leadership

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Reality or simulation? Is there a difference?

The Endorian Sorceress Causes the Shade of Samuel by Dmitry Nikiforovich Martyanov, 1857. Shutterstock image.

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.]

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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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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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All Warfare is Based Upon …

Utagawa Kuniyoshi, The Famous Samurai: Miyamoto Musashi (c. 1850)

The best strategist is not the one who knows he must deceive the enemy but the one who knows how to do it. Polish author Stanislaw Lem (1921 – 2006)

All war, Sun Tzu once observed, is based upon deception. And in keeping with Lem’s pronouncement, he knew how to do it:

The task of a military operation is to accord deceptively with the intentions of the enemy. The Art of War, Chapter 11 (Cleary trans)

Like so much of Eastern philosophy, this bears deep thought,  For one thing, what do we mean by “deception”?  Is it primarily camouflage, disguising ourselves so that the opponent does not recognize us? Feinting in one direction while we attack in another? Publicly making misleading statements about our intentions?  All of these are deceptive, of course, but they all focus on what we’re doing, what our intentions are.  Sun Tzu, however, talks about the intentions of the enemy.  John Boyd’s definition captures this distinction:

An impression of events as they are not. Patterns, 115

Deception: Merely a Prerequisite for Surprise?

As Boyd explained it, to deceive an opponent, you must create a view of the world in his mind — his orientation — that is logical, compelling, and validated by observation, but which is wrong.  The enemy will intend to act on this impression, allowing you to, for example, trap or ambush him or attack in an unexpected, direction.  The key is knowing what his impressions, and thus his intentions, are.

How do we know “the intentions of the enemy”? One way is through your knowledge of the opponent, your fingerspitzengefuhl of how they act in various situations.  

If I was him, what would I most want me to do? Easy, I thought. So I did it.  K. J. Parker, Savages, Kindle Ed, Loc 619.

A new approach

But there is another, more powerful and more reliable way of knowing opponents’ intentions: You be the one who put them there.

His primary target is the mind of the opposing commander … Sun Tzu realized that an indispensable preliminary to battle was to attack the mind of the enemy.  Samuel B. Griffith, in his introduction to The Art of War.

In other words, the blokes and boffins on His Majesty’s Service had tailored their program of deception to the peculiar tastes of their famous adversary.  Bruce Ivar Gudmundsson on (successful) British attempts to shape Rommel’s impressions in 1941.

The idea is more powerful than just setting up the opponent for surprise. You can use deception to control the intentions, and thus the actions, of your opponents:

You are the general. The enemy are soldiers under your command.  Miyamoto Musashi, Book of 5 Rings (1645) trans Brown, et al., 1982.

Think Stork taking over the band in Animal House. Once you achieve this degree of mastery over the opponent, there is hardly any limit to the bad mental and moral conditions you can inflict, including ambiguity, hesitation, and destruction of the opponent’s cohesion. 

Bottom Line

Most of my readers will be familiar with these effects on the mental capabilities of the opposing side. So, here’s my main point. When we talk about creating impressions in other peoples’ minds, we’re talking mind control, or as it is often called, mentalism. There are people who do this for a living.

It seems reasonable to see if we can borrow some concepts from them.

Watch the this short YouTube video:  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lo5BRAKvJoA

Now, watch it again, and this time pay close attention to their explanation of why it works:  “We’re going to give the audience a story they can tell themselves …”  where part of that story is the intention: “You’re telling yourself that at no time will you allow your attention …”  Once they get to this point,

Penn and Teller accord deceptively with that intention. It’s important to note that Penn and Teller make a distinction between the deceptive actions we carry out and true deception, which is in the mind of the target, “That doesn’t fool anyone …”

I’ve put a few more observations on their act in the Notes to my presentation The Lost Arts of Leadership, and you can download both from our Articles page.  Please do.

Here’s a more complex example involving not only the target but creating a team to exploit the target’s intention. It is one of the amazing and informative videos on the YouTube channel of the modern British mentalist, Derren Brown. Pay close attention to the first half, “The Gallery.”  It’s about an hour long, but in addition to being extremely entertaining, it illustrates the idea of what Penn and Teller call a “curating of attention,” that is, nurturing a story, an intention, in your subject’s mind, and then exploiting it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWiKVAQRT4g

If strategy is deception, and deception is mind control, then strategy is mind control.

According to the Wikipedia page on the principles of war, none of them include deception.  It’s sometimes mentioned as an enabler for surprise, but as I’ve tried to show, it can be far more than that. When I establish my War College, developing fingerspitzengefuehl for deception would be the schwerpunkt. It would be taught by people who actually know how to do it.

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The Autobiography of John Boyd

As far as we know, Boyd never wrote his life story or left any autobiographical notes. However, in 1977, about 18 months after he retired, he sat down for a long interview for the Air Force’s Corona Ace program.

Robert Coram included a lot of this material in his book, Boyd, the Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War, for which this interview is one of the sources. I think you’ll find it interesting, though, to read what Boyd said about his life in his own words, and you’ll pick up details that Coram didn’t have space to include in his book.

Although the document doesn’t provide any information about the interviewer, Lt Col John N. Dick, Jr., it’s clear from early on that Colonel Dick is also a fighter pilot, so the back-and-forth between these two guys is fascinating, and illuminating, in its own right.

Download The USAF Oral History Interview of Colonel John R. Boyd (5.8 MB PDF)

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Magic leadership video now live!

Kanban University has posted the video of my keynote, The Lost Arts of Leadership, and How to Get Them Back, from the Kanban Global Summit in San Diego in August.

Finally, the secret to great leadership is revealed. Shutterstock image.

A couple of points:

  • The speaker’s rostrum was on a platform about 18″ above the floor, and the audience was seated pretty close to it. It made for a dynamic speaking experience, but it also explains why I seem to be bent over a lot.
  • The presentation has several animations which in the interests of readability, the version that accompanies my video doesn’t capture. If you’d like to see them, please download the PDF edition on our Articles page (each stage of a build is a separate slide). Also, I’m using an Apple Pencil to underline, circle, draw arrows and the like. You’ll have to infer these.

There were a lot of interesting presentations. You can view them all on their Conference Archive and their YouTube channel. And don’t forget the helpful and entertaining set of annotations!

Enjoy!!

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Do you believe in magic?

The Witch of Endor
1 Samuel 28

[11/11/2022 version updates link to annotations] There’s a whole category of leadership practices that are rarely taught nowadays. I’m thinking witchcraft, conjuring, necromancy, divination and the like. People have been practicing these arts for tens of thousands of years — they show up on cave walls and the Bible attests to their power — but you’ll search long and hard to find MBA programs that include them.

So in my keynote at the recently held Kanban Global Summit in San Diego, I set out to remedy this sad state of affairs.

Lycanthropy – a neglected art of leadership
(Shutterstock image)

You can download the PDF (12.3 MB) of my presentation, and I’ve also included a helpful set of notes and annotations. WordPress’s Terms of Service appear to prevent me from including the actual spells, hexes, and curses themselves — a liability thing, you know. This is unfortunate, because we have all had occasions when the ability to transform into a werewolf and rip out somebody’s heart would have proven extremely useful*. But I think you’ll find enough to give your leadership that extra edge you need to be successful in these trying times.

Many thanks to David J. Anderson, founder, honcho, and chief sensei at Kanban University, for inviting me back. The University’s Kanban Maturity Model provides a tested framework for incorporating the OODA loop (the one Boyd intended) into practically any type of organization.

Also, my extreme gratitude to the staff of Kanban University for putting up with all my questions, objections, and negotiations over the past three years — the Summit was originally scheduled for 2020.

And, finally, our host facility, the Rancho Bernado Inn, might be a great place for that mid-winter, or, if you’re from my part of the world, mid-summer getaway.

*If you go around ripping out peoples’ hearts without first transforming into a werewolf, that’s not magic. You may have anger management issues.