Episode 113: Mark McGrath: John Boyd Is Far More Than The OODA Loop

Informing your decisions with intelligence analysis and insight brought to you by the team@ooda.

Loop.Com I'm Bob Gourley, the Chief Technology Officer of OODA LLC. And today on the OODaCast, Mark McGrath, the Chief Learning Officer of AGLX, an adaptive strategy consultancy. Thanks Mark, for joining the OODaCast.

Thanks for having me, Bob.

You know, Mark, I've tracked your readings and I mean your writings and seen you online for a long time. There's a lot of things I want to discuss with you, including Colonel John Boyd, the OODA Loop, your approach to business and finance. But before getting into that, can you give us a little bit of your background and how you got to this point in your career?

Sure. I had a very eclectic upbringing. I was a Army brat, son of an army officer. I went to West Point, who was from New York City, who married a art teacher, who was from a family on the opposite side. I guess a different, a different background. We lived all over the world. I was born in Fort Knox, Kentucky, lived in Grafenwehr, Germany, Fort Benning, Georgia. And always getting a pretty good taste of everything. Our, my parents did a lot of traveling with us, exposed us to a lot of stuff. When my, I was in eighth grade, my parents split and I think, I think it was about age 10 in 1986, I saw top Gun and I wanted to be a, instead of be following my dad's footsteps to go to West Point, I wanted to be a Navy pilot. And it was also coming on the wake of my, my aunt marrying a, a naval Naval aviator in the US Navy. Thought it was very different. And I always like to do things different. I always like to kind of, I guess, challenge, challenge the status quo, so to speak. And you can imagine growing up on army bases, you know, challenging the status quo by really enjoying Top Gun to the point where you say you wanted to be a Navy pilot and follow in your, your uncle's footsteps was, was very different. I went to a all boys Catholic high school in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. So I would say functionally I'm, I'm from Pittsburgh Penn. Went to 8th grade in high school in Pittsburgh. Grew up in the city in a neighborhood where the, where the zoo is. And that experience was where I discovered the Marine Corps. We had a disciplinarian that was a Marine and I want to go into details, but I found myself in a position that the disciplinarian said if I didn't bring a business card back from the recruiter that I was going to be in more trouble than, than I could ever imagine. So a buddy of mine and I took the bus down to the East Liberty neighborhood in Pittsburgh, went to the recruiting substation. We walked in and right away I was hooked. I had never seen dress blue Deltas before, was really impressed by Staff Sergeant Dan Rowe was his name. And he had aviator glasses on and he was just creased and polished. And he asked me what we knew, what we, you know, what do you boys know about the Marine Corps? And I knew nothing other than my father said they were good because they had infantry. He was an infantry officer. And I said, yeah, I think they guard the President or fly the President or something like that. And he says, what do you want to do? And I said, I want to be a Navy pilot. And he says, do you know that Marines are naval and they're naval aviators and they have F18s? And I said, no, I've never heard that before. She goes, why don't you boys sit down the couch with a tv? And he puts it a vhs. It was called warriors from the Sea and you can still see it on YouTube. And we were hooked. There's no other. Whatever. Whoever designed that video certainly had us in mind. So my question at the end of it was, so, you know, you can be a, you can be an aviator and you can still do all that other stuff. And he's like, yeah. And I was, that was it for me. So what ended up happening was I got a ROTC scholarship to Marquette, Naval ROTC at a Marine option. And the. My buddy Mike, who went to the recruiting office with me just a few years ago, he retired as a Marine master sergeant. So the, the recruiting video worked. But yeah, no, I went to, I went to Marquette. I majored in history. I did six years active duty in the Marines. I was a field artillery officer. And then I did. I had about a 15 month civilianization job working with a diagnostic pathology lab, you know, medical sales, for lack of a better term, which was a pretty, you know, fun place to work. And I wound up linking up with a really interesting headhunter that paired me up with a phenomenal mentored leader who's still a phenomenal mentor and leader to this day. And I went right into what's called external wholesaling of selling investment products inside of financial institutions. And I did that for 17 years before going off on my own as a consultant originally, but then joining up with AGLX at the functionally at the end of last year, but officially at the beginning of this year. So.

Fascinating. Well, yeah, thanks, Mark. And along the way, you somehow discovered uda?

Yeah, I. Well, I would say I rediscovered it. So I first came into contact, what we were told was the Void cycle. When I was in Naval rotc, we had a pretty good Marine officer instructor that was a infantry officer, Desert Storm vet, phenomenal coach and teacher, and he taught amphibious warfare. And there was another class called the Evolution of the Art of War, and it was one or the other that we had to read FMFM1 at the time because the 97 revision hadn't come out yet. So we read FMFM1 and we learned of the Boyd Cycle. And I should have got them out, but behind me I actually have in a box my original notes from that class where I had written down about John Boyd, uda, the Boyd Cycle as observe oriented side enact. And ironically, he was still alive at the time. You know, he passed away two years later. And you know, as you go through, as you go through being a Marine officer, through Naval ROTC and through officer cannon school and through basic school and then just your time out in the fleet, you know, you're, you're inculcated with the concept of, you know, war fighting, you know, the mindset and sort of the practical things. But things like UDA and John Boyd, you're getting it all the time. You're learning sort of how and what, but not really the why. Right. And my rediscovery point came after I had left the Marine Corps and got into the civilian world. And I started wondering why I was able to see things differently than others. You know, like I looked at thing, I just looked at things differently, whether it was a medical sales strategy or whether it was like the market crash of 2008. I just had a different, I had a different frame of reference. And also at that time I had gone back to school to finish my master's degree in economics and I discovered, I guess what's known as the Austrian School of Economics. But getting into the concept of praxeology, it's called, it's another word of saying, another way of saying the study of human action. And as I would read this axiom of praxeology, the axiom of human action, I'm like, you know, this sounds really familiar, like something they taught us in the Marine Corps. Oh yeah, it was that guy, the Boyd Cycle, John Boyd. And then you, you go digging and you realize that there was this massive parallel between what we had learned and what I was learning in, in graduate level economics. But then what I was seeing unfold before my eyes, I Thought that I was in a really good school on multiple fronts to kind of relearn and rediscover this. So I actually went back and pulled all my old war fighting books out and started rereading these things. A couple years later, Franzo Singha's books Science, Strategy and War came out. And I think that the development of my thoughts on UDA started really taking shape beyond what I had been taught in the Marines. That was an important part of it, but I was augmenting it with what I was learning through, through economics. That was kind of the front door to rediscovering Boyd was economics and then working in capital markets. Awesome.

Let me ask a few other questions about that. And I do want to get back to things like Austrian economics and yeah, things, but back to Boyd in the OODA loop. How would you explain, how do you explain the OODA loop to business leaders?

Well, that's a, that's a great question. I don't want to say loaded question because it's, it's going to depend on the audience really. Well, let me, let me back up a step. Would, I would. I knew as the Boyd cycle and just oriented, you know, observe oriented side act always made perfect sense to me. But what I started to understand through the study of economics, that there was something bigger about it, there was something more, more to it. That our, our orientation was really everything. You know, how we think, what we believe, what we've learned, you know, what's our psychological state, what's our emotional state. And once I started to grasp that, I started to realize that when you, when UDA's reduced to just a four step process, that is any number, as a tool, like any number of mental models, that it's limiting. And the deeper I got in the economics, I saw that there was something more going on and, and I, I just felt that like what I had learned about Boyd and what Boyd was saying, it, it, it, there's more to it. And I, you know, I couldn't put my, I couldn't put my finger on it. But to directly answer your question, what I, what I started doing was getting people to understand orientation and that your orientation was everything and that, you know, I would describe orientation as your internal operating system. Just like a, just like a phone or a tablet or iPad or whatever has a, an internal operating system. You as a human have an internal operating system that has to constantly be updated, it constantly has to be revised, it constantly has to be shattered and, and rebuilt in order to stay matched to the, to the world around you. And I started thinking more about orientation. And that OODA loop, or the, the OODA loop as we see it, depicted lots of different ways either simply or, or the way he, he sort of envisioned it before he, before he passed away became more of a map. To me, this is a map of how my orientation functions. Not a, not a linear process. Because as I guess, I guess I got deeper in economics and markets and things, I started understanding complexity more than, more than complicated and realizing that if a copy machine is not working, I could fix it, right? I could call somebody, there's a complicated procedure of checklist they could fix. But, but market sentiment and why prices flow the way they flow and why consumer preferences flow the way they flow, that's more complex. And the deeper I got in the economics too, I realized that that was more complex. So what I started to do with teaching ooda, I'd start with orientation and then I would explain that OODA is sort of how orientation functions. You know, like we observe, we, we, we, we, we cross reference those observations off of our orientation. That's the orienting process. We formulate a hypothesis and we tested a hypothesis. And then the loop is actually the, the, the learning, you know, what we, what we get from that, what we get from that feedback. And I found that when I started doing that, you kind of people, I feel like they started to get it more. Some didn't like, some would say just, I'm just looking for a simple tool. Give me a simple linear tool. That's all I want. Don't you want to know? Nope, just, just, just give it to me. Right? That's harder, that's harder to do. But when, when people take the time and, and start to understand it in a bigger light, I think that they can start to see where the, where the, where the power is. So I thought that the approach that I needed to take, as I continue to learn more, I'm always learning about it. The approach I needed to take was less. I'm not going to teach you a recipe or a formula. I'm going to teach you something that is more axiomatic, that's more applicable in everything that you do. And the only requirement is that you need humans that make and make decisions. So that's, that's kind of, that's kind of a long winded answer to your question. But that's really the how I, how I've augmented my approach. You know, in years past, I would have just said, here's the OODA loop. You observe, you orient, decide you act, you know, and give a, give an example. If I'm gonna, you know, pick up my coffee cup, I'm gonna explain how I observe where it is I orient, I decide, I act. If I miss, I reorient, you know, I, I, I got away from that. The more I started to really think about orientation and, and, and what it is and that OOD is more of a function in the OODA loop sketch, which is, that's John Boyd's term, not mine. He put it in quotes. You know, the OODA loop and quotes sketch. It's just a map. And it's not even an exact map. It's, it's a, it's an illustrative map that helps drive home a concept to get people to start understanding things and then it's on them to, to dig, to dig deeper and, and push farther on it. And when you, the more you learn about Boyd, you realize that UD is actually a very small part of, of his contribution to complexity science and, and decision making and other things. UD is a very small portion. There's so much more that he was, he was working on.

So I agree with you there. And I would also say that, you know, I never met Boyd. I did meet several of his acolytes and I've read everything I can about Boyd and I believe he would agree with you that orient is absolutely the most important part of that decision loop. And it's quite a bit of time on it. Chet Richards spends quite a bit of time on it in his book Certain to Win. It's the absolute critical portion of the decision making loop. If you have just observe and act. Well, that's an insect brain. That is just your, you know, intuition just doing stuff without thought. That orientation is what really makes for optimal decisions that you act on.

So I, I did see your interview of Chet and one of the things that I remember that he said in your interview was that even Boyd's own thinking of UDA evolved that when he started with patterns of conflict, UDO was something like it's just a, you get inside someone's observe, Orient, decide and act cycle, you know, and then you break that cycle. And I think over time that, you know, over the next, say, I guess he started patterns maybe like the late 70s and he passed away in 97. Which by the way, yesterday was the, was the anniversary. I'm sure you saw me post that on LinkedIn. Um, but, you know, he, his own thinking evolved on it. That there is something more comprehensive about it, that it's not simply A. A formulaic recipe that there. That there's more to it. And then orientation, I think, started taking a bigger. A bigger role and a bigger focus and in his teaching and what he was. And what he was talking about.

Yeah. So, you know, you bring up another topic maybe we ought to discuss, and that is myth busting. There's so many myths about Boyd in the OODA loop. One that's very commonly said in the cyber security world is that Boyd was a fighter pilot ace in Korea who developed the OODA loop in Korean conflict. Well, there's multiple things wrong with what I just said.

A lot. Yeah.

No evidence he ever fired a shot in anger in Korea, therefore could not have been an ace.

Right.

He did not develop the OODA loop there. Of course, he wrote later about the better observation in his cockpit, but the OODA loop was not developed until he retired.

Yeah. So. So I'm all for myth busting with Boyd. It's. You know, as someone who's. I've read it. I've read the Quorum biography, I don't know how many times, and the Hammond, you know, I've read them all multiple, multiple, multiple times, and you can never get enough of it, especially when I'm trying to, you know, continue to develop his ideas. But to your point. Yeah, I. It is. It is dismissed that way. And I think that that reduces it a lot of times where people inaccurately say exactly as you just said. Well, he was a fighter ace that developed this, you know, in dogfights. And I think we would be incorrect to say that that didn't inform his thinking over time. But that's not the. That's not really what it. What it was all about. Dog fighting. You know, the. The scope of Boyd's analysis and work was so far beyond fighter aviation, it's ridiculous. And there's even that point in the book where he talks about how John Boyd just let his flight status go. Like, he's like, well, you know, you're gonna lose your flight pay, and you're not going to be able to fly anymore. And he's like, I'm over it. Like, I'm. I'm. He's on to something. He's on to something bigger. And I certainly think that there's parallels. I mean, there's. There's things that we could draw from that experience of because they are important to his work. Right. So. So the, you know, the Korean experience, the Korean War experience, not so much his own, because to your point, there's. There's, you know, the Combat missions he was on was as a wingman, not as a lead. So he never. He never shot down anybody. And to your point, he probably never shot, fired a shot in anger. But his prowess of handling aircraft and in his. In his curious nature about, like, you know, his curiosity and how to improve where he created this thing about this. He created the aerial attack study.

Right.

The first draft. The first draft I saw, he was a first lieutenant. I mean, can you imagine being a first lieutenant, creating the definitive air to air combat study for all NATO air forces as a first lieutenant? That's unheard of. And again, I think over time, I think, like with Boyd, from that point forward to his death, you see an evolution of thinking, you see an evolution of understanding. And as Dave Snowden said on our podcast with him, it would have been interesting to see what he would have thought had he lived another 10 years. You know, he only died. He was 70. And, you know, my. My parents are 72, so I think like, 70 is young. Right. And. And it would have been interesting to see if he had lived another 10 or 15 years, what would have evolved. We know. We know what. Whatever he did would have evolved. And I think that's kind of the work that we're trying to pick up and continue because he intentionally left it open. He intentionally wanted to be developed and thought about just like. Just like he did his own. His own thinking evolved over time. Right.

You know, he did make comments about this and doctrine.

Yeah.

You know, meaning and how did he put it? You know, this is not doctrine. If you think this is doctrine, just burn the whole thing down.

Yeah. If you think, if you think that what I'm telling you and teaching you is to be set in stone as doctrine, take it out and burn it right now. It's worthless us. And, And I think the suggestion there is that the. The world and the universe is volatile and certain complex and ambiguous. In other words, it's always in a state of flux and change. So what worked then might not work going forward. And actually OODA loops, a really good example. So. So Chet Richards has a. A beautiful epistemology of the OODA loop. And it's a graphic that he has on his website, and it shows the starting point of destruction and creation in 1976 forward, like a timeline to his. The year before his death, 1996. So the UDA sketches, we know it, that's when it came out, about a year before he. Before he passed. And then all through that period, Chet has these great illustrations of all of the inputs of Eastern thinking and the Toyota production system and Sun Tzu and guerrilla warfare and all these things, all the scientific inputs too like Heisenberg and, and Godel and Polyani and all these other things. And then at the bottom you see this timeline that UDA is actually evolving to, to get it to where, where we understand it or where we've seen it in, in his last iteration of it. But we can only draw the conclusion that it would have kept evolving because he would have come into contact with more and more, more and more stuff. Punch Rivera, my, my, my business partner and I in the co host of our podcast. You know, we've spent days in the archives at Marine Corps University going through Boyd's handwritten notes and the, the conclusion you can immediately draw was if you're, if you're going to reduce this amazing thinker to one little four step process and that's his only contribution to man. Are you missing the mark? I mean, you're completely missing the mark. I mean he was engaged in so many things and so many disciplines and pulling from so many categories and I think that was a big, that was a, the more I got into that, the more appealing it was to see that he was showing, you know, really universal applicability. You know, it's, it's so much more than what, it's what it's often, I hate to say the word but it's true dismissed as it's often just dismissed. This is little formulaic tactical model that really undersells it.

I agree with you and I also, I love the way he pulls from many different sciences, including the biological sciences. You know, we are in a competitive environment and we are in resource fights and at strategic levels. We need to make sure the nation wins in ways favorable to us. But also as individuals and business leaders, we need to make sure that, that we succeed in this very competitive environment. And he's drawing lessons from biology that just make that so clear. It's just our natural existence.

What was his favorite book? This was. And there's a sticky note in the copy of it at Marine Corps University. It's his dad's favorite book and I think it's his daughter Mary put a pink sticky in it. It's how the Leopard Changed Its Spots by Brian by Brian Goodwin. It's nothing to do with air to air combat, has nothing to do with aerodynamics. It has nothing to do with tactical strategic, has nothing to do with any of that. And I think that augments what you're saying. It adds to what you're Saying this, he pulled from so many places, because universal principles occur universally. You know, whether you're an economist or whether you're a, a rifleman in the Marines or you're a portfolio manager managing billions of dollars, or you're a school teacher or a nurse or a hockey player. Doesn't matter. Universal principles apply universally.

Right. Mark, I want to come back to Boyd in a minute. Would also love to get your views on economics, especially Austrian economics. I've seen you write about that. You've encouraged me and many others to do more reading on this and would love your views and. Well, first, let me tell you, I may be misunderstanding something. So let me tell you my view after reading what you've said.

Okay.

A couple different approaches to economics. There is one theory that economics means how you can shape the economy by moving interest rates and these other big things. And then there's another kind of economics which seems to be grounded in reality, the Austrian economics. How do people make decisions on what to buy and sell, hold and use, really? And then that's a theory of decision making. Am I getting that about right?

I would say yes. Disclosure, I am slightly biased because I gravitate towards the Austrian school. The fundamental. One of the. One of the fundamental. Well, I'll just give you a couple of the fundamental beliefs or principles that all economic phenomena is the result of human decisions and actions. And this is really where I draw the parallels with Boyd. You know, anything you see in the. Via price, market movements or whatever, that's all the result of human decisions and actions. Right? So that's, That's a fundamental point. The other fundamental point is that value is subjective. What's valuable to you is not. May not be valuable to me. You know, we both admire John Boyd, but nobody could make an equation to explain that. Nobody could write an equation to explain why. Why you and I find value in John Boyd and other people completely dismiss them or want nothing to. Want nothing to do with them. There's. There's no way that you can empirically prove that because all value and all preferences are, are subjective. That's, that's another tenet. The other thing is that there's things that are a priori like that are in or deductive. Right. In and of themselves. I don't have to prove the law of gravity, just like I don't have to prove the law of supply and demand. I know. I know it exists. So when you delve into Austrian economics, especially when you had a BA in history like myself, there's no math like there's there's no equations. These are all axiomatic logical principles that, again, that. This is how I kind of rediscovered Boyd. Just because I saw that. I saw it connecting to uda, to your, to your comment about other schools existing. There certainly are. I mean, there's certainly schools of economic thought that believe that they can sit in a room and they can calculate in Cambridge what's right for me in Omaha, Nebraska, or what's right for people in Bangladesh, or. Because these equations say so, and we looked at this data, but they don't. That's impossible. Right. Because the other, the other tenant of, of Austrian Economics, or I can. I can explain why it's called Austrian Economics, but I would just say real economics or classical economics. The other tenant is that. Oh, I was saying about the planning for who. I lost my train of thought there. I have to come back to that one. What was I saying? I was saying that you couldn't be in Cambridge and plan for somebody in Omaha or Bangladesh. Oh, it'll. It'll come back to me. But it was a. It was a sticking point. Believe it.

Okay, but let's talk about Austrian Economics.

You can't presuppose to know something about somebody else. And, you know, everybody's unique. Everybody has unique tastes, everybody has unique preferences. And you can't. You can't force or flow. You can't force. Oh, I know what I was going to say. The economy is organic. Markets are organic because people are organic. Right. We're organisms. We're complex adaptive systems. That's. That. That was the point I was going to make, was that. And because we're organic, we're all trying to, as Boyd would say in Destruction, Creation. We're all trying to improve our capacity for free and independent action on our own terms. We're all unique. Our orientations, it's like a. It's like a fingerprint. There's no way that anybody could plan for somebody else because they could never have the knowledge. They could never have the understanding. You know, FA Hayek, who is one. I draw a lot of parallels with Boyd. And by the way, when we were in the archives last time, we found Hayek articles and, and, and a written reference. Boyd wrote about Hayek. He said that knowledge is tacit and dispersed. You can't. You can't know. There's a famous thing, it's called the pretense of knowledge. You can't assume to know something just because you're in an ivory tower somewhere. And we whiteboard it out. What people in California need or what people in Texas need or what people in, you know, Brazil need. You can't, you can't do that because you have no knowledge of what's going on on the ground. You have, you have no way to calculate how everybody's going to feel about something or how people are going to value one thing over the other. So that's a big part of, of Austrian school economics. Cool.

And who was this guy Mises?

So, so Ludwig von Mises would be the. Yeah. Mises was the teacher to Hayek, who won the Nobel Prize in 1974. Mises was the student of Eugen von Bombavrick and Carl Menger. Carl Menger is considered the, quote, unquote, founder of the Austrian school. And the reason it was called the Austrian School was because all these thinkers came from Guess, guess which country.

Uk.

Exactly. They're all in Austria. And it was actually, it was, it was meant to be a put down. So it was, I believe it was economists in Germany that were. That were putting down this school. They call it the psychological school or the Austrian school. Oh, that's the Austrian view. Whereas I think the Austrians, at least the modern versions of them anyway, have taken the banner and picked it up. But really it's a, it's a flow of classical economics that goes all the way back to Aristotle. You could, you could, you could trace the lineage all the way, all the way back. And really the split with Austrian economics and other classical economics around, say, like Adam Smith, really, the split came on the, on the subjectivity of value, like, so that value can't be calculated. Value is subjective. Right. It's not objective. You value things, I value things. And you can't make a, you can't make a. You can't make an equation on that. So that was a big sort of split, I guess you'd say, between one school of capitalism. I'd say capitalism with a small C versus another.

But I did notice that Mises was quoting Aristotle and Socrates and Heraclitus. Things like they had observed, you know, thousands of years ago that everything is ceaseless flux and continuing change. Sounded very Boyd like.

Yes. Yeah. And that's, that's exactly. And that's, that's what really sort of woke me up to the reality that my pursuit of economics was better served by understanding Boyd better and, and vice versa. My understanding Boyd better was augmented by my, my, my pursuit of. My pursuit of economics to the point where, you know, I have these conversations. They're like, I've never heard of FA Hayek or I've never read these texts before, and it really woke me up. I had no idea. And there might be something to that, but those, those, those classical, those classical definitions of things, they're, they're grounded. I think they're grounded in reality. And they, and they seek to deal with the world for what it, what it actually is. Where, you know, market is a process, not a place. People are organic. We're not some kind of. We're not numbers that can just be reduced by equations. You know, I remember taking graduate level economics the first time, and they show indifference curves. Like, it's like this is actually a thing. Like you're comparing the indifference curves. I think it was between George W. Bush and Oprah Winfrey. And I'm like, what if you could even prove that? What would that prove? Like, what does that mean to buyers and sellers in any markets? I mean, it was a funny test question because I guess he was president at the time or whatever. But, like, what does it mean? It doesn't mean anything. That doesn't occur in reality, I guess. But supply and demand does occur in reality. I would bet that the things that you hold dear are less common than the things that you don't value. Right? I mean, those sorts of things actually do occur in reality. And I think that that's sort of the, the starting point of a lot of the, of the thought. So, you know, and there's, I guess my own thinking on it has evolved over the years. You know, the, the, the work that we've been doing lately. My. With my co author Hunter Hastings, who's a Cambridge economist, and he had an interesting discovery process. It's more this orientation and understanding. Boyd, informs entrepreneurial theory and it makes you better at it. Why? Because we understand how decisions are made and how, how value is subjective and it all, it all lines up and we understand intent, you know, and intent comes right out of MCDP 1. What's our intent? What are we trying to accomplish? You know, whether we're attacking a position or we're, you know, creating value for a customer, it's the same, same concept.

Well, all of this feeds into our ability to better orient. That's a fact. And now. Yes. So let me segue into another thing that I think feeds our ability to orient, and that is the environment we work in. And many of us use the acronym vuca. I've seen you explain it quite well. And you know, business journals write about the VUCA world, but I really don't see a lot of business leaders talking about it. As if they really understand. And I wanted to ask you, what do you mean when you say vuca?

When I say vuca, I'm. I'm affirming what Heraclitus said, that, that everything is in a state of flux. Everything is in a state of constant becoming and change. And being a student of complexity science, which never stops, by the way, that's a constant learning exercise. You have to understand that linear solutions don't work in a world that's characterized by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity. They don't. There's no recipe for that. There's. There. You can't have recipes and formulas for a world that's constantly moving, constantly changing, that's unpredictable. And what I find is that a lot of people don't. Either they don't accept it or they still continue to focus on reductionist formulas and recipes dealing with, with linear solutions in a, in a nonlinear world, you know, looking for symmetries in an asymmetric world. So less, less uda. Right. Less understanding of, of Boyd or less understanding of things like, say, mission command, or more understanding or more emphasis on if this, then do this, do that, hit these numbers. So, and, and there's a. I think that's where the disconnect emerges.

Yeah, but you have made it clear it is possible to lead in a Vuca world. Do you have any tips for us on that?

Yeah, because, you know, my, my favorite example is surfing. You know, the, the ocean is the best example. It's always in a state of change. It's always in a state of flux. It's never the same twice. Yet I can still learn to surf and I can still learn the procedures and the, and the, and the things that I need to do to be a better surfer. And I can still do the research on the area that I'm going to be surfing in. I can still do the physical training that I need to do, and I can harness that Vuca as an advantage to me versus something that's going to inhibit me. And that's really the message. A lot of the stuff that I put out is like, you can't get rid of this. You can't eradicate it. In so many things that are done in business and leadership is to try to eradicate it as if you could make it go away. You can't. The Austrians would say, you know, the pursuit, equilibrium is impossible. Like there is no, there is no equilibrium state. Stop. Stop trying for it. You can't. Even if you could achieve, would be achieved and you wouldn't even know it, because there's no way to know. Oh, this is the equilibrium moment now. What. It'd be gone in a. Gone in an instant. So, you know, by learning, by learning, you know, by learning the various things that we talk about with business leaders, that empowers leaders and teams to thrive in Vuca as an advantage, whereas if I can't, it's going to be a massive disadvantage. And it's something that I would coach a. I would coach a company or coach a leader. Look for this in your competitors. Do they see Vuca as something they can get rid of, or they see as something as they're. They're trying to. To surf, you know, and if they're trying to. Trying to get rid of it using linear formulas, that's a, That's a critical vulnerability for them.

Hey, Mark, I have several other questions for you, but before getting there, I thought I should mention your podcast, the no Way out podcast. I'm going to link to that in our show notes. Everybody's going to know how to download that. But what's the purpose of the no Way Out Podcast?

The purpose of the no Way out podcast is to advance and develop the theories of, of John Boyd and, and help others improve their capacity for free and independent action. That's the, that's the official answer and the, the personal answer. It's, It's a living memorial to him. You know, it's. It's. It's to create more awareness about John Boyd and his ideas. As you know, he. He had very little credit in his own lifetime for his massive contributions. And, you know, it's. It's really honoring him, his legacy and pursuing his work and, and developing his work is really what, what drives me. That's the, that's the win for me. You know, so we, Ponch and I connected years ago, talking about John Boyd and UDA and realizing, well, we really see it in a similar light on how we view Boyd's contributions and how we view Boyd's work as something that can help literally everybody, no matter what they're doing. And you can tell by the guests that we've had up to date that we pull from everywhere, right? And we're. And we're going to continue to do that. We're going to be pulling from all disciplines, you know, because the only place where voyage theories work is where you have humans that make decisions.

Right?

The, the intent of no Way out was, you know, originally, we're like, well, let's start a podcast. Yeah, start a podcast about our ideas. You know, it should be about John Boyd. Yeah. What should we call it? Well, actually, no Way Out. We. We got that idea. That was his working title for his conceptual spiral brief. And when we were in the archives back in December, we found this legal pad brief because he hand wrote everything and somebody typed for him. I don't think he did his own typing, but he hand wrote literally everything. And he would handwrite it multiple iterations. So there's probably four or five different versions of just this one brief. No Way Out. And if you listen to the podcast, we actually, we quote from it. So we have voice recordings of him saying the, the. The points from that. From that brief. But I. I pulled it out of. We're. Ponch and I were each tearing up. Not tearing, but like tearing through or not ripping. You know what I mean? We're. We're going through all these papers of Boyd, and I pull out no Way out, and I go, boy, that's a great name for a podcast. What do you think? And Ponch is like, oh, yeah, that's a. So we go through it, we share it and talk about it, and that's how it. That's how it came to be. We. We thought it should be called no Way out, because what Boyd was saying is that there's no way out of the requirement of reorienting, because you can't eradicate entropy, you can't eradicate mathematical imprecision, you can't. You can't eradicate uncertainty and other things. So that's the. I don't know. I thought that that was a really good summation of, of Boyd's work beyond what he's most commonly affiliated with, you know, UDA or Patterns of Conflict.

So in the way you describe this and the way you've described Boyd, I know you're not going to stay fixated on one concept. This is not about the OODA loop. It's not about the EM study. It's about Boyd in a big way. So you're going to hit any concept relevant to decision making, right?

Yeah. I mean, so decision making and flow, Right? So the flow system. Brian Ponch is a co author of the Flow System with Nigel Thurlow and Dr. John Turner, and it's built on the foundation of the Toyota production system, which was something that Boyd studied quite a bit. That's one thing that's apparent in his archives is his work and study on Toyota production system. Japanese manufacturing is fascinating, but there's three pillars of it. Complexity Thinking, Distributed leadership, and Teaming Science and uda. Is a big part of that. Because think about it, everybody's making decisions and actions, but when we. When we approach it that way, I mean, that. That, that becomes part of one's orientation. But yeah, it informs a lot more than just decision making. There's debrief and red teaming and just basic leadership. Leadership is a quality that everybody has and that everybody can work on versus leadership, the title. Working in high performing teams and how to build high performing teams. And it's a lot of stuff that we learned is in. In the military, but the principles are universal. So that's the cool thing about it. When you. When you strip out the principles and you see universal principles like, like UDA and other things, and you can show people that that's. That's a big win. And then I think we're doing. I think we're doing good work and with that, and I think we're living up to what Boyd left open for us to figure out. So.

Mark, I really appreciate this. There's so much we didn't cover and I think would love to have you back one day and keep talking about these. I do have a final question for you, and that is.

Yeah.

How do you personally keep sharpening the saw? How do you keep fresh on all this stuff?

Hmm. Wow. Great question. So a lot of. A lot. So one is. You can tell this isn't. Well, I demonstrated with the. The one book. This is not a backdrop. These are. These are real books. I read a lot. I intention. What. What am I reading right now? Yeah, right now I was actually just reading Austrian Economics as we're. We're sprucing up a paper that we're presenting next week. So. The Theory of Dynamic Efficiency by Jesus Huerta de Soto is one of the best economic explanations of orientation. And I wish. I wish Boyd could have read it. And we're on a mission to get more economists reading Boyd or understanding Boyd. So we have another crack at it next weekend. We did it last year, and this is sort of a part, a 2.0 version to really hammer on orientation and how it ties with intent and how it informs entrepreneurial judgment. That's. That's our big. That's our big mission. But the Theory of Dynamic efficiency, it. It's broken into a couple of parts, but if you just read the first and the second chapter, I think it'll jump off the page how it aligns with what Boyd was saying. But then in the second chapter, it. It draws pretty clear distinctions of what you brought up earlier. You know, sort of the Austrian way of economics versus the neoclassical way of economics. There's a great graphic and you know, for someone that didn't want to read the whole book, just go to Table 2.1 and, and read it and you'd say, wow, that's interesting. Those are really different. Oh, this does really tie with, with John Boyd, what he's thinking. So drawing those parallels. That's been my, my reading and sort of, sort of mission of late. I don't know. I think also too being on a team like, like AGLX and having, having we challenge each other, you know, we, we try not to get stagnant in our thinking and, and always keep, keep, you know, be open to the possibility I could be wrong. You know. So like that, that kind of debrief and feedback is very important. Two of the partners are naval naval aviators, F14 Tomcat aviators. So, so debrief is a big part of, of that culture and it helps inform, you know, what we do and how we interact with each other. I do listen to a fair bit of podcasts. I like, like yours.

Oh, thank you.

I think you've got a great one. It's always good to be interacting with others that are on, on a similar path and you know, from, from different backgrounds too. So you know, you're coming at it from a different way than maybe I did. But we're all sort of focused and directed on the same, on the same target. I do like Joe Rogan. I do, I do listen to Joe Rogan. I, I, I like the Spotify. Now that he's on Spotify, you can actually increase the speed. Yeah. More than you could on itunes. So you can, you know, instead of a three hour podcast, I guess it's more of an hour, an hour and a half. I guess the other thing I did is sharpen the sword. And this is somebody I recorded with yesterday, Starting Strength. So I do, I do barbell training and distance swimming. So my, my distance swimming has just become, I would call it like autodidactic swimming. I just get in the pool and I swim for, I don't know, depending on the day, a mile or two and just keep going and going. It's, it's meditative for me. Every year I do a virtual marathon. It's 32 miles. Last year I did it in seven sessions. So this, this year is going to be harder to, harder to break, but I'm up for the challenge. And then the barbell training that I do is a program called Starting Strength, which the conversation I was telling you we're having. Yesterday was really interesting in the quorum book. I know that Boyd lifted weights and I would think that he would like starting strength because it is a, it's an assumption challenging approach to fitness using five barbell movements that work every, every muscle in your body. You do three times a week. A lot of, a lot of veterans are involved in it. A lot of. There's, there's one I can think of. He's a Marine that has an affiliated gym outside of, outside of Camp Pendleton called the Strength Company, which is interesting, but I like. So that's another. I guess that's kind of the. I gave you the intellectual answer and the, and the physical answer. And I, I have four teenagers that are all athletes, so I have a college swimmer and then I have three other swimmers. Two in high school, one in eighth grade. My eighth grader also plays lacrosse and field hockey. So there's not really an excuse to be sedentary or stagnant here. You have to keep moving in this, in this household. Yeah.

It should also be a good opportunity while you're driving them everywhere to listen to your favorite podcasts and.

Well, it's fun. Yeah. And I could tell you what you asked me earlier about how do you teach business leaders OODA loop? Any one of my children could stand up in front of a group and explain UDA and I've had, you know, executives, PhDs, whoever they were, tell me it's too complex or too complicated or we, you know, you know, it's not, it's beyond us or whatever. And I say if you like, I could bring my 12 year old daughter in now, she's 14 now. But I could, I could bring her in and she could explain how UDO applies to field hockey and she'd do a really good job. And all you have to do is take the principles that she's talking about and apply it to whatever the, whatever the business is. But I find that, you know, the, it's, it's. The things around UD are pretty. Are that simple. I could explain it to. It to a kid and they could, they could give me a really good explanation, so. And they also use it against you too. You know, they say, dad, your OODA loop's not so, not so fast today. Oh, dad, you should reorient. You know, that was a so.

Well, Mark, thanks for the time today. Really appreciate it.

No, thanks for having me. Thanks for the great questions and thanks for everything you're doing to keep advancing the learning.

Well, it's our pleasure.

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