Sun Tzu

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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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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

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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/

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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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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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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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Confusion and disorder

Even if you’ve seen this, it’s well worth a second look.

Even if you know what the OODA loop is — especially if you know what the “loop” is — watch this video. Chuck was present at the creation, and he’s passing along nearly 50 years of experience with Boyd’s concepts.

For example, Boyd says that in a conflict, the key to success is the ability to build and effectively employ snowmobiles. Why? Which snowmobiles? How do we use them? Chuck will give you some insight.

Chuck embeds the “loop” into the entirety of Boyd’s work. As Frans Osinga points out in Science, Strategy, and War, although the OODA Loop is the best known part of Boyd’s writings, in many cases, the only known, it is not the only or perhaps even the most important.

Enjoy.

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Boyd’s OODA “Loop”: What and why?

As Frans Osinga pointed out in his 2006 examination of John Boyd’s philosophy of conflict, Science, strategy and war: The strategic theory of John Boyd, the OODA loop is the best known but probably most misunderstood aspect of Boyd’s body of work. Even today, it’s very common to see people describe the OODA loop as a loop. However, when Boyd finally got around to producing a “sketch” of the “loop” (his terms), it was, as I’m sure practically all readers of this blog know, something entirely different.

From “The Essence of Winning and Losing,” 1996.

Why? The reason is that the OODA “loop” is an answer to a specific problem. It is not, for example a model of decision making — in fact, it simply requires you to make implicit and explicit decisions and link them to actions, all the while experimenting and learning.

On November 30, I gave a lecture on this subject to the Swedish Defense University in Stockholm. My host, Johan Ivari, arranged for it to be recorded and made available on the University’s web site. They broke it into two parts:

Part 1 https://play.fhs.se/media/The+OODA-%E2%80%9Dloop%E2%80%9D+lecture+by+Chet+Richards+-+Part+1+-+Setting+the+scene./0_bkfn6gnx

Part 2 https://play.fhs.se/media/The+OODA-%E2%80%9Dloop%E2%80%9D+lecture+by+Chet+Richards+-+Part+2+-+John+Boyd%27s+real+OODA+%E2%80%9CLoop%E2%80%9D+/0_tkvhlxsh

I had a lot of fun with this, and the students asked some great questions. I hope you enjoy it!

By the way, check out some of the other interesting videos on their site.

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Is it agility or adaptability?

I tend to think of “agility” as adaptability with a time dimension, that is, the ability to adapt more rapidly to new situations than can competitors or opponents.  That may not, however, be the only or even a very good way to think about these concepts.

Here’s an alternative view:

AQ is hot right now – but is it the Adaptability Quotient or the Agility Quotient?

Kristopher Floyd
Founder and CEO, TeamMate AIDao-TheWay

November 13, 2018
Originally published on LinkedIn. Reprinted with his kind permission

Throughout military history, there have been winners and losers. Some of the winners have found disproportionate success due to strategic brilliance; when examining their successes, we find a golden braid that links them all together. This braid is the foundation of an underlying philosophy that dictates how military forces can survive and thrive in hyper-competitive, chaotic, uncertain situations. Continue reading →