OODAcast informing your decisions with
intelligence
analysis and insight brought to you by
the team
at oodaloop.com hello this is matt devos
ceo
of OODA llc joined by bob gourley the cto
at OODA and today we are joined on the
OODA cast by
chet richards interesting point of
background if you've ever visited our
office in reston virginia we kept a
well-stocked
library of books that we gave away the
first of course given our
namesake was the boyd biography the
second
being chet's book on applying the ooda
loop to business right so it's obviously
a topic that is near and dear to our
heart because we established a company
and a brand on
applying the the principles of OODA to
having benefit you know just
outside of national security or fighter
pilot space
so chet thanks so much for joining us
we'd love to kind of get your
history you know how did your career
start and kind of take us up until the
point in which you became a
intellectual co-conspirator with john
boyd
intellectual might be a little bit heavy
but yeah i had a uh
i finished my mathematics work uh in
1971 i had a
deferred commission from army rotc uh
turns out by that time the army
basically didn't want anybody they were
withdrawn very rapidly from vietnam
and so what they essentially told me was
yeah
i know you were planning you know to
spend a couple years in the army and
then look for a job but why don't you
just go ahead and look for a job
so i did my three months of engineer
office of basic training
and in the meantime scrambling around
trying to
to find a permanent physician it was it
was in a
a period of a little of a recession with
the aerospace business again because the
defense
defense budget was shrinking down a
little and after
much prospecting i finally got one job
offer
it was from the office of the secretary
of defense in washington of course
at the pentagon and it was a thing
called the management intern program
where you rotated around
um through several shops in um
in osd the office of the secretary of
defense and then at the end of that
period
of one of them or more supposed to make
you an offer and you accepted it and
that would have been your permanent
position
i got one offer the one offer i got was
from the tactical air shop
uh in the at that time it was still
called the office of systems analysis
uh in the office of the secretary of
defense and
the first programs that i got handled to
do anything about
was the thing called the lightweight
fighter i also had the f-15 but it was
pretty mature by then
and the same with the f-14 a-10 all
those programs were well along
but the lightweight fighter was
interesting because it was a technology
demonstrator at the time the air force
kept saying over and over and over again
no plans for production nope we're not
going to produce it forget it all of
that
however the people that that work in osd
were uh very interested in having a
a lightweight complement to the f-15
well and that was that would have been
then in uh
mid 1970s about september of 1972
about a year later tom christie took
over the shop came up from
uh from eglin air force base in florida
and he had been co-authored with this
guy named john boyd
on a thing called the energy
maneuverability studies which were
lots and lots of of hairy looking
diagrams
showing where if you took for example an
f4 and a mig-21
which were the two leading edge fighters
of the day for the us
and the soviet union respectively and
you overlaid these energy
maneuverability diagrams on top of each
other
areas where the f4 had an advantage
would show up in blue
and of course the mig and red and by
areas i mean things like airspeed
altitude so it said okay if you're at
you know you're 20 000 feet and you're
doing a mach 0.7
it said in that range maybe a mig-21
would have an advantage
and the guy who had come up with all
this stuff was this guy named john boyd
uh i said well this is really
interesting you know but like at this
point who cares these airplanes have
already been
already been uh either put into
production or or
the service was definitely definitely
not going to put him into production
well it turned out john boyd was already
at the pentagon at that time
and uh i got actually got to meet him in
1973 just before he went off to
to command an air force base in thailand
in kp uh and
however tom being of say his being his
co-conspirator and all of this was very
very familiar with the lightweight
fighter program had done a lot of stuff
to kind of help get it going
and as luck would have it the secretary
of defense at that time was james
schlesinger
uh who was kind of unique in that he
wasn't a politician he had been a rand
analyst and uh
very very um a quantitative oriented guy
and tom christie already knew him from
other things
so basically tom and uh secretary
schlesinger worked this kind of deal
to put some money in the budget to fund
uh elect to take the lightweight fighter
into production
and of course the air force screaming
and yelling
uh john boyd came back from from
thailand and got heavily involved in all
of this
and that's where i began to work with
him a little bit the uh
my one claim to fame was the the budget
document that actually
put the light with the lightweight
fighter at that time they hadn't chosen
between the fyf-16 and yf-17
was one line and a thing called the uh
pd um
uh program budget decision a memorandum
and i wrote that one live so that was my
my claim of fame i left the pentagon
shortly after that
and it went on to do other things it
started in 1974.
john retired in 1975 and started to work
for tom
christie as consultant and i think he
actually
had the old office that i had left to uh
uh
before i um before i did leave and uh
but i was off doing other things i went
out to california to work for northrop
when i finally came back to the pentagon
in uh uh in 1980
john had been retired and he was hard at
work on this thing called
uh he called patterns of conflict that
was the first time i saw the uh
the ooda loop i guess i should do a
little bit of aggression here i did live
editing for genre a little uh reviewing
john for his paper
destruction and creation john wanted a
mathematician who was familiar with
things particularly with girdler's
theorem
and all uh graduate level mathematicians
are
are familiar with it uh and he also
wanted a mathematician who worked for
free because he didn't have any money to
pay for him so i said well all right
john so you know what he wrote about
gerder's theorem was right but the way
he was using it was
sort of say very non-mathematical
and there's a lot of discussion that has
gone on and we can talk about that later
on if you want about whether or not his
use of the girl's theorem the heisenberg
uncertainty
principle and the second law of
thermodynamics were were analogies or
was he somehow
trying to apply these these uh
principles from theoretical mathematics
and physics to the actual physical world
that we uh we inhabit
the answer by the way is the is the
second question that's
in other words he really was applying
them to the world that we live in
but he was doing it in a very very
clever way which we can talk about later
anyway time marches on
he had uh he had completed about four
years
of work on uh on patterns of conflict
it was up at about 100 and probably 20
charts by then i think i even have an
old copy of patterns from that era
it eventually grew to 185 by the way by
1986 when he finally stamped finished
finished on it
and at that point important to point out
that
the way he originally used the term ooda
loop was was not
by itself but he used the phrase
operating inside you to loot
and he used it that way for a long time
in fact
with the exception of one one use in
in his discourse in a section called a
strategic game
of question mark and question mark uh he
always used it as operated
inside the loop and he never defined
what he meant by operate
inside the loop he drew some he did give
some hints and we can talk about that a
little bit later too but he never
actually said
to operate inside the oodle means and
then
a given definition um i guess he just
took it as prima facie self
self-evident it's some kind of a as an
axiom
uh that uh to operate inside the
loop just sort of meant uh you were
somehow inside the other guy's head and
in fact one of the way he's described it
once they they said well think about it
it's like because the other guys
if the other guy has a physical
headquarters and you're a
fly on the wall and you're listening to
all the stuff that they're doing inside
their headquarters
then you could round you know you could
run around the other end and figure out
things to do about it
before he actually was able to carry him
out and he'd never
never understand what what was going on
and
of course a lot of intelligence is to
try to bug the other guy's
command and control so that you can do
exactly that and another way to think
about
operating inside the lives well it's
like a cat playing with mouse wherever
the mouse gets ready to go the cat's
there first
and so it and what it does is eventually
it it
it drives the mouse crazy um and if you
look at how he uses the fresh expression
operating inside the ooda loop it's
the idea is to work on the other guy's
ability to make decisions
but he never actually defined ootaloo at
this point anyway that was
1980 or so i went off and i went to
saudi arabia from northrop and
came back and did some consulting uh
eventually ended up back in the
washington dc area
in the early 1980s and got into this
this
this chain where he would call late at
night and start and
read you his at that time they were view
graphs they were manually typed
then they were converted by running them
through a little machine and you made
transparencies
and you carried the stack you may
remember all this thing or you may not
have
exactly transparencies with you you had
a geographic projector and you sat there
and you flipped
your grass or somebody flipping for you
um
so anytime he wanted to make a change
somebody he didn't type
somebody had to sit down and retype his
charts for it
run them through the view graph machine
again and add them to the
atom to the deck uh even
given with all of that the the side deck
for patterns of conflict grew to about
185 charts
over time and many of them quite
detailed as
i'm sure a lot of your your viewers have
have seen he sort of as we said mark
finished on patterns of conflict in 1986
and then he did two little satellite uh
briefings if you
sort of think of the uh patterns of
conflict as being
the milky way they used to be two little
satellite galaxies on the sides or like
the malogenic clouds
and um the first one came out was um
called organic design for command and
control and the other one was strategic
game for question mark and question mark
and say a strategic game being the only
one where i think i think the strategic
giveaway actually talks about
the loop per se the two briefings are
are kind of similar and
and to be honest with you i frequently
confuse what's uh
what's in them organic design is all
about orientation
and strategic game is basically about
internal and uh and external how to
operate
essentially in the external world while
forcing your opponent
uh uh uh to look inward where whereas
uh as he had pointed out in his first
paper once he looks inward
then things like gertle heisenberg and
the second law begin to take over
and entropy begins to build up and he
begins to worry much much more about
what's going on inside the
outside and anybody that's worked for a
large corporation has been around for a
long time has
has definitely seen that process in
action after a while conforming with
internal uh regulations and even more
race becomes much more important than
what you actually accomplished out in
the external world
and uh so he got those were finished in
1987 and then he sort of took a little
break
then the early 1990s he produced this uh
um started to work produced charts for
briefing that he later called a
conceptual spiral it's without a doubt
the least
red of his of his briefings but in some
ways it's the most important because in
some ways it goes all the way back to
destruction and creation
and looks at it from a different
a different viewpoint but it's it's the
first time where he really starts
talking about things that became the
ooda loop and
he actually defines two loops in there
the science loop and the technology
group and he defines them as loops as
actual
interactive processes and
in the middle of them they have this
analyses
and synthesis stage and he talks about
going through this loop
uh testing you know hypothesis
testing if you're in science or maybe
testing
versions of your product if you're in
technology and then going back and doing
your analysis and synthesis again
and going through the loop again and
it's through this looping process he
says that you of course produce your
your product but he said more important
than that what you really produce is you
change your orientation
because as you're interacting with the
outside world and you're seeing what
works and what doesn't your middle
models
which you had first described back in
instruction and creation
in 1976 your mental models get
tweaked so that they start to make more
accurate predictions and if you're in
science the predictions are your
hypothesis about how the world is
working and of course if you're in
technology your hypothesis is
this this version of the gadget's gonna
fix the problems i saw in the last
version of the gadget
and then you try it and you learn from
the you learn from the results
and so what you're able to do he said
all right that's
fine but how does that apply to strategy
what of the plastic strategy
is he said this is the way you generate
novelty because he had said
oh back in the late 1980s that the real
key to winning
is the ability to generate novelty in a
way that the that your opponent can't
handle and there's
conceptually two two buckets it falls
into you can take the gadgets you
already have now
or you can take the skill set you
already have now and you can
you can figure out new ways to use it
so for example simply that he has a
diagram and patterns of conflict
where he shows um impression of the
blitzkrieg and on one side it's got one
jagged air on the other side he's got
two jagged arrows and he says that one
of these
german blitzkrieg generals has suggested
to him and he said a very interesting
thing he said okay if you do it like
this and it works the next time
don't do it the same way because you're
learning but you're also training your
opponent too
and so the two on the other side is
supposed to represent on the fact that
the next time you do it do something
different so he said if
if you try something and it doesn't work
do something different if you try
something and it does work
do something different well do something
different means generate novelty
and a conceptual spiral is
is essentially on about how you generate
novelty
and it covers both uh a new ways to use
what you already have
but also coming up with something that
you didn't have before
um and uh but it oddly enough
doesn't include how you actually use it
if you've uh i'm sure we all have but if
you think back in a time
when you have a group of people and you
tried something totally new
and even though you may know the people
very well if it's new enough the first
few times you use it it's very chaotic
people are not exactly sure what you
mean not exactly sure what their role in
it is
not exactly sure what doing it well
means
all those kinds of things and so
you know that there's a period of time
when you have to when you have to
essentially shake everything out and he
had actually talked about that
both in patterns of conflict and in
organic design which talked about the
need of regenerating
and use he talked about a common outlook
or similar implicit orientation or
phrase common mind time space scheme
that's a nice one for you isn't it
and it's all in how you take your
novelty and you actually then are able
to
to use it out in the real world and he
said what you need is you need to
practice it enough
so that most of the time people know
what to do
and so all you need to do explicitly is
tweak it a little bit
which you can often do by just showing
up at
the uh at the point where you could have
the most influence and just being there
or pointing things out or slapping
people on the back as they do it all
kind of things like that to give little
signals
that yeah this is this is kind of what
the right way to do it or no this is not
exactly the right way to do it sort of
thing but just very very minor tweaks
and so he sort of put those two together
he took the loop from conceptual spiral
he took the this idea that if you go
through the loop enough
your orientation changes if you do it
with people
together enough your common implicit
orientation or your common outlook
changes
so that most of the time the control of
your actions is done
implicitly and when you marry those two
things together the implicit feed from
orientation to action
and the learning loop from conceptual
spiral
and you middle those two together in
orientation which against the utility
through the loop which you put in quotes
and it's really
very very very clever because it it uh
it takes those two those two processes
the
using what you already have uh in uh
and generating that kind of novelty
coming up with new ways
and puts them all together in the same
in in the same diagram so you can see
them all working at the same time
so anyway that's that's kind of my
introductory loop i think to where the
loop came from and i got involved pretty
heavily in the
in conceptual spiral uh you know every
chart will
you know write this down write this down
below well what do you think about this
write this down write this down
you know that's really neat john will
write this what do you think about that
it went on for hours uh
and then uh the very very last thing he
did in 1996 he actually started at 1995
was
i got this envelope from and i don't
remember whether it was a uh
i think it was probably just a piece of
paper with a sketch on it but we always
like to say it was there
it was a napkin from the bar at the fort
myer oak club where every wednesday
evening they would they would sit down
and it was a little note saying can you
make a chart out of this for me
and it was the beginnings of what became
that ooda loop sketch
and we spent a lot of time on it for
example
some of the lines have been dashed some
i've been solid some of them bigger than
others
he wanted to kind of show what goes on
inside orientation it wasn't
really so much inside orientation but
what shapes orientation
how do we how does that our mental model
why does my mental model work different
than yours for example and it's a
function of a bunch of uh things some of
it may be
uh a genetic in the sense of you know
our brains are different some of it is
clearly the
set of experiences that we've had so far
some of it is what's going on right
around us now some of it
is the uh the analyses uh that we do in
other words how we're
how we're breaking these problems down
and then the synthesis which is the
prediction that your model
is making going forward
that's going to guide your your actions
the idea here being that
you your action is the action that your
orientation
is predicting is the one that you want
to do uh which he defined
in uh patterns of conflict is generally
being in a conflict situation one is
that's the least
uh expected uh
and uh basically anything else that you
think
affects your ability to make mental
models and
uh assess the result that goes into that
orientation block
and we had a lot of uh stuff back on
which one should be solid which one
should be double headed arrows single
headers finally he just said make
everything solid in a single headed
arrow and leave it at that
see uh back then the question was for
example
can you change your genetic makeup and
there had been this thing remember you
remember back in the soviet union in the
30s
scientist lysenko who said you can make
the new soviet man by
by training and after a while it'll get
into their dna
we know about dna they'll get into their
genes and voila new soviet man would
and of course stalin loved that um
wildly discredited
in the uh you know in the west uh so
boyd didn't want to act like he was a
lycinquist uh
by any means on the other hand ideas
like neuroplasticity were beginning to
come out that the brain can actually
actually change itself as a result of
what's going on in surrounding and then
long after boyd died
the feel of epigenetics which is okay
your dna doesn't change but the way the
dna is expressed
certainly can change as a result of your
uh
experiences and some of that can be
inherited oddly uh
enough so uh life cycle may not have
been right but the basic idea that some
of the stuff that goes on
around you today can in fact flow to
your offspring there may be more to
that than was accepted in boyd's day so
as a result all that boyd said make all
the lines inside orientation
uh solid and let's not worry about it
and of course about a year after that
after he did the last one he died so he
wasn't
probably wasn't feeling that he had he
had prostate cancer been treated but it
had come back by that point so
that's kind of how i got involved and
that's the sort of the birth story of
the ooda loop
yeah that's a great introduction to
those concepts and a lot to discuss
there um first i want to mention uh
patterns of conflict was a
great review of history military history
and key lessons from major battles
going all the way back to the ancients
but
up to date and modern also and after
re-reading your book and thinking
through patterns of conflict
now every time i read about a great
general i think ah-ha
that general was using the principles of
the ooda loop
in uh maneuver warfare and out thinking
the adversary and he was using him
wasn't using him in which case he lost
yes that's right that's right well if
they're not using them it's uh
first thing that happens is they become
predictable and
in which case then if you are if you're
actually using the
loop if you're if you're keeping your
orientation up to date
if you if you're doing everything you
possibly can to develop
an accurate understanding of the
external world then
ideas will come to you for exploiting
these and that's
basically what doodling is all about and
i wanted to um
ask one question here and the way i
understand your book and the way i
understand the ooda loop is
you are this is not passive you don't
sit back
and wait for information to come to you
when you're making decisions
and i know in the military that's
critical in business
the successful business leaders are not
sitting back in a passive way
correct do i understand absolutely
correct boyd starts out patterns of
conflict
essentially giving you the answer before
you go and the answer is organizations
require four things in order to be
successful
look at the very highest level they
require a variety of things that they
can do
in the ability to rapidly switch between
them in order to do this we need to
harmonize
the actions of the people within the
organization and the very last one is
we always need to keep the initiative
which gets to your point there because
for a bunch of things
internally initiative just pumps morale
through the ceiling
externally it confuses the hell out of
the other side
people start reacting to what you did
last year the classic case i think being
microsoft and
and apple we started with the ipod
microsoft was
always two generations behind and it's a
very interesting thing they did a
interview with with bill gates back
during this period
i'm thinking maybe 2003 2004
and they asked they said well do you
actually have an ipod
he said no no i'm not an ipod user and i
said right there microsoft is finished
they'll if they if the ceo the guy who's
making these decisions doesn't have a
an intuitive feel for what's going on
out in the marketplace for why
people like the ipod so much then he's
so every time the uh you know a new or
what did they call it that was the zoom
i think they wasn't at the microsoft it
came out the reviews were all the same
this would have been really good two
years ago
and so that's the that's the exact thing
there and of course the other thing
about steve jobs is he wasn't afraid to
kill off something
if it uh you know if it didn't match his
predictions of what
its effect on the on the marketplace the
classic case
perhaps being the uh the a mac pro uh
queue uh he predicted millions of copies
and i think they sold 190 000
um something numbers and so okay after
18 months it was gone
you know he learned his lesson from it
and went on but yeah absolutely you know
um
and even if you look like you're being
passive
you're really not the key is keep the
initiative somebody once said well i
think the
the key to the uh to the loop
is being aggressive and i said no that's
wrong if
you are aggressive you're predictable
the opponent can pretty much figure out
what you're going to do
what you however you've got to always
keep the initiative so think of an
ambush for example who's got the
initiative
in an ambush even though you're sitting
there you look like you're you're you're
passive you set it all up beforehand you
lured the other side into the trap
all that is you taking the initiative
and of course then you spring the trap
and that's the
that's the coup de gras but you never
lose the initiative you see the other
person's not falling into your trap you
immediately
you know uh pull your ambush back and
do something else uh and that's
something that he got from the germans
who said you know they told him offense
defense those are just words instead but
you must
always keep the initiative so very very
good point that you made
and so relevant to business so thanks
chet
yeah oh yeah absolutely absolutely in
fact that's one of those areas where
uh war and business
kind of intersect uh they are so
different endeavors
uh that uh i tell people you'll go to
very very strong links not to include
for one thing war always
focuses on the competitor the opponent
in business we don't have components we
have competitors and tomorrow they may
be
partners and of course the day after
that they may be your boss
you know and but that's okay an
acceptable
outcome for for a lot of people in
business is to have your business bought
up at an outrageous price by somebody
else
you know whereas that's generally not an
acceptable outcome in war
so you see it's a but the idea of
keeping the initiative i think is is
runs through to all implementation
avoids uh
the boyd's work uh business as well as
war
can you step us through was there an aha
moment when you recognize that there was
this intersection between
business and what was happening you know
i think you should mention that there
was
uh i don't know if it reaches the level
of a satori or not but yeah this was a
i was looking for lockheed at the time
and this would have been
1986 or 87 and at lockheed
uh they took i was about three weeks off
for christmas vacation
because it's basically a big big factory
and
uh absenteeism got to be so high after
about the first week of december they
just shut the plant down
and then you came back the first week of
january and i had gone over to our local
library and i'd seen this book by tom
peters and of course we all knew in
search of excellence
and at that time about three four years
earlier it had been the big book and put
tom peters on the
you know on the map he'd been a stanford
professor you know like that when he uh
when he wrote the book and i believe he
was
a mckinsey consultant before that
and i believe he got his phd i think
from stanford and he'd been a naval
officer in any way and he
and his partner whose name community
forget at the moment
uh a watermelon i believe it was wrote
this book uh
in search of excellence and but it was
he wrote and had all of these attributes
that so-called excellent companies had
and so when this new one came out it was
called thriving on chaos
and there was nothing really in in
search of excellence thriving on campus
direction is a very static book you have
these you have these attributes and
allows you to succeed
thriving on chaos was about successful
companies are able to
to create what we would now call
disruptions in the marketplace and
exploit these disruptions while there's
still time and it talked about companies
that could do that and companies that
couldn't for example xerox with park a
classic classic case all this
neat stuff came out of the park and it
made billions and trillions of dollars
for companies
not one penny for sharehogs apple being
probably the most uh
you know the best known um so he said
the real
key is to get the marketplace going get
the
pot boiling but then be able to exploit
that while there's still time because
very quickly
either your existing competitors will
figure it out or new people will come
into the marketplace
and and and figure it out and yeah
peters was real big on that he said in
fact if you get something that's really
really good and a really really
exciting idea rather than regarding that
as a barrier to entry
and hiring a bunch of lawyers and trying
to defend it he said sell it to your
competitors
that will always guarantee that as bob
talked about they're at least one step
behind you
so and that also gives them a frontal
lobotomy because if they're buying your
stuff
they're not developing the ability to
come up with it on their own
i thought hey someone this is just right
on the board john would love
this so i sit down and i wrote tom
peter's a message
no um i actually had the secretary type
it up when i got back
unlocking stationary and said this is
really good stuff it reminds me a lot
about this done this colonel john boyd
and uh
peters wrote right back and he said you
know you're right i read about boyd and
james fallows
his book national defense came out in
1982
and about boyd's ideas you know for
again for taking the initiative
and for uh for his fighter and opera
operating inside the
loop he already called it that by 1982
although he didn't
quote finish patterns until a few years
later about the time that thriving on
chaos came out
and he said you know that was uh he said
can you put me in touch with boyd i said
sure no problem so i did and eventually
they actually
sat down and uh and met
at the coffee shop i think it was in the
crystal gateway or it might have been a
hot crystal city
unfortunately for a variety of reasons i
wasn't able to go but yeah
it was that moment i was reading driving
on chaos and going yeah this is it this
is exactly the kind of things
boyd was talking about boyd incidentally
didn't really like the book because at
the end of each chapter
peters had put in a list of things that
you ought to
that you ought to do and you ought to
take into account in this chapter and
one thing boyd absolutely hated
when it came to competition was
checklist the checklist mentality
now he was a pilot so he realized
checklists are very important for
non-competitive sorts of things like you
know landing an airplane very important
that you go through your checklist
but when you're in air-to-air combat
it's not you know it's not all right
you know pull six g's put power to the
you know 95 percent you know pull you
know all this kind of stuff you know
because once you start doing that the
other side figures out make yourself
predictable
and you're also more important than that
you turn off your brain when you
uh are going through a checklist because
again you're landing an airplane that's
not
really the time for creativity unless
something goes wrong it's the time for
exploiting the training that you already
have
and i thought private private on chaos
had a little bit too much of a checklist
mentality i disagreed strongly i thought
that list was back in there just to kind
of to try to remind you of some of the
important points but
he never said do a b c d and e and
you'll be successful
which is the sort of other checklist
mentality
uh anyway uh peters made about a 90
degree turn at that point in his career
and he's continued down that line even
to the present day and all of his books
since then
had that idea of don't be passive back
to boyd you know
we're going to create the market that we
want we're going to exploit it and then
we're going to move on
before our competitors can figure out
what we're doing which is just
classic operating inside the loop at a
very high strategic level within the
company
and uh for a long time tom and i wrote
back and uh
back and forth i still have enormous
respect for him by the way i think of
the practicing business strategist
he's certainly the one that's very
closest uh to boyd's uh
uh philosophy present company accepted
of course
and uh uh and even in the stuff he's
writing today i think that
the underlying philosophy is still still
there so that was kind of my
aha moment when i was reading certain
women not sure what i was reading i was
thinking i don't
that was that book by the way did give
me the idea of writing certainly when
because it was about a year and a half i
came back after that and then tried to
put some of those ideas some of boyd's
ideas some of what i was reading about
started picking up the toyota production
system about that time and i put
together a briefing called work chaos
and business
and every time i do a new chart i'd send
a new copy of a briefing board boyd
would write back and
call back phone would ring hey can you
talk uh or no he was saying hey can you
call me back because he didn't want to
pay for long-distance card remember back
then you had to pay for long justice
so i'd hang up and i had the i had the
lockheed uh
a telephone system at that time i could
do it i could use for free so i called
him back
and we would talk and i'd send him new
copies of the briefing and he would
circulate him around and hit some
feedback on him i'd do another new copy
of the briefing
and finally about 1988 or something said
hey you got to write this stuff into a
book and i said john you never wrote it
into a book and he said that's different
that doesn't make any difference
you said the audience you're trying to
reach now is not um
a decision makers in you know inside the
beltway in washington it's all over the
world
business people and you can't go brief
all those people so you got to do a book
so certain to win started about 1988
from that briefing more chaos and
business
and uh 16 years later it uh it's all the
light of day
but yeah and it was really boyd uh
kind of encouraging me along he read the
stuff on the toyota production system
then
and they agreed that again the
underlying principles of the toilet
production system
are basically the same that he was going
out particularly the climate
the organizational climate and which he
once called the blitzkrieg
climate and then later we used the
acronym of german words
mfast exactly the same in both of them
and that's when i
when going again going back and forth
with boyd when we saw that that's really
what it was it was the same climate in
both
then it occurred to us what it really is
those are two different manifestations
of the same underlying underlying set of
principles
and uh there have been a couple
others since then i've been able to find
but
i found very very few people i don't
know what your experiences can just sit
there and quote
implement boy by itself and come up with
an implementation
again maneuver warfare being one toyota
production system which of course
greatly predates boyd uh
by a whole generation but it's still an
implementation of the same principles
and they've been a couple others since
then
so they take these principles they
develop a deep understanding of those
principles and then they
take that deep understanding and they
apply that to their own problem and they
come up
with techniques and and things
that work for them and so i said when
you can write your own
your own doctrine manual on this like
like the marine corps mcd p1
um at that point then you you know it
well enough to uh to begin thinking
about how to actually uh
you know how to actually use those
people will will use the ooda loop
methodology
but they won't sit down explicitly and
say okay and i've got to have i've got a
link going from here to there they just
they just use it you know they
they've embodied it so much internalized
it so much
that they're using obviously is
intuitive and uh
and uh implicit
so anyway long way around the thing but
that's
uh that's how it all started it was uh a
search engine
i'm sorry fighting okay not interested
i'm thriving on chaos and then toyota
production system
while i was also looking at void stuff
at the same time and
seeing the same the same deep underlying
principles implemented in completely
different ways
so i hope that that long discourse
answered some of your questions yeah
that was excellent
the one thing i want to touch upon and
obviously keep you here for days
probably
there's a tremendous amount of informal
collaboration that seems to take place i
noted in a void biography
you were tasked with finding the happy
hour spot that was you know
contribution to the boy what happened
yes
i need to know is it was it whiskey or
beer you know that what was that
whatever you wanted but as far as i know
nobody made boy
click on boilermakers where you take the
whiskey and drop it and drop it in the
beer
a little too much no we were looking and
we tried several
um we decided we couldn't use a
commercial um
establishment for several reasons one of
them was the
conversations while they didn't get
classified certainly weren't things we
wanted people over here and all the
people could
at that time fort myers was totally open
post anybody could just drive on go to
the club walk downstairs to the old
guard room and
join in but but newcomers to the uh
to the to the group kind of you know
people started asking questions you're
in a kind of a good nature way to figure
out why were you there
um and considering the boyd was giving
out copies of his uh
of his presentations to anybody that
would take him at that point didn't seem
to be too much reason for
um for worrying about security there we
did have people though with very high
security clearance a guy like tom
christie
uh who at that time was he i just have
deputy under secretary of defense for
something an acquisition than
something another essentially had every
every clearance in the book but uh also
getting time to talk about anything
anything at all was a real challenge
and yeah it was also cheaper down at the
old boy
the beer down there was a lot less
expensive i think a picture of beer when
we first started out was two bucks you
know
something like that and it wasn't much
more expensive even to the present day
but so i was uh going back and forth
with
al price uh at dr air force colonel
uh went on to command the flight
dynamics lab and then
went on to find his own company uh he
and i
sort of sort of bounced out the ears off
each other and we finally came up with
the old guard room then the question was
what day of the week well most happy
hours were
that time of the week were on friday but
i said that doesn't really work too well
because friday starts interfering with
the weekend social schedule
so why don't we really need happy hours
right in the middle of the week
on hump day on on wednesday so
al and i and a couple of other people
from that shop
uh names will go unmentioned uh for a
variety of reasons
uh i went and checked out the old guard
room talked to the
club manager and the club manager said
look you start showing up by about 5 30
there's nobody down there
why don't you take this corner over here
i can't reserve it for it but just have
somebody down there to kind of stake it
out by around five o'clock and also kind
of gently steer
other people to the other you know to
the other part of the club
and that worked out fine you know that
was uh that would have been 1973.
it seems like a lot of the work happened
informally right it was phone calls it
was letters it was happy hours
right you would you would around the
table you know get all these
conversations going and then
at that time uh 73 uh
boyd didn't really join us till 75
maybe late 74 he got back from thailand
75 when he retired from the uh
from the air force started working as a
consultant for tom
uh and uh at that point he kind of even
though it was a circular table somehow
he was at the head of
it everybody looks sort of like king
arthur in the round table it may have
been a round table but you knew who king
arthur was
same same general principle uh
conversations would range all over the
place
they were really really fun to be in and
then throughout the week
uh boyd typically it was boyd would
would call people on his little list and
bounce ideas off him off and at that
time he was still working on destruction
and creation
so i got most involved in he was also
working on this little paper he had a
contract with nasa
uh to figure out why models didn't
always predict the outcome of area
combat
we had all these area combat models and
sometimes they kind of helped and
sometimes they didn't
and at the end of it his conclusion was
he who can handle the fastest rate of
change wins
or he who can have a faster trade of
change survives
well in air-to-air combat survives and
wins are basically the same thing
uh balloons are being shot down and
essentially all the rest of his work
when it comes to working with opponents
is an elaboration of that statement what
does it mean by handling the fastest
rate of change
both handling it being able to inflict
it on the other side but also handling
it
internally with your own mind and within
your group
and your group being able particularly
to take the initiative to exploit
a fleeting opportunity so you can see
it's all kind of led
to that one little statement right at
the end of his uh a little briefing for
nasa
uh on uh and that being really what it
was and i'm
to this day i have no idea what that's
the thought you know being basically a
bunch of engineers and what they wanted
to know was
well are we not are we not modeling uh
you know aileron roll fast enough you
know things like
things like that and it was that reason
that also explained by the way by the
f-16 got
got picked as the winner of the
lightweight fighter competition and not
the yf-17
but that story is told pretty well in
boyd in uh in coral
smoke so we'll go into it here so yeah
and
a lot of us were still working for tom
at the time i worked for him for another
year after that before i left
and so we were all had that all in that
same little office there in the tac air
shop that time he was the director of
of tactical air the office had changed
its name to program analysis and
evaluation
and then he he moved up to be the head
of
general purpose programs uh shortly
after that
and so he had not only attack air but he
also had the tactical army
you know navy a marine corps kind of
could
as as opposed to strategic atomic bombs
didn't belong to him
pretty much everything else did and we
were all right there in the pentagon
essentially made it or we were
uh consultants to the pentagons came in
and out a lot so that led to that
very high level of interaction among
these people we talked about and boy you
start like you turn the turn the heat up
and get the pot boiling kind of
kind of thing and i think that was a key
part of of helping this stuff develop
is that any time for example john had an
idea or wanted to talk about a
particular military battle
of course he had the pentagon library
which had all this stuff but he could
also walk over to the army staff
talk to the army history people and uh
he could talk to people who he had never
been in land combat
he'd been in very little air-to-air
combat but there were a lot of people in
pentagon that had been in quite a bit of
land combat going all the way back to
world war ii so he could sit and talk to
him
about their experiences about what it
actually felt like and what it felt like
to have control
lose control and how they actually
exercised leadership
and he also because of that position
there in osd he was able to
to interview several of the german
generals
patel had a contract at that time and
pierre spray did the whose flute in
german did the
translation so he was able to take a lot
of these ideas and actually talk to guys
like herman
balk who was one of the uh the germans
regarded him as perhaps next only to
ronald as being their their
greatest exponent of maneuver warfare
and von millenthan who wrote the book
panzer battle for box chief of staff for
a while
and uh several other of these guys came
you know came through so it was
a very high probably never possible to
put it together again
you know amount of interaction among all
these people that went through this
analysis lots of analyses and
synthesis beginning forms ideas could be
tested
and things could be changed and this
went on for about
10 years while patterns of conflict was
uh
was being written so if you compare that
to a phd dissertation
it takes two or three maybe if you're
slow you know three years
uh one or two due to writing all this up
this was 10 years an intense study
almost 24
7 with all of the resources of the
american defense department
you know available to you since he was a
consultant to tom he kept his security
clearance
he kept access to basically where he
wanted to go and tom of course opened
doors for him
if he needed to it was the kind of thing
that that basically could never be
never be repeated you know very very
interesting question
yeah and again there too everything
you're saying has so many direct
so much direct relevance to industry and
you made me think a couple other
thoughts one
is the trust-based networking that
occurs in a small group like that where
you meet
informally talk about whatever you want
to that occurs in industry a lot well
we have this academic right now has put
so much of that on hold
we try to do that trust-based networking
by video like this
and we can you know maybe maintain
networks but it's hard to create new
networks
and i also wanted to say that i mean
something you just
made incredibly clear is
these ceos um you mentioned
initiative you mentioned agility you
mentioned um
survival you mentioned strategy
they should all take to the ooda loop
without even needing to know what that
concept is
because if you're a successful ceo you
already know that
at best your strategy is only good once
it has to be dynamic um or you're
certain to lose instead of being certain
to win that's exactly right
so that's i wanted to ask other thoughts
on what you would say to the ceo about
john boyd and the ooda loop and how it
applies to
ceo decision making that's a really
really interesting question
um i think the point of interest for me
there would be
what you know what do ceos really do and
we talk a lot about decision making and
decision making is important because it
selects an action
from among a universe of potential
actions and it acts as a harmonizing
device
uh so if you put it in boyd's terms what
he's really talking about is it sorta
designates his fair punt
but the vast vast majority of the time
if you're doing void right
most people should know what to do most
of the time
so then the question becomes then what
is this
the ceo's job and that's where i think
if you if you take it the next step the
boy did and put it in this leadership
and appreciation
and again i think most in fact maybe all
real
successful ceos they've been successful
over a period of time
it could always be lucky once even a
blind hog
but what happens is if you're not then
the people within your organization that
are really good will even go somewhere
else or start their own company or
they'll get together
with a bunch of their folks and start a
company in other words you can only be a
lousy ceo i think so long
um or again as boyd used to uh
you said we asked about well you know
general motors didn't operate according
to this
uh if y'all they were successful for so
many years and he had two answers to
that well
where are they now any second is who was
the competition
he said it's not necessary that you that
you exercise
his his philosophy perfectly he said you
have to be better than your competition
he said that's really the mark of of a
maneuver-based strategy
uh as opposed to what we call a fault
strength false strategy is it doesn't
work people say
how well you didn't do 8.3 correctly and
all of this stuff it's you use it a
little you get a little you use it a lot
you get a lot
and that's virtually a quote from sun
tzu and
like i said boy bitch all goes back to
sun tzu and
so he said what a leader really his real
real real real job is that leadership
and appreciation job
and again it came out of the military
there's not enough time to make
decisions for everybody in the
organization you set the
the objectives the high level stuff then
your real job is to kind of
get this intuitive feel for how it's
going and you may remember there's a
thing called the ono circle
in the toyota production system toyota
uh a tai chi ohno one of the creators
organizers that you can walk into any
factory that claims that it's using the
toyota production
and you draw a circle and you stand in
that circle and
you close your eyes and you just listen
and maybe exactly a little bit
because you can keep your eyes open if
you want but he said you can really
quickly tell if they're using my
my system or not because you have such
an intuitive feel for how it's supposed
to be
for what the level of activity is for
what the talking back and forth and how
often if
people are pulling the end on to stop
the line and what happens when they do
and and the level of general chatter and
the the level of
you can tell if things aren't flowing so
once you understand
you can and you develop this intuitive
field and then that's what you want to
use
so that's what i think i would intel a
really good ceo
has an intuitive feel for how well this
organization is doing and
let me switch over to uh to make it a
little less
a gender specific their ability to
exercise that field and
influence their organization is really
what we pay them to do because there are
people that can do it the very highest
level they're the only ones that really
understand
if the organization is working properly
and what to do if it's not working
properly to get it working
we're not just working properly then the
organization does does the work of the
organization
uh i think really really really good
ceos uh do that
this is not to say that they don't they
don't get involved in
you know some of the details the design
of the package and you know the design
of the ad campaign
and all of that yeah you know they can
but if they're getting a lot of designs
that they don't like then they need a
new ad agency you know
and their job there is to figure out why
they're marketing people
came up with a bunch of clowns in the
first place you know maybe kind of
helped
you know help them work through their
problem uh so that would be my advice in
case it's all about orientation
orientation you think of as being your
mental model that make predictions of
the future
and their real job is to try to get
everybody's mental models making better
predictions of the future because once
they start making better predictions in
the future
then things then things happen happen
the way they're supposed to happen
and so when i tell you you'll really
talk to ceo and say
it's in an office environment it may not
be possible to close your ass and sense
how it's
uh how it's going to work but you can
sense how it's working from other things
from people's attitude with staff
meetings
are they sitting around water coolers
talking to each other is everybody
is the building emptied out at 501 pm
you know
if it's not emptied out it's only
because they're waiting for you to leave
and it empties out one minute after you
leave
you know that kind of stuff and if you
really know
you know what you're doing people can't
fool you because you've lived the
organization you
created it and you came up through it
you came up through similar
organizations
and you can you can tell when your
organization has a finely
tuned machine it's not it's not working
right it's a machine of parts that think
so you have to be real careful with the
machine analogy there
but it all gets back to orientation and
then the next thing is okay is that are
these predictions actually are we
actually working out in the marketplace
like we're like we're supposed to which
is one reason by the way that
the quotas drove boyd absolutely bananas
uh because there's so many ways to meet
quotas with the lousy lousy
functioning machine um your quota is
just a guess
but you should be able to i mean maybe
we didn't meet quota because that
market's just not there and you know you
made a guess and it's just not going to
happen
but the question is how well did your
organization do in
in trying to do that do we need to help
them work better or we need to shift the
sharepoint a little uh kind of thing
these things only ceos can
only the ceo can really go to the
shareholders uh
other stakeholders and say yep things
are really working
and they're going to work better next
year this way or they're not really
working and here's what i'm going to do
about it
so long answer thank you good context
awesome yeah
i see it definitely great context i know
we're coming up you know get
a few more minutes before we're booked
on the hour
a kind of a novelty question you know
john boyd is
is relatively well studied you know
multiple books being written
what is there is there is there a nugget
of truth about him or an insight
about him that is not well known out
there
kind of in the public domain coral put
so much into his book
there was hardly anything left by the
way as an aside
uh i was living in atlanta and actually
working for his wife but he was writing
the book and he
and my and my wife who knew john uh also
and robert would get together at the a
restaurant at the dekalb county airport
you have hd airport by the way coral
reef mentioned the book now but he's
licensed commercial instrument pilot
and uh so even though he was ever a
fighter pilot he knows aviation pretty
well so we would get who get together
with me there we and he'd exchange
copies of the manuscript and we'd look
at it
comments on it and then i was at
washington several times when he was
interviewing pierre and chuck spinney
and some of these other people
and
there's been some question about whether
or not he exaggerated in that book or
things like that i can assure you he
didn't
everything that in that book was checked
and double checked
and anytime anyone avoids people told
him something he would try and find
another one aboard people
uh to uh you know to verified or correct
it so there's really very little about
john boyd that i can
that i can tell you that's not in the
book with one possible exception
he would call and i would at home like
on the weekends and i wouldn't always be
available one of the kids would
sometimes
answer the phone and despite this big
rough
fighter pilot anthony quinn type you
know exterior that he uh
that he put out um uh
i was in thai little italian lannister
type exterior
he would um he would talk with the kids
hey how you doing
said how you doing in school how are you
doing in math well tell me what matters
what are you doing in math now you know
what are you taking in your science
classes and they would even sit and talk
with them until either i became
available or somebody said oh i will ask
your dad to give me a call back
and so my kids in some sense probably a
new boy
at least as well as i did uh and even
though
you know they both eventually did end up
in um
in scientific type type stuff my my
older started being
in public health and being a biologist
and the youngest one being an actuary
and now doing uh
app development uh so um and both out
you know so in that sense i thought that
was kind of funny is that he really got
along
very very well with the kids something i
would not have predicted
uh ordinarily so so i can i can pass
that along to you
um he could be very aggressive in uh
in debates but he never took it
personally as long as you could make
long as you can hold up your end of the
argument um
you know he didn't mind uh you know
talking with you and every now and then
he come out and say
you know tiger that was a good one no
you got inside my
loop tiger didn't happen very often but
every now and then
what you took us a big kudo from uh from
john
so uh yeah he was uh he was a unique
unique kind of a character for all the
reasons that we talked about
probably just as well for the rest of
the world that he didn't make general
because you never have had the ability
or the time
uh to have done any other stuff if he
had been wrapped up
in the kind of political environment
that air force generals at the pentagon
live in
and so that from that point that was
probably good i know to the day he died
it kind of
irritated him uh and he died you know
like 21 years after he retired 22 years
after he retired
so uh but it was probably for the best
got a great body of work you know the in
exchange for the lack of promotion
uh what are some books that are on your
radar screen right now or that you're
reading that you might write i tend to
read mainly
a mainly fiction uh i'm retired uh
i've been through you know business
books and there's a lot of good stuff
out there i'm not i'm not
i'm not going to denigrate any of it and
every now and then i uh
i get to read something good uh
i thought of the art of action
by uh who's his name steven uh he's
going to kill me
remembering his name here is uh is is is
very good
uh talks a lot it's about off jobs he
manages to write an entire book on off
trucks tactic
and never uses the term noodle but he
never mentions john boyd either but
that's right there's a long tradition of
never mentioning john boyd
for all i know he never heard of his
british british consultant it's an
excellent
steven bundy excellent book and of
course el david marquette's turned the
ship around
is is also a very good book and it's a
good book because it talks about
uh basically how he runs a submarine a
cruise of a
ballistic missile uh submarine without
ever giving an order
and he wanted to do it totally by you
know implicit guidance and
uh and control and to do that you need
an extraordinarily high degree of ein
height and one way to get that is to
lock everybody together in a steel tube
for 18 months
and you can develop very high einheit
which
begs the question of why other submarine
commanders weren't able to do it how did
marquette get the idea to uh
to do this and the technique you use
basically the technique that boyd
the boy prescribes in organizational and
organic design of putting people
together and working them through a
variety of scenarios together so they
can form those implicit bonds
uh and and develop the common outlook
that makes uh
harmonized action possible so that's uh
that's a very good book and
on the fiction side i'm a big fan of roy
r king's
mary russell series mary russell being
the fictional
wife of sherlock holmes uh much much
younger than sherlock
uh gets married i think when she's 21
and he's whatever
but they're extremely well uh well then
books and if you want
fiction that kind of avoids books and it
actually mentions the ooda loop and uses
it i think in a very good way
charles strauss's laundry files books
uh science uh fantasy fiction whatever
are i think are outstanding and in one
of them
and i mentioned this on my blog slightly
east of new
if you google stras s-t-r-o-s-s you can
find the uh
the citation to it where he talks about
the oodaloo and actually has his
character using it correctly focusing on
orientation
and then letting actions flow and
putting the focus on getting the
orientation back right
and and then the actions that she
already has you have plenty of actions
then the correct actions begin to flow
she can start to assess and
you know generate she needs to generate
a lot of novelty very quickly
uh and that thing so i'll uh i'll
suggest those
awesome um it's time to think what else
i do
do really a lot i read everything martin
van gravel
puts out i thought hitler in hell was
hilarious
recommended highly but his
transformation of war and he knew boyd
uh
and he uh whenever he would come to dc
he come by the pentagon and he and boyd
would talk
uh and transformation of war has uh a
lot of the flavor of boyd uh
the boy did it boy quotes uh his command
in war book
and his uh i believe it is in
organizational design
or he was about organic design for
command and control
so uh so those go down he is currently
finishing
his his last book which is on prediction
that's it's it's a a
history of what we use for prediction
and of course orientation is all about
predictions so you can see that
you can see that sounds fascinating yeah
how that goes up there so
anyway that's uh that's basically it at
this point i have an amazon news plus so
i read a lot of magazines for
very low very low price uh
yeah how do you think and uh that's
basically about it
and chet you're still writing correct or
your your book is being translated into
japanese i understand yeah let's just
happen to have a copy here just came out
in japanese
it's uh those who can read japanese
there it is
and they did it good just physically
it's a um
it's a work of art i think so many of
their books
are one of their professors translated
it i looked him up a very distinguished
professor
of management did the translation and
uh that an audio version of the book is
coming out i'm not narrating the audio
version
i don't know who they got to narrate it
but it's coming out should be out early
next year
um and the last two things i've written
have all been papers the uh the last two
being
the final i hope version of boyd's real
ood loop that i did with uh
for the norwegians for their their
defense journal called
a necessity and uh
then the one on conceptual spiral and
john boy conceptual spiral and the
meaning of life
so uh and they're available also on
slightly eastern
so my wife keeps saying that i should do
a new book and as i tell her as soon as
i
think of some of these things to say i
will i would like to do a book
going back tracing the roots of boyd's
uh
philosophy back much deeper than than
just the war stuff
uh boyd never wrote anything in any of
his books about zen
although it's clear that there's a lot
of zen and void stuff and he read a lot
of it
after he completed the the
books and uh but he never wrote anything
on it
my problem is i don't really know enough
about it uh you know it's a very very
rich history of zen and buddhism
taoism uh and all that somebody that
knows a lot more about that stuff than
that he really needs to
really needs to write it but for example
uh
shinryu suzuki and zen beginner's map
which is a good description of boyd just
in the title
said the purpose of that is to see
reality clearly
what's the u loop all about guys
no anyway yeah the answer is yeah i'm
supposed to be writing i tell my wife
i'm writing but
in fact i have very little to show for
it
anyway i'm talking with y'all
yeah thank you so much for joining us
you know we look forward to folks we'll
we'll put links uh in the description
obviously
to the book into the translated versions
and of course to your blog as well so
that people can dive a little bit deeper
the second my my production staff just
handed me a note here
don't go away
it went on there is a there is a
portuguese version of certain delano
all right nice and there's an indian
version of
which is in english certainly went out
so
it's been translated twice and then i
have one country specific uh
version of it uh anybody that's
interested in doing a translation please
uh
please get ahold of me so absolutely
well thank you all very much i really
appreciate the
opportunity to do this thank you thank
you
we'll see you all take care now thanks
for listening to this
ooda loop production for the latest
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