orientation

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The OODA Loop and Lean: What John Boyd Wrote in the Margins

By Chet Richards and Brian “Ponch” Rivera

“Learn from Japanese, retired colonel says,” by John Guerriero, Erie /Morning News, 1992. Boyd explains just-in-time. The article credits Taiichi Ohno with the system, and Boyd credits Shigeo Shingo with quick die changes. John R. Boyd Papers, Marine Corps History Division, MCHD 109904 (Box 2, Folder 3).

In 1992, John Boyd went home to Erie, Pennsylvania, to give the commencement address at Strong Vincent High School, where he had graduated in 1945. Before the ceremony, he told a Morning News reporter what American manufacturers needed to learn from the Japanese.

“We’re taking cues from the Japanese. Now we’re going to have to learn from them, and we are. You can’t be arrogant in this business. There’s always somebody else who’s got an idea, and you’d better understand it.””We got too comfortable with our methods. It’s like a weatherman. Every once in a while, you’ve got to look out the door and find out what’s going on.”

To people who know Boyd only as a fighter pilot, a tactician of air-to-air combat or a philosopher of conflict, it may seem strange to hear him talk about manufacturing. His interest in business and manufacturing, however, went back many years. His first college degree was in economics, and in the early 1960s the Air Force sent him to Georgia Tech for a second degree, in industrial engineering.

By 1992, Boyd had studied the Toyota Production System in depth. Material in his papers, now held by the Marine Corps History Division at Quantico, Virginia, shows that this interest grew out of his earlier work on the theory of conflict and competition. In Patterns of Conflict, Boyd’s advice was to “operate inside adversary’s observation-orientation-decision-action loops.” He wanted to understand how the Toyota Production System let Toyota do that to American competitors that were much larger and better financed.

Chet laid out a business example in his June 1989 briefing for Lockheed, “War, Chaos, and Business,” using what George Stalk called the H-Y War. In 1981, Yamaha announced that it would become the world’s largest motorcycle maker, a position Honda held. Honda counterattacked. Over the next eighteen months it introduced 113 new models against Yamaha’s 37, and Yamaha gave up: “We want to end the H-Y War. It was our fault.” In Boyd’s terms, Honda was operating inside Yamaha’s OODA loop.

The same briefing listed how to tell the approach is working against a business competitor: “His new products are consistently late,” “Turnover is high throughout his organization,” “He constantly blames his customers,” and “He launches witchhunts and other ever-intensifying internal searches for The Cause of His Problem.” These are the business cousins of what Boyd described in war, where the aim is to “generate uncertainty, confusion, disorder, panic, chaos.” As we read it, Boyd saw the same symptoms in American industry, and that is the warning behind his Erie remark about the weatherman.

Then, as books on the Toyota Production System (TPS) appeared in English during the 1980s, he got a close look at how the Japanese actually did it.

He explained one of the primary elements of the TPS, just-in-time, in one line: “What it really is, is you get what you want, when you want it and in the amount you want it.” The Japanese, he said, studied American mass production after the war and “took it to the next level up.” A Toyota took 17 man-hours to build, Boyd said, against 30 hours for a similar General Motors car. The article says the system “was invented by the late Taiichi Ohno, an engineer and later vice president in charge of production at one of the Toyota automobile plants.” Ohno’s consultant, Shigeo Shingo, developed quick ways of changing dies, so model changes took minutes instead of hours.

As Ohno himself explains, he did not “invent” the Toyota Production System. It evolved over many years, starting with the invention of the auto-activated loom, which would stop “should any one of the many warp threads break or the weft threads run out.” As Chet recalls, the TPS material Toyota gave prospective suppliers in the early 1990s credited three people as its primary creators: Sakichi Toyoda, Kiichiro Toyoda and Taiichi Ohno. Ohno gives them generous credit in his own book.

That distinction matters, because what interested Boyd most about the TPS was how it evolved. It struck a personal note. In the early 1960s, Boyd and the mathematician Thomas Christie had built energy-maneuverability theory, a way to compare the performance of two air-to-air fighters across their entire ranges of speed, altitude, acceleration and turn rate. Fighter pilots still learn it. It changed the design of modern fighters, away from higher, farther and faster and toward maneuverability and agility.

Why, Boyd wondered, was he able to build it when many people with far more knowledge of aerodynamics, propulsion and even basic physics could not? According to Franklin “Chuck” Spinney, as he told it to Chet, Boyd thought about that question for years. His answer became his first paper after retiring, “Destruction and Creation” (1976). As Chet reads Boyd’s later work, Boyd applied that answer to everything he did for the rest of his career.

The OODA loop and PDCA do different jobs

Boyd, in his usual voracious manner, did not stop with the TPS. He read Shewhart and Deming closely, and there he met the plan-do-check-act (PDCA) cycle. At that point the OODA loop had not yet been sketched. It was described as a cycle of observation, orientation, decision and action. Chet’s 1989 Lockheed briefing drew it that way, as four words in a cycle, credited to Boyd’s “Patterns.” Lockheed was doing a lot with Deming and PDCA at the time, so later in the same briefing Chet set the Shewhart/Deming cycle under the heading “THIS SHOULD LOOK FAMILIAR.” In that early form, the two did look alike. Chet’s manuscript from the late 1980s called the Shewhart/Deming cycle “a final example of the O-O-D-A loop in business” and gave it its job: “The purpose of this cycle is to get your act together internally so that you can compete externally.”

The sketch Boyd produced on 28 June 1995, in “The Essence of Winning and Losing,” looks very different from PDCA. Orientation sits at the center, shaped by genetic heritage, cultural traditions, previous experiences and new information. Feed-forward and feedback paths run through it, and implicit guidance and control runs from orientation straight to observation and action.

We see PDCA and the OODA loop doing different jobs. PDCA is a method a team uses to test and improve a process. The OODA loop represents how a living system, whether a person, a team or a company, interacts with a changing environment full of other adaptive agents. Run well, PDCA improves OODA loops.

Boyd saw the limit of any cycle that runs only inside a process. On a legal pad dated 5 May 1992, under the heading “Unstated Message derived from Shewhart & Deming,” he wrote:

“We can neither maintain nor reduce statistical variation of a physical process/system unless we reach out beyond that process/system. … or put another way … We can neither maintain nor reduce statistical variation of a physical process/system from within that process/system.”

As we read it, improvement needs information from outside the process, and the OODA loop is how that information gets in.

What Boyd was reading

On another page of the same legal pad, dated 15 July 1992, Boyd wrote out a reading list. It includes Rafael Aguayo’s book on Deming, Deming’s Out of the Crisis, Masaaki Imai’s Kaizen, Ichiro Majima’s The Shift to JIT, three books by Ohno, two by Shingo, Stalk and Hout’s Competing Against Time, and The Machine That Changed the World by Womack, Jones and Roos. The source list for his briefing cycle, A Discourse on Winning and Losing, carries the same three Ohno books and the same two Shingo books.

Boyd’s “Reading Outside” list. Ohno and Shingo sit in the same list as Gödel, Heisenberg and Bohr, Shewhart and Deming, and the MIT team of Womack, Jones and Roos. An arrow runs down to “Many-sided implicit cross-referencing process of …” John R. Boyd Papers, Marine Corps History Division, MCHD 111469, p. 54 (Box 17, Folder 10).

Another page shows where Toyota sat in his thinking. Under the heading “Reading Outside,” Boyd listed the people he drew from: Löwenheim and Skolem, Heisenberg and Bohr, the Hawthorne Study, Gödel, Gentzen and Tarski, Shewhart and Deming, Jay Forrester and E.T. Hall. Then come “Taiichi Ohno & Shigeo Shingo (1978-1992),” the MIT team, and Stalk and Hout, on the same list as the mathematicians and the physicists. An arrow runs from the list down to a box: “Many-sided implicit cross-referencing process of …”

That reading came before the 1995 sketch, and we believe the Toyota system influenced it, through Toyota’s continuous interaction with its environment and its emphasis on orientation. In the margin of Imai’s Kaizen, next to a figure that sets “Innovation” against “Kaizen,” Boyd wrote: “They’re not necessarily true. Both Taiichi Ohno’s & my own work blow these juxtapositions apart.”

Beside one of his OODA loop sketches, on a page from a telephone conversation in the 1990s, Boyd wrote that the loop “can be used to represent how we deal with this world around us, regardless of our profession.”

Ponch has done Lean work for many years, Toyota included, and this is the thread he kept pulling in Boyd’s papers and in Boyd’s personal library at the Marine Corps History Division. Here is what he found in the margins.

Boyd thought the MIT team missed Ohno

The Machine That Changed the World (1990) made the word “lean” famous. John Krafcik coined it two years earlier, in a 1988 article in the Sloan Management Review. Krafcik also served as the MIT team’s assembly plant survey leader. Boyd’s copy of the book is full of his notes. On the blank page that closes chapter 3, facing the Part Two title, “The Elements of Lean Production,” he wrote:

Boyd’s note on the blank page before Part Two of his copy of The Machine That Changed the World. Handwriting only. Photo by Brian “Ponch” Rivera of Boyd’s personal library, Marine Corps History Division. Register ID BL-0101.

“It is clear from reading chapter III (3) that the authors did not come to grips with Taiichi Ohno and the Toyota Production System. Furthermore there is no mention of Shigeo Shingo and his contributions. (Why is this so) Because, in reality, they do not understand how to make snowmobiles which in turn permits one to ‘leapfrog’ the competition. And leapfrog is the name-of-the-game if you want to survive and grab in an evolving, competitive reality.”

Snowmobiles are Boyd’s image for creation, from “Destruction and Creation.” You take skis, an outboard motor, bicycle handlebars and tank treads, pull them apart from the things they belong to, and recombine them into something new. His complaint, as we read it, is that the MIT team described the parts Toyota had built and skipped the creative process Ohno used to build them. Inside that same chapter, on page 62, Boyd says kanban “is only part of the JIT system,” and the authors “have not captured Ohno’s reverse ‘thinking.'”

In other words, unlike Boyd, the MIT team did not dig into the thinking behind how the creators of the TPS evolved the system. Ohno covers this in detail in his book, and we think it struck a chord with Boyd as he reflected on how he had evolved energy-maneuverability and then the rest of his work. To be fair to Womack, Jones and Roos, that does not appear to have been their aim.

He was just as hard on the managers the book describes. Early in Part Two, the authors recount their first interview with the senior managers at General Motors’ Framingham plant, who had just returned from a tour of NUMMI, the Toyota-GM joint venture. Boyd wrote above the passage: “Folded back inside themselves, possessed mental images that could neither appreciate nor cope with what’s really going on.”

GM had a front-row seat. NUMMI opened in 1984, and yet, as Frank Langfitt reported for This American Life, “It was 15 years before GM took the lessons of NUMMI seriously.”

Boyd saw Toyota inside Detroit’s OODA loop

Boyd’s note around the margins of page 65 of The Machine That Changed the World, shown in four strips. Handwriting only; the printed page is left out. Photo by Brian “Ponch” Rivera of Boyd’s personal library, Marine Corps History Division. Register ID BL-0100.

Where the book explains how the West misread Japanese success, Boyd wrote across the top of page 65:

“Japanese totally inside Detroit OODA loop; why? We read Japanese thru our orientation while Japanese exploit our orientation & theirs by knowing both. Therefore with their wider focus or wider orientation they understand us we don’t understand them. Shades of Sun Tzu: Know your enemy, know yourself.”

What Boyd credits is a wider orientation, and as we read it, speed follows from orientation. Boyd said as much at a 1988 Defense Department conference on agility, where he defined agility as “the ability to shift from one unfolding OODA loop pattern to another by being able to transition from one orientation to another.” Chet quoted that definition in his 1989 briefing, and his manuscript makes the same point: “your ability to cycle rapidly through O-O-D-A loops (old definition of agility) depends on your ability to change your orientations (new definition).”

Boyd read pull as control from the outside in

Boyd’s note around the margins of page 18 of Masaaki Imai’s Kaizen, shown in three strips. Handwriting only; the printed page is left out. His last words, “is bottom-up,” run across the printed text and are cut from the image. Photo by Brian “Ponch” Rivera of Boyd’s personal library, Marine Corps History Division. Register ID BL-0203.

In his copy of Kaizen, next to a passage on the manager’s role, Boyd wrote:

“If looked at this way a’la Taiichi Ohno then the customer or subsequent process controls the … previous process. [In] other words control is really exercised by the environment (customer). Hence control is outside-in—bottom-up not top-down—inside-out. Put simply command may be top-down but control is bottom-up.”

He came back to the idea at Imai’s section titled “The Next Process Is the Customer”: “Tie this idea with Taiichi Ohno’s Kanban and we see control is exerted upstream (one more time).” In TPS terms, that is a pull system, in which the next process draws work from the one before it and the customer sets the pace.

Boyd held other authors to the same standard. In his copy of Aguayo’s book on Deming, beside a passage on the meaning of control, he wrote: “These comments while nice do not really address the … nature of control. If he had read Ohno, Shingo, and others he would appreciate the idea of control much better.”

Why does this matter now?

In Ponch’s experience, most Lean programs took the vocabulary from that 1990 book and left Ohno’s thinking behind. They install kanban boards, count waste and drive results from the top. In the same Deming book, Boyd wrote the warning plainly: “Once again, you must get outside the system!”

Military doctrine did the same thing to Boyd’s own sketch. It turned the sketch into a linear, four-step version and lost the orientation that drives it. Lean and the OODA loop suffered the same loss for the same reason: people copied the visible parts and left out the thinking that made the parts work.

Back to Erie. “You can’t be arrogant in this business,” Boyd told the reporter in 1992. “There’s always somebody else who’s got an idea, and you’d better understand it.” That still holds for anyone running a Lean transformation.

Listen and read further

Sources

John R. Boyd Papers, Marine Corps History Division (MCHD), Quantico, Virginia: “Learn from Japanese, retired colonel says,” John Guerriero, Erie Morning News, 1992, MCHD 109904 (Box 2, Folder 3); Boyd’s handwritten notes, MCHD 111469, pp. 17, 38 and 54 (Box 17, Folder 10); Boyd’s OODA loop sketch page, MCHD 111475, p. 1 (Box 17, Folder 15); A Discourse on Winning and Losing outline and notes, MCHD 110119, pp. 16 and 18 (Box 7, Folder 10); Chet Richards, “War, Chaos, and Business,” Revision 5, June 1989, PDF pp. 7, 15, 29, 30 and 41, MCHD 110311 (Box 12, Folder 2); Chet Richards, untitled manuscript (late 1980s), pp. 144 and 150, MCHD 110312 (Box 12, Folder 3).

Boyd’s personal library, Marine Corps History Division, photographed by Brian “Ponch” Rivera: Womack, Jones and Roos, The Machine That Changed the World (pp. 62, 65, 77, and the blank page before Part Two); Imai, Kaizen (pp. 18, 32, 51); Aguayo, Dr. Deming (pp. 75, 138). Book images are cropped to Boyd’s handwriting. The printed book text is left out, and two running heads and a page number that sat between his lines are painted out.

John R. Boyd, A Discourse on Winning and Losing, ed. Grant T. Hammond (Maxwell AFB, AL: Air University Press, 2018): “Patterns of Conflict” (1986), pp. 152-153; introduction, p. 2, for the date of “The Essence of Winning and Losing” (28 June 1995). John R. Boyd, “Destruction and Creation” (1976). John R. Boyd and Thomas P. Christie, Energy-Maneuverability (March 1966). Boyd, remarks at the DoD Agility Conference, Los Angeles, 26 January 1988, as quoted in Richards, “War, Chaos, and Business.”

George Stalk Jr., “Time: The Next Source of Competitive Advantage,” Harvard Business Review (July-August 1988). George Stalk Jr. and Thomas M. Hout, Competing Against Time (New York: Free Press, 1990), pp. 58-59. Taiichi Ohno, Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-Scale Production (Cambridge, MA: Productivity Press, 1988), p. 77 and pp. 75-92. John F. Krafcik, “Triumph of the Lean Production System,” Sloan Management Review 30 (Fall 1988). Robert Coram, Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War (Boston: Little, Brown, 2002). Frank Langfitt, “NUMMI (2015),” This American Life, episode 561, Act Two, 17 July 2015.

Personal communications: Franklin “Chuck” Spinney to Chet Richards, on Boyd’s question about energy-maneuverability. Chet Richards’s recollection of Toyota’s TPS material for prospective suppliers, early 1990s.

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Cracker Barrel succumbs to Boyd

The skyscraper formerly known as the Sears Tower. Chicago, Illinois.

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”?

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Logical End of the K-Shaped Economy

Edelinck, Gérard (n.1640 – d.1707-04-02), Triomphe de Louis XIV (Titre principal). Burin. Petit Palais, musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris

[Updated version of my initial press release dated May 2018. I wasn’t wrong, just a bit premature.]

Newly Merged Airline Ends Coach Class Service
A news release

Chet Richards

ATLANTA, Georgia — May 27, 2030— (NYSE:DUA) — DeltaUnited-American (DU-A), the country’s premier global airline, announced today that it is ending coach class service and retiring routes and aircraft that serve the coach market. In conjunction with the move, the airline rolled out a new ultra-premium “Imperial Class.”

According to CFO Jonathan Tripp, the airline obtains 75% of its revenue — and all of its profit — from its premium offerings and upmarket financial services from companies like American Express and Capital One, despite such passengers making up less than 15% of its customers. Over the last five years, however, the airline has begun to face new competition from “semi-private” airlines such as JSX and Blade that offer experiences above first class, which he called “ultra luxury,” sometimes at twice the price.

To better compete in the ultra luxury marketspace, DU-A’s new Imperial Class will occupy the front section of larger aircraft, including select Boeing 777-10s, Boeing 787-10 Dreamliners, and Airbus A350-1500s. Passengers in the new class will travel by helicopter (where available) to special boarding terminals with “transparent” security checks. On board, Imperial Class customers will enjoy staterooms, as is now common on Asian airlines, but with additional amenities including enhanced soundproofing, jacuzzi tubs, salons with fitness, yoga, and massage rooms, and an exclusive on-board lounge. Discrete lightweight carbon fibre walls will separate the Imperial zone from first and business classes.

A unique amenity of Imperial Class is a ratio of one flight attendant per Imperial Suite. “All of our attendants are licensed massage therapists and certified yoga instructors,” noted DU-A Executive Vice President of Marketing and Client Services, Capt. Katherine O’Flannery. Imperial clients will be able to select their attendant online or through the company’s Imperial Courtier service.

“We designed Imperial Class to appeal to the growing number of discerning clients who appreciate the opportunity to show the world what their intelligence and hard work have accomplished,” she elaborated. “Business class, on the other hand, is for high achievers on their way up. I see their work lights on all night,” she explained, “while Imperial is for people who have already made it.” Comparing to semiprivate airlines, she noted that Blade can take you from Chicago to Paris, but “if you want ultra luxury to Beijing, Jo’burg, Buenos Aires, or Singapore, we’ve got you covered.”

When asked about domestic cities where there may not be enough demand to justify all-premium service, she confirmed that the airline plans to stop flying to those places, although they will retain suitable domestic routes with smaller, but still all-premium, aircraft. “Coach just got to be more trouble than it’s worth,” explained Capt. O’Flannery. “Coach passengers always buy the cheapest fares, but they still expect to be treated like royalty. I tell you, though, did you ever see the coach section of a 777 after a 12-hour flight? And those toilets! Our business class clients complain about even being on the same plane with those people, and who can blame them?”

“We’ll let Greyhound or Southwest worry about coach,” insisted Capt. O’Flannery. Commenting on losing the smaller markets now served by DU-A, she suggested that “Imperials who live in Rapid City can fly their Citations into O’Hare where our Rolls will pick them up planeside for flights to Paris and beyond.”

CFO Tripp estimated that the move would initially reduce revenue by some 15-20% but could double the bottom line. Achieving these results, however, will require substantial savings, primarily from headcount efficiencies. “We’re going to have to be vigilant,” he observed, “but the mergers that built DU-A have already structured our senior management bonuses to incentivize the level of savings we’ll need.”

Longer-term, Imperial Class has huge upside potential for revenue enhancement, he concluded. “For this elite segment of the market, price is not only no object, price is the object.”

DU-A unveiled a new corporate motto to complement these initiatives: “The romance of flight for those who can appreciate it.”

[Inspired by “Sorry Virgin – Sex and air travel just don’t mix,” by Natalie Cox, The Guardian, “Comment is Free,” 21 May 2013 http://www.guardiannews.com/commentisfree/2013/may/21/virgin-air-travel-sex-dont-mix%5D

Chet Richards, now retired and living near Hilton Head Island in South Carolina, is a Million Miler on Delta and close to that on Lufthansa. His family is from the South and his father was career Army, so, as he puts it, “we were flying Delta back when they used to swoop down to dust a few crops.” He still has great affection for the airline. Although the vision related in this news release came to him in a dream and originally appeared in this blog on May 27, 2013, the statistics in it are real.

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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.

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Speed versus Quickness

Drawing by French artist Théodore Fort c. 1845. © The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.

Editor’s note: One often hears that Boyd insisted that the side with the faster OODA loop wins. Here’s what one of Boyd’s closest associates, Chuck Spinney, says about that.

Aide Memoire

It seems to me that it is important to appreciate that the difference between speed, quickness, and initiative is crucial. When it came to the OODA loop, Boyd, after considerable thought, came to view “quickness” as the crucial factor related to what many people confuse with raw speed. That is because he is describing the interaction of multiple opposing OODA loops in conflict and cooperation, and a focus on absolute speed can lead one astray. 

Perhaps a simple (and over-simplified) example can help to illustrate the point. You can not generalize from this, because it is very extreme example to illustrate the point (a more general version of working on an adversary’s orientation is given by Boyd in his “Counter Blitz a la Sun Tzu”). [Editor’s note: Slides 146 – 155 of Patterns of Conflict.]

Imagine two adversaries in conflict, call them A and B. A has an insight into B’s Orientation and decides to set up a trick based on a deception. A plans to strike at point 1 but wants to convince B the attack will be at point 2, before the battle or operation is joined. A prepares this trap over a long period of time, e.g., by setting lures and deceptions, to reinforce the pattern in B’s mind. All this takes place over months.

Moreover, A can monitor the degree to which B is buying into the deception and can reinforce the false impression by feeding carefully tailored information (which is based on the monitoring). Finally, assume B does not appreciate the extent to which his Orientation is being shaped and monitored by A. Now assume further that B has a higher speed OODA loop than A in normal circumstances.

A strikes object #1 but B’s orientation is that the real objective is #2, so B moves faster (in the wrong direction) than A can possibly move (remember B has a speedier OODA loop). Result B, is blindsided when it dawns on him that his Orientation was wrong, and coupled with the presence of menace, the sudden eruption of surprise events cause the speedier OODA loop of B to over- and under-react and degenerate into confusion and disorder, which by the presence of lethal menace is magnified into panic, chaos, and maybe even collapse.

So, who really has the quicker OODA loop? A laid out an elaborate deception, methodically over a long period of time, but A could also monitor B’s orientation and therefore reinforce B’s mistaken impression of unfolding events. B acted speedily but in wrong direction and played into A’s hands, and the unfolding, menacing events suddenly loomed out of nowhere to threaten B, causing anxiety, confusion, which if exploited properly could be magnified into chaos, panic and collapse. Boyd would argue that A had a quicker OODA loop than B because A controlled the pace and shape of action. In other words, A had the initiative, even though B’s OODA loops were inherently faster.*

Now perhaps B’s speedier OODA loop could enable B to recover the initiative, if A did not or could not press its Orientation advantage in such a way as to prevent B’s OODA loop from operating effectively at its natural tempo and rhythm.  

Basically, Orientation is by far the most important part of the OODA loop because it not only shapes Decision and Action but it also shapes (or misshapes) Observations — in this artificial example A had a better Orientation (by definition because it could monitor B’s Orientation whereas B could not monitor A’s Orientation). In the example I just described, A had a better appreciation of what it was Observing whereas A’s deception operation, coupled with A’s monitoring capability, caused B’s Orientation to misshape its Observations, and indeed amplify B’s disconnect from reality, assisted by A’s reinforcing action on B’s Orientation. 

Bear in mind, this is an artificial example, but the reader might have recognized that its essential attributes loosely paralleled those surrounding the Allies advantages over the Germans leading up to the D-Day invasion and its immediate aftermath. 

At the strategic level of conflict, the Allies contrived an elaborate deception plan aimed at convincing the Germans they would invade France at Pas the Calais instead of Normandy. They even created a phony army under Patton, who the Germans considered our best operational commander, complete with a phony signals net. 

The Allies also had Bletchley Park’s Ultra Secret and an effective spy network. They had duplicated the German Enigma machine and could read the most secret German codes, while the Germans had no idea their codes were broken. So the Allies could monitor the extent to which which Hitler and OKW were buying into the Allied deception plan and their judicious use of spies could feed in formation that reinforced the pre-conceived beliefs and observations that contributed to the mis-orientation of the Germans. 

The Allies used a variety of ruses thereby creating false Observations — creating a kind of confirmation bias — that reinforced the German’s Orientation that the invasion would take place at Pas de Calais. This all took place over a period of months, and even though the Germans knew an invasion was imminent in June 1944, the allies could verify that the German Orientation was causing them to focus on the wrong place.  

In the event, Hitler and OKW withheld the Panzer reinforcements from counter attacking at Normandy long enough for the Allies to establish a secure beachhead.  Allied control of the air compounded the German Orientation problem by slowing the Action part of the German OODA loop. But the operational level OODA loops of the German ground forces enabled them recover somewhat and eventually extract a large number of troops before we closed the Falaise Gap (even though, the allies captured a large number Germans as well). 

The Allies were able to maintain the initiative at the strategic and operational levels of the conflict, even though their tactical level OODA loops were slower and more methodical that those of the Germans, because they were inside the German loops at the operational and strategic levels of the Normandy operation. 

Conversely, the Allies, who had come to depend on their Orientation advantage, were taken by complete surprise six months after the successful Normandy landing in the Battle of Bulge because the Germans used secure land lines to organize their offensive. 

OODA loops in guerrilla war are also display a similar speed/quickness dichotomy in this regard … guerrillas maintain links to local populations gives them a similar Orientation advantage.  In fact the North Vietnamese had a telling saying with respect to the issue speed versus quickness — the Americans may control the clocks, but we control the time.

By the way, we coined a term for a situation where Orientation drives and misshapes Observations at all levels of conflict — “incestuous amplification” — it is the sine qua non of getting inside your opponent’s OODA loops. Incestuous amplification can also be a self inflicted wound, as is certainly evident in our OODA loops shaping the “kill chain” targeting decisions in drone warfare. 

Please excuse this long example, but the distinction of speed vs quickness and initiative are crucial to understanding Boyd’s ideas in the context he thought about them. 

The appendix in Coram’s book contains his short paper, “Destruction and Creation” — this is epistemological foundation of the OODA loop, although it predates his conception of OODA loop. I have a briefing explaining why this is so, if you are interested, you can download it that this link: Evolutionary Epistemology. [Editor’s note: All of Boyd’s works, including D&C, are available from our Articles page.]

Note also, at bottom, the theory of the OODA loop is about a living, non-linear phenomenon, which makes it biological in the sense that it is goal seeking, exhibits growth and decay, is evolutionary in nature (i.e., it is shaped by an unpredictable interplay of chance and necessity mediated by some kind of selection process), and is governed by a homeostatic control system embodying positive as well as negative control loops — that makes it an open, far-from-equilibrium open system prone to chaos.
 
Chuck Spinney
15 April 2015

*Editor’s note: Boyd would also describe this situation as A was inside B’s OODA Loops. See, for example, Patterns, slide 132.

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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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Inside Detroit’s OODA loops (again)

A couple of quotes from recent articles about the auto industry. The first is from the US, and the second from the UK, but I think you’ll get the idea.

In 2017, for example, there were 11 models available on the U.S. market for less than $20,000, according to Cox data. By the end of 2022, there were four. Then, by March 2023, only 2.

Among the cars discontinued last year was the Chevy Spark, the cheapest of which started at $13,600. Chevy sold more than 24,400 of those cars in 2021 — more than most luxury models can claim. Now, Chevy’s cheapest models cost more than $20,000.

“New cars, once part of the American Dream, now out of reach for many,” Rachel Siegel and Jeanne Whalen, Washington Post, May 7, 2023

And then,

European makers, prominently Ford, abandoning their entry-level models gifts a huge opportunity to predatory Chinese companies.

“Early Chinese cars were like the early efforts from Japanese and Korean makers: bad. No more,” Gavin Green – Car Magazine (UK), June 2023

About 18 months ago, we bought a Volvo XC60, the only car on the lot. It has the Inscription trim package — top of the line at the time — the B5 mild hybrid engine, and the advanced tech package with SAE Level 2 driver automation (same level as Tesla), and several other options. We were a little embarrassed because we really didn’t want anything so fancy, but now, it turns out to be right about the average price for a new car. And yeah, I know, Volvo is owned by Geely, a Chinese auto company (from 1999 – 2010, it was owned by Ford).