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Is 4GW magnifique?

Quick note to a comment by Jeff Sexton to my last post, who mentioned John Robb and his Global Guerrillas blog.

Clausewitz’s observation, of course, was made in the context of state-vs-state warfare, where, as he notes, the aim is to “disarm the enemy.” In the form of warfare Robb is addressing (if “warfare” it be, but that’s another question — you can read my take on the subject in If We Can Keep It, available from the Article page), and which also goes under such names as fourth generation warfare and non-trinitarian warfare, that conclusion may not be so straightforward.

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C’est magnifique

mais ce n’est pas la guerre.

This is what I was thinking as I read John Arquilla’s intriguing article on cyberwar at Foreign Policy, “Cool War: Could the age of cyberwarfare lead us to a brighter future?”

Here’s his thesis:

On balance, it seems that cyberwar capabilities have real potential to deal with some of the world’s more pernicious problems, from crime and terrorism to nuclear proliferation. In stark contrast to pitched battles that would regularly claim thousands of young soldiers’ lives during Robert E. Lee’s time, the very nature of conflict may come to be reshaped along more humane lines of operations. War, in this sense, might be “made better” — think disruption rather than destruction. More decisive, but at the same time less lethal.

To which one can only add, “I hope so.” But one is reminded of Clausewitz’s warning that once you unleash the dogs of war, it’s hard to know where the escalation of violence will stop: “War is an act of violence pushed to its utmost bounds.” The side that holds back, loses.

So either cyberwar is not real war, or, which may be saying the same thing, it won’t replace violence but be merely an adjunct to it.

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The Agile Boyd

People who know more about Boyd than the OODA loop often associate him with agility. I’ve heard him described as the High Priest of Agility, much as his predecessor, the Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz is sometimes called the Mahdi of Mass.

This post starts an occasional series on agility within Boyd’s framework. I was prodded into action by an article by Mike Doheny, Venu Nagali, and Florian Weig,  “Agile Operations for Volatile Times,” which you may have seen in the McKinsey Quarterly. I don’t know about you, but I find it a little depressing that nearly a generation after The Machine that Changed the World, we are still reading articles touting agility. Tells you something about the state of the art.

Here’s the key sentence:

Notably, these companies aren’t just spotting and mitigating supply chain risks. They are also seeking ways to use volatility to gain advantages over rivals.

What they’re suggesting is that “agility” has something to do with how you “use volatility to gain advantages over rivals.” I couldn’t agree more, leading to the question of how agility fits into Boyd’s framework, which certainly concerns itself with gaining—and exploiting—advantages over rivals.

Oddly, though, mentions of agility are rare indeed in Boyd’s works. If you search Patterns of Conflict, for example, “agility” occurs precisely once, as an item in a list attributed to the German general, Hermann Balck:  By example, leaders (at all levels) must demonstrate requisite physical energy, mental agility, and moral authority to inspire subordinates to enthusiastically cooperate and take initiative within superior’s intent. (chart 118) That’s it. Interesting that he singles out mental agility. Even more interesting that the title of this page is “Observations related to Moral Conflict.”

The situation is even more sparse for “Destruction and Creation,” Organic Design, Strategic Game, Conceptual Spiral, and The Essence of Winning and Losing. Not a mention anywhere.

So how is Boyd associated with agility? That’s what we’re going to explore in this series. It turns out that agility does indeed play a central role: You’ll have a hard time understanding his strategy, much less applying it in your own organization, without a deep understanding of his concept of agility. But Boyd did not throw around the term loosely … when he used it at all.

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Happy days are here again

Fabius Maximus has another post on the financial crisis: US economic update. Everything that follows is a result of what you see here.

I’m not an economist so I can’t comment on his analysis. However, he makes an interesting observation near the end of his post that applies to a lot more than economics:

Under stress people tend to narrow their circle of care.  Who is “us” and who is “them”.  Coordination both within and between nations becomes less likely; conflict becomes more likely.

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Time through the OODA loop

Interesting article in the WSJ today that touches on the role of speed: Companies change their way of thinking (subs. required). One of its messages is that finding and fixing problems quickly is good:

[Intuit founder Scott] Cook said the initiative, termed “Design for Delight,” involves field research with customers to understand their “pain points”—an examination of what frustrates them in their offices and homes.

Intuit staffers then “painstorm” to come up with a variety of solutions to address the problems, and experiment with customers to find the best ones.

Does this mean that time through the OODA loop, which is what this approach describes, is the fundamental driver of business success?

In a sense, it does. If you read the article carefully, or just examine the above closely, you can see that what companies are really getting with their rapid experimentation is better orientation: The more they can create and test their hypotheses, the better understanding they will have.

But it’s what they do with that orientation, compared to what their competitors do, that’s the ultimate driver of success. For one thing,  it’s not as simple as I create and test 5 hypotheses and you only did 3 so I win.  I could create and test a million hypotheses and never come up with e=mc^2. On the other hand, if we’re in the middle of a world war and I succeed in building a workable atomic weapon before you do, I might have a significant strategic advantage.

Toyota, by the way, takes this approach: For the production system, it’s the time span from customer order to customer delivery that’s important, not the time through any particular machine shop or process, per se. And Apple, you’ll note, seems to introduce products at a fairly regular tempo — when they’ve reached insane greatness. What Apple and Toyota will do is use their higher OODA loop speeds to explore a wider range of possibilities, which gives them more options, within the time interval they’ve selected.

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Think fast!

Let me get this out of the way right up front: There is never a time when thinking slow is good. Ever.

So I was a little surprised when a friend alerted me to a piece on the Psychology Today site entitled “Thinking Fast Promotes Risky Behavior,” by Art Markman, a psychologist at the University of Texas. Any well-constructed research will tell you something, will, that is, give you a part or two for a future snowmobile, so I figured it was worth a deeper look. Often you have to dig in see what they did, rather than accept the wisdom of whoever wrote the title.

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Patterns of OODA loops

In my brilliant exegesis of Boyd’s Discourse, “Boyd’s Real OODA Loop,” (available through the “Articles” link in the menu bar above), I noted that:

In his presentations on armed conflict—war—Boyd never wrote the term “OODA loop” alone but used the phrase “operating inside opponents’ OODA loops,” which he seemed careful never to define. (p. 9)

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In our backyard this morning

With Tropical Depression Beryl barreling down, at least so we hope. So far, we’ve had virtually no rain, but it looks like the Okefenokee, which has lost more than half its acreage to fire, is getting a good soak.

When the wind is right (wrong?), we get a lot of smoke from the fires down there, more than a hundred miles away.

The heron is standing in a golf cart track, watching the action on the 13th tee.

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Patterns: More pieces and parts

As I suggested in an earlier post, if you look at the structure of Patterns of Conflict, its 185 pages naturally split at no. 126, “Synthesis,” with everything that precedes it forming some type of analysis. In “Destruction and Creation,” Boyd described this analytical process:

… suppose we shatter the correspondence of each domain or concept with its constituent elements. In other words, we imagine the existence of the parts but pretend that the domains or concepts they were previously associated with do not exist.  Result: We have many constituents, or particulars, swimming around in a sea of anarchy.

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