Orientation is arguably the most important concept in John Boyd’s entire body of work.
Here’s my new YouTube video on how Boyd’s understanding of the subject evolved.
John Boyd
Leadership is (could be) magic
I just posted a new version of my presentation The Lost Arts of Leadership. This is an editing of my first YouTube video, which adds a new intro and removes some of the extraneous noises and distractions from the original posting.
I gave the original of this presentation as a keynote to the Kanban Global Summit in San Diego in August 2022. This version is a moderate revision of that address.
By the way, this is my third YouTube video. It’s taking me a little while to develop fluency in iMovie — a long way from fingerspitzengefuehl — but they say that as you get older, you should keep learning new things. I’ll let you know.
The Penn and Teller video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lo5BRAKvJoA
PDF of slides: https://slightlyeastofnew.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/leadership-is-magic-youtube-final.pdf
Notes to accompany the lecture: https://slightlyeastofnew.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/notes-to-accompany-tlaol-youtube.pdf
Original presentation at the Kanban Global Summit in San Diego in 2022: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGcSg-gEFhA&t=2s
Changes to Patterns of Conflict
I’ve posted a short (17 min) YouTube video on a couple of major changes John Boyd made to Patterns of Conflict after its “final” publication date of December 1986.
(my second ever YouTube video)
Here are links and references included in the description box of the video:
Reference to the Fortune article: “How CEO Larry Culp pulled off the turnaround of the century,” by Shawn Tully, Fortune, posted July 23, 2026.
Snowmobiles and Grand Ideals: https://www.usmcu.edu/Outreach/Marine-Corps-University-Press/Books-by-topic/MCUP-Titles-A-Z/Snowmobiles-and-Grand-Ideals
Grant Hammond’s book, the Mind of War
AGLX: https://www.aglx.com Click on “Podcasts” for the “No Way Out” collection of podcasts on subjects related to Boyd’s work. Lots of interviews, including me.
Mind control in leadership and strategy. Download “The Lost Arts of Leadership” and its accompanying notes from the Articles tab at Slightly East of New: https://slightlyeastofnew.com/439-2/
Cracker Barrel succumbs to Boyd
Robert Coram described “Destruction and Creation” as “having a specific gravity approaching that of uranium.” While apt (you can download a copy from our Articles page and draw your own conclusion), Boyd distilled its essence down to a couple of cogent sentences:
According to Gödel we cannot—in general—determine the consistency, hence the character or nature, of an abstract system within itself. According to Heisenberg and the Second Law of Thermodynamics any attempt to do so in the real world will expose uncertainty and generate disorder.
Examples are not hard to find. In a recent column for Inc.com, “Cracker Barrel wanted to cut costs. Instead, it damaged its own brand–again,” author Minda Zetlin noted that the company has gone through a series of mis-steps that define the cliche “mind boggling.” First, they decided to modernize the logo by eliminating anything associated with their homey, country theme — the old man and even the cracker barrel itself — then they got rid of the antiques on the wooden walls (and repainted them an androgynous white).
There was an immediate customer backlash, driving the share price down almost 50%. As Ms. Kalin notes, they did learn from the experience. Sort of. Going into frantic reverse, the company squelched both initiatives. But then, they turned around and did something almost as, shall we say, ineffective. In a panic to cut costs, they issued a directive requiring employees, if at all possible, to only eat at Cracker Barrels while traveling. Once leaked, comments on the directive were brutal. Many were along the line of “even their own employees have to be forced to eat there.”
Ms. Kalin, however, reaches a deeper, more strategic, even Boydian, conclusion: ” … it can prevent employees from checking out other restaurants, looking to see what the competition is doing or discovering new and innovative approaches.” She surmises that the root cause of their problems was that Cracker Barrel execs “were so used to looking at the world from inside their company that they forgot how things looked from the outside.” In other words, success at playing the game inside the company is what got you rewarded and promoted, and over time, this internal focus warped their orientation. As Boyd predicted:
Put another way, we can expect unexplained and disturbing ambiguities, uncertainties, anomalies, or apparent inconsistencies to emerge more and more often.
I noted this effect, and suggested several antidotes in Certain to Win, chapter VI. Ms. Kalin insists, rightly, that senior execs should interact with customers and “customer-facing employees as part of their regular workweek.” But also, these same senior leaders, not just employees who happen to be on the road, should experience the competition regularly and first hand. Finally, organizations need mechanisms to take all this tactical, front-line knowledge and ensure that it influences their (common implicit*) orientation. Thus are effective actions taken.
In this regard, a shout out to Ford CEO Jim Farley, who imported a Xiaomi SU7, drove it for a while, and described it as “fantastic!” praising its its superior technology, quality, and, specifically, its seamless smartphone integration. There may be hope for Ford.
Here’s a video review of the car, so you can see what he’s talking about.
*As explained on Organic Design 23 (available from our Articles page).
As an aside, last Sunday evening, before seeing this article but aware of CB’s problems, I was returning with a companion from the Rowdy Gaines Invitational Swim Meet in Orlando. Starting with temperatures that broke a 90-year record cold, it had been a long day. So when we stopped for the night in Palm Coast, we wanted some place for dinner that was warm, quick, and close. As luck would have it, there was a Cracker Barrel around the corner. Although it had been a couple of years since my last visit to their chain, it was familiar as soon as we walked in: the roaring fireplace, folksy artifacts, and natural wood walls. Familiar menu, quick service, and a hoot of a waitress. Somehow, it felt like going home. Now why in the world would you want to take that brand and turn it into “just another restaurant”?
A sure-fire cure for optimism
[Editor’s note: John Boyd insisted that to succeed in conflict,
We can’t just look at our own personal experiences or use the same mental recipes over and over again; we’ve got to look at other disciplines and activities and relate or connect them to what we know from our experiences and the strategic world we live in. Strategic Game, 45
It is in this spirit that SEON offers the following by my longtime colleague, Larry Kummer, with whom I sometimes agree and sometimes don’t.]
Larry Kummer,
Editor, the Fabius Maximus website
Over the past 23 years I wrote 5,200 posts at the Fabius Maximus website (11 million views). Most were diagnostic, investigating how we got into this mess. The most useful were predictive, helping us prepare. These proved quite accurate. Here are three of my current predictions:
First: The defining characteristic of our time: We have entered another singularity, a veil we cannot see beyond. A transition to unimaginable outcomes. The process has already begun. A generation ago, who imagined that grade schools would become trans groomers, or that middle aged soccer moms would become the Left’s new street warriors? All we know is that the world will look different on the other side. The West as we know it is dying. Too many changes coming too fast: feminism, mass migrations, revolutionary politics, the crash of the Debt Supercycle, radical new technologies, and Nietzche’s “collapse of all values.”
To survive we must, as we have done before, reinvent the West with new values. The modern Left (post-1964) knows this, and logically they have become a revolutionary force. It is an open source movement (no controlling center), with next-generation values (non-Marxist). They have gathered vast resources and powerful alliances. They have effective recruitment (e.g., street warriors from Antifa thugs to middle-aged soccer moms), sophisticated tactics and strategy, and unifying doctrines. Most notably, they have played two aces. These by themselves might result in a victory for the Left:
- The Long March Through the Institutions, with so many vital institutions dominated by the Left. Leftists infiltrate institutions, then repurpose them. The press, entertainment, and education industries have become great fortresses from which they project power. Giant churches and corporations become activist machines to the point of self-destruction, gutted to serve higher goals, as lamprey eels consume fish.
- Open borders–the flood of Third World people to drastically change US demographics. NYC, Portland, Minneapolis are just the first wave of our new politics.
My greatest analytical error was a failure to see that there would be little organized opposition to the Left. Only now have the first glimmers of organized resistance appeared (e.g, Kirk’s Turning Point USA). Hence their series of mind-blowing victories. The right’s weak institutional support means their occasional wins only slow the Left. Trump discovered this in his first term and is re-learning it in his second, hence the pivot to foreign affairs.
The right might learn this when the Left recovers Congress and the White House. They will reverse all of Trump’s Executive Orders. Trump exercised vast new powers. The Left will wield and expand them to advance the Revolution.
Second: Since 1648 the West has run by the Westphalian rules, an era of warfare between nations (plus occasional civil wars). The post-WWII era was new phase of this, as the tactics of Fourth Generation Warfare allowed weaker nations to defeat powerful foreign armies. A new era is coming of Fifth Generation Warfare which will break the Westphalian mold as warfare between civilizations ignores national borders, as the Western peoples, and perhaps some of East Asia’s (broadly defined), realize that we share the same internal foes and unite to fight their common revolutionary enemies.
This evolution from the post-WW2 era will resemble 4GW and anti-communist conflicts, but cubed. No front lines, not even inside nations. Alliances will be between factions of societies. Most ideological differences will be subsumed in a larger conflict, because “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” As for the sides and the nature of that conflict, I leave them to your imagination.
Third: The nature of war comes in part from the imaginations of participants. Americans of the post-WW2 era grew up with stories of the Space Patrol (Star Trek is one such), plus national and transnational organizations to maintain order (UNCLE, GI JOE, SHIELD, etc). The young today have little or none of that. In their stories the Federation is corrupt. Police are broken or evil. GI Joe was destroyed. SHIELD was corrupt and incompetent.
Instead they have stories like Warhammer 40,000. They see that the universe has no rules, no benign guiding hand. Only the struggle against chaos. Survival is most we can hope for. Our youth unconsciously prepare for what is coming.
IN THE GRIM DARKNESS OF THE FAR FUTURE, THERE IS ONLY WAR
“In the 41st Millennium, warring factions of an ancient civilizations fight endless battles across innumerable worlds. Humanity stands alone, beset on all sides by the heretic, the mutant, and the alien. There is no mercy. There is no respite. Prepare yourself for battle.” The core description of Warhammer 40,000.
For a quarter century, Larry Kummer has been writing for and editing the Fabius Maximus website. He is a former Boy Scout Leader and retired Senior Portfolio Manager at a global investment bank. He has also written extensively for this blog, most often under his pseudonym “Fabius Maximus.” Although he hasn’t posted much recently, he has promised to reactivate his blog; I’ll let you know.
Reality or simulation? Is there a difference?
About a month ago, German physicist Sabine Hossenfelder ran a YouTube video “Physicists Prove That Universe is not a Simulation.” As I understand the argument, they showed that if the universe were a simulation, it would have to obey the conclusions of Gödel’s Theorem, but that the real, observable universe doesn’t.
Dr. Hossenfelder wasn’t entirely convinced, and I’m certainly not qualified to judge, but check it out for yourself.
Then, just a few days ago, Mark McGrath and Ponch Rivera posted a No Way Out podcast, “Beyond the Linear OODA Loop: Jon Becker on Authentic Boyd Strategies,” where their guest maintains that we are living in a simulation. So what gives?
The difference is that Becker is not addressing the entire physical universe but is echoing John Boyd’s observation that:
To make these timely decisions implies that we must be able to form mental concepts of observed reality, as we perceive it, and be able to change these concepts as reality itself appears to change. The concepts can then be used as decision models for improving our capacity for independent action. “Destruction and Creation,” p. 2.
In other words, what we are living in is a simulated world generated by our mental models, and so our (simulated) world is indeed governed by Gödel’s Theorem. Becker, then, draws some interesting conclusions about how to live and operate in this environment.
Recognizing that we are living in a simulation, there are things we can do. We can not only mitigate the effects on ourselves by following Becker’s suggestions — e.g., recognize the effects of our egos, incorporate a range of perspectives (including those from the external environment), and always remember that orientation is a process and not a picture — but also exploit the fact that our impression of the unfolding situation is a simulation. We can do this in at least a couple of ways: internally to our organization as leadership and externally to it, as strategy. With John Boyd, everything is about mitigating and exploiting, with the latter providing the schwerpunkt.
Back in 2022, I did a presentation on the internal implications — that is, on leadership — of living in a simulation. After watching Jon’s podcast, I made a few updates to the notes accompanying that presentation. The fundamental conclusions, though, haven’t changed. For millennia, there have been people who recognized that what we regard as reality is actually a mental construct. Over the centuries, some of these folks evolved tools for manipulating this fact. So it stands to reason that leaders and strategists today could benefit from exploiting these tools. We refer to many of these as “magic.”
Think of them as the chi to the cheng you find in most management, leadership, and strategy tomes. Serious leadership gurus and strategists have dismissed them as tricks or “slight-of-hand.” Entertainment but good for little else. But the deeper question is, “Why do they work?” And why do they work even though you know the performer on stage is trying to fool you? It’s just like in a conflict: Your opponent knows you’re trying to deceive them. But you have to do it, anyway. If you look carefully, you’ll find that many of the most successful leaders down through history have found these techniques and made good use of them.
You can download the presentation here, and the notes, which I strongly recommend because I don’t think the presentation by itself will make a lot of sense, here. The Witch of Endor, by the way, makes her appearance on slide 53.
[The links in the paragraph above go to the versions that were current when this column was published in December 2025. Any more recent versions are posted on our Articles page.]
Deep Dive into the OODA Loop
Mark McGrath of AGLX has just done a really deep — 1 hr 40 min — dive into the heart of John Boyd’s OODA Loop:
Mark brings a unique set of qualifications:
- He’s a former US Marine
- He has spent years working with the OODA loop in his own businesses
- He also researched Boyd’s original notes at the Boyd Collection in the Marine Corps University Library in Quantico, VA.
This last part is important because the “loop” didn’t spring fully formed from Boyd’s brow like some modern day avatar of Athena. Boyd first used the term as part of the expression “operating inside the OODA loop” at least as early as the mid-1970s. But he never wrote down what it actually was. As recently as 1989, he was still describing it as a linear observe-then-orient-then-decide-then-act process, which would make further elaboration superfluous.
But in the early 1990s, when he was working on his last briefing, The Essence of Winning and Losing, he needed a sketch of the OODA loop. As he started fitting the pieces of that presentation together, he realized that the simple circle wasn’t going to do the job. After many, many, MANY iterations (I was involved with a few of them), he settled on the version that appears in that presentation. It is this collection of iterations, and many other hand-written sketches riddled with arrows and acronyms (some of which have yet to be deciphered), that Mark studied.
It’s a long podcast, so I’d recommend you take it a little at a time.
Boyd in his own words
Boyd gave Patterns of Conflict several hundred times, and many of these were recorded on video. Unfortunately, I can’t find any of them on, for example, YouTube. If you know of one, please put a link in the comments. A complete version of Patterns would be around 8 hours.*
However, we do have a complete audio recording of Boyd presenting not only Patterns but also Organic Design for Command and Control and Strategic Game of ? and ? Boyd gave these at the Marine Corps University in Quantico, Virginia (just south of Washington DC) on three evenings from April 25 – May 3, 1989.
Ian Brown and Frans Osinga have just published a transcript of these briefings, along with their own analyses, in their new book, Snowmobiles and Grand Ideals. Everyone with even a passing interest in Boyd, including those who are thoroughly sick of him (perhaps especially those), must read this book. Even better when you can get it for free.
As fascinating as Boyd’s own words are, you should pay careful attention to Brown’s and Osinga’s own sections. Each has published major works on Boyd, and they provide deep insights into Boyd’s presentations and the mighty shoulders Boyd stood on.
Brown and Osinga have done a masterful job, and their book deserves a substantive review, which I will try to do at some point. For now, though, here’s a couple of short quotes from Dr. Osinga’s introduction to tide you over:
Thus, he introduced into strategic theory the concept of open complex adaptive systems struggling to survive in a contested, dynamic, nonlinear world pregnant with uncertainty, constantly attempting to improve and update its schemata and repertoire of actions and its position in the ecology of the organization. (32)
[I]t is basically only necessary to create an initial advantage and prevent the opponent from compensating for it. (34) [Editor’s note: As good a definition of “operating inside the OODA loop” as I’ve seen.]
*The three briefings together run around 281 slides. There is a complete video of Boyd giving Conceptual Spiral, 38 slides, at Air University in 1993. The book also includes a transcript of this presentation.
The Manchurian Blitzkrieg: A Japanese Perspective
This post publishes a comment by LtCol Hiro Katsura, Japanese Ground Self-Defense Force. Colonel Katsura is completing a Ph.D. dissertation that focuses on the internalization of mission command in the U.S. Marine Corps, particularly examining how competence is cultivated among NCOs who are expected to operate with delegated authority.
[Editor’s note: This is a follow-up to my post on the Soviet invasion of Manchuria in August 1945.]
As you mentioned, this campaign is an extremely important case study in strategic history.
The surprise attack at midnight on 9 August caught the Kwantung Army completely off guard. This was the result of several overlapping factors: the inability to anticipate the Soviet redeployment of mechanized forces across more than 9,000 km from Europe in only three months; Japan’s continued hope that the USSR might mediate a conditional peace settlement; and the simultaneous three-front offensive, which created defensive chaos—further compounded by inadequate communications.
At the time, the Kwantung Army still had over 700,000 men on paper, but most of its elite units and equipment had already been siphoned off to the Pacific. What remained was qualitatively weakened: undertrained troops, shortages of ammunition and fuel, and outdated armor—mainly Type 95 light tanks with 37mm guns, plus a handful of Type 98s. These conditions greatly amplified the effect of the Soviet surprise. Even so, the discipline of the Japanese Army is striking—reports say that even after the commander announced Japan’s defeat and the order to disarm, many officers and staff still argued for continued resistance.
Taken together, this explains why Boyd described the Soviets as moving inside Japan’s OODA loop. It was not only a matter of operational tempo, but also a fatal mismatch between Japanese perceptions and reality, which paralyzed decision-making.
I am reminded of a lecture I once attended in Tokyo by David Glantz.* He also described the Manchurian operation as a classic Soviet blitzkrieg. One anecdote he shared was particularly memorable: the name “August Storm” came from an offhand comment by his eight-year-old daughter at the dinner table. Years later, one of his former students—by then a SAMS graduate and a planner for the Gulf War—remembered that story and suggested the name Desert Storm. Glantz laughed that the true origin traced back to a little girl’s imagination—a curious thread in the tapestry of military history.
On a personal note, one of my mentors had been in Manchuria at that time. After the surrender he was captured and spent eight years in Siberian detention. Knowing his story gives this campaign a very human weight for me. And of course, your own father’s presence there makes this history resonate all the more strongly.
*Colonel, US Army, ret., historian who has published extensively on Soviet military history and doctrine, including:
- August Storm: The Soviet 1945 Strategic Offensive in Manchuria, https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Portals/7/combat-studies-institute/csi-books/Glantz-lp7.pdf
- August Storm: Soviet Tactical and Operational Combat in Manchuria, 1945,
https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Portals/7/combat-studies-institute/csi-books/Glantz-lp8.pdf
He is probably best known for When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler (1995, revised 2015), which he co-wrote with Jonathan M. House.
A few thoughts on “Speed versus Quickness”
Larry Kummer*
August 25, 2025
Perhaps Chuck is over-conceptualizing the D-Day operations. The whole D-day deception – Operation Fortitude – is the stuff of legend. But there is little evidence that it affected German deployments in a meaningful way. A bigger advantage of the Allies was Hitler’s bizarre command structure for the defense.
As for D-Day, the accounts differ in their key details. Hitler was by then a meth-head, possibly sedated around 3 am by his personal physician, Dr. Theodor Morrell. When the call came at roughly 6 am about activity at Normandy, it is uncertain if he could have been awakened. Perhaps his aids didn’t try. He got the news at roughly noon, along with his generals’ request for permission to move the tanks. Sometime that afternoon Hitler ordered the tanks unleashed.
How long did Fortitude’s deception ops delay Hitler’s response? If the tanks had been released at noon – a few hours earlier, in full daylight, fully exposed to Allies’ air power – how would it have affected the outcome? We can only guess.
I said that perhaps Chuck “over-conceptualized” those events. He described them as a very high-level abstraction – and, like all such, of value to the extent it is useful. Here, I’ll offer another perspective that is simpler and, in my opinion, equally useful. As Boyd said, you have to slice the problem from many different directions.
Another example of conflating OODA loops with a simple action is Operation Mincemeat, intended to confuse the Germans about the invasion of Sicily. Like Fortitude, it was wildly complicated. But with a different twist in the ending, the story of which doesn’t require OODA loops.
Mincemeat had excellent results. A key part was “The Man Who Never Was,” a fake British officer whose corpse washed up on the Spanish coast with secret documents in his pocket. But the two key Germans in Spain who forwarded this hot info to Berlin saw through the trick. Desperate to justify their cushy jobs, however, they reported their actions as a valuable opportunity. If they had been more honest and loyal, this might have alerted the Germans to Sicily as our next target.
History is contingent: The German’s D-Day alert did not reach the Normandy zone; two corrupt Germans did not blow the whistle on Mincemeat. These are factors that move history.
In the present day, discussions of 4GW (and 5GW and 6GW) that center on OODA loops show the decay of the military arts in America: bizarrely abstract and very complex. Suitable for a nation that tied in Korea and lost every significant war in the following 70 years.
Oddly, the winners in those wars did so without such awesome PhD-level theories.
Part of our problem stems from a focus on the wrong aspects of Boyd’s theories, like Paleolithic hunters given a telescope – who then use it as a microscope. I recommend we broaden our approach to Boyd. For example, we should take to heart his description of grand strategy in Patterns of Conflict, slide 139:
- Increase our solidarity, our internal cohesion.
- Weaken our opponents’ resolve and internal cohesion.
- Strengthen our allies’ relationships to us.
- Attract uncommitted states to our cause. End conflicts on favorable terms, without sowing the seeds for future conflicts.
It’s worth pointing out that this section culminates in his “Theme for Vitality and Growth,” slide 144, whose purpose is nothing less than to “Improve fitness as an organic whole to shape and expand influence or power over the course of events in the world.” The acronym “OODA” doesn’t appear anywhere on that slide.
In fact, my candidate for Boyd’s greatest insight applies at all levels, from building a strong society, to grand strategy, to building a military, to tactics:
“People, Ideas, and Hardware. ‘In that order!’ the late Col John R. Boyd, USAF, would thunder at his audiences.”
Ideas spread best when in their simplest (or core) form. Christianity had its fastest rate of growth of converts before the Gospels were written, telling people little more than ‘Christ died for our sins and rose again.’ Another way to say this: The passages I quote are Boyd 101. Only when those are mastered should his disciples attempt to teach Boyd 201. That time might be many years in the future.
*Larry Kummer is the editor of the Fabius Maximus website, writing about these matters since 2003 (often presciently). [Editor’s note: His description. I am not prone to disagree, although one must contend with the blind hog syndrome.]
Here are some listings of posts on his site:
On OODA Loops (warning, Chuck and I are both featured, more prominently than we deserve):
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22ooda+loop%22+site%3Afabiusmaximus.com
On 4GW:
Slightly East of New 
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