and be) stupid taking action against an individual.