Episode 31: Chet Richards on John Boyd and applying OODA principles to the business world

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Hello, this is Matt DeVoe, 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 Void biography. The second being Chet's book on applying the OODA loop to business. 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 principles of OODA to having benefit 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. I finished my mathematics work in 1971. I had a deferred commission from Army ROTC. Turns out by that time the army basically didn't want anybody. They were withdrawing very rapidly from Vietnam. And 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 officer basic training and in the meantime scrambling around trying to find a permanent position. It was in a period of a little of a recession with the aerospace business again because the 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 through several shops in osd, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and then at the end of that period, 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. At that time it was still called the Office of Systems Analysis in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. The first programs that I got handled to do anything about was a thing called the Lightweight Fighter. I also had the F15, but it was pretty mature by then. And same with the F14, A10. All those programs were well along. But the lightweight fighter was interesting because it was a technology demonstrator at the, 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 worked in OSD were very interested in having a lightweight complement to the F15. Well, and that would have been then in mid-1970 to about September of 1972. About a year later, Tom Christie took over the shop. Came up 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 hairy looking diagrams showing where if you took for example, an F4 and a MiG21, 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 in red. And by areas, I mean things like airspeed, altitude. So it's said, okay, if you're at, you know, you're 20,000ft and you're doing Mach 0.7 in that range, maybe a MiG21 would have an advantage. And the guy who had come up with all this stuff was this guy named John Boyd. I said, well, this is really interesting, you know, but like at this point, who cares? These airplanes have already been, already been either put into production 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 I actually got to meet him in 1973 just before he went off to command an Air Force base in Thailand in kp. And however, Tom 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, who was kind of unique in that he wasn't a politician. He had been a RAND analyst and very, very quantitative oriented guy. And Tom Christie already knew him from other things. So basically Tom and Secretary Schlesinger worked this kind of deal to put some money in the budget to fund to take the lightweight fighter into production. And of course the Air Force screaming and yelling, John Boyd came back from Thailand and got heavily involved into this. And that's where I began to work with them a little bit. My one Claim to fame was the budget document that actually put the light, the lightweight fighter. At that time, they hadn't chosen between the YF16 and the YF17 was one line and a thing called the PD program budget decision, a memorandum. And I wrote that one line, my claim to fame. I left Pentagon shortly after that and went on to do other things. This was in 1974. John retired in 1975 and started to work for Tom Christie as a consultant. I think he actually had the old office that I had left to. Before I. Before I did leave. 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 1980, John had been retired and he was hard at work on this thing called. He called Patterns of Conflict. That was the first time I saw the OODA Loop. I guess I should do a little bit of aggression here. I did a little editing for John, a little reviewing John for his paper Destruction and Creation. John wanted a mathematician who was familiar with things, particularly with Godel's theorem and all graduate level mathematicians are familiar with it. And he also wanted a mathematician who would work for free because he didn't have any money to pay for them. So I said, all right, John. So you know, what he wrote about Goller's Theorem was right. But the way he was using it was, so we say, very non mathematical. And there's a lot of discussion that has gone on. We can talk about that later on if you want, about whether or not his use of the Goehl's Theorem, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and the second law of Thermodynamics were analogies? Or was he somehow trying to apply these principles from theoretical mathematics and physics to the actual physical world that we, we inhabit? The answer, by the way, is the. Is the second question. 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 completed about four years of work on Patterns of Conflict. It was 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 on it. And at that point important to point out that the way he originally used the term OODA Loop was not by itself, but he used the phrase operating inside the OODA loop. And he used it that way for a long time. In fact, with the exception of one use in his discourse in the section called A Strategic Game of Question Mark and Question mark, he always used it as operating inside the OODA loop. And he never defined what he meant by operate inside the OODA 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 OODA loop means and then give a definition. I guess he just took it as prima facie self evident. It's some kind of a, as an axiom that to operate inside the OODA loop just sort of meant you were somehow inside the other guy's head. And in fact, one of the way he's described it once they said, well, think about it. It's like as 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 of the stuff that they're doing inside their headquarters, then you could run, you know, you could run around the other end and figure out things to do about it before he actually was able to carry them out. And he never could 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 could do exactly that. And another way to think about operating inside the utilities, well, it's like a cat playing with mouse. Wherever the mouse gets ready to go, the cat's there first. And so, and what it does is eventually it drives the mouse crazy. 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 OODA loop at this point. Anyway, that was 1980 or so. I went off and I went to Saudi Arabia for Northrop and came back and did some consulting. Eventually ended up back in the Washington D.C. area in the early 1980s and got into this, this, this chain where he would call late at night and start and review 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 or you may not have a stack of transparencies with you. You had a view graph projector and you sit there and you flip view graphs or somebody flipped them for you. So anytime he wanted to make a change, somebody he didn't type, somebody had to sit down and retype his charts for him, run them through the view graph machine again and add them to the deck. Even given. With all of that, the slide 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 viewers have seen. He sort of, as we said, marked finished on patterns of conflict in 1986. And then he did two little satellite briefings. If you sort of think of the patterns of conflict as being of the Milky Way, these would be two little satellite galaxies on the side, sort of like the melodgenic clouds. And the first one came out was 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 it was Strategic Game where he actually talks about the OODA Loop per se. The two briefings are kind of similar, and to be honest with you, I frequently confuse what's in them. Organic Design is all about orientation, and Strategic Game is basically about internal and external, how to operate centrally in the external world while forcing your opponent to look inward. Whereas, as he had pointed out in his first paper, once he looks inward, then things like Godel, 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 than outside. And anybody that's worked for a large corporation that's been around for a long time has definitely seen that process in action. After a while, conforming with internal regulations and even mores becomes much more important than what you actually accomplished out in the external world. And so he got those were finished in 1987. And then he sort of took a little break. Then in the early 1990s, he produced this started to work, produced charts for briefing that he later called Conceptual Spiral. It's without a doubt the least read 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 viewpoint. But 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 loop. 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, 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 through this looping process. He says that you, of course, produce 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 mental models, which you had first described back in Destruction 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 version of the gadget is going to fix the problems I saw in the last version of the gadget. And then you try it and you learn from the. Learn from the results. And so what you are able to do, he said, all right, that's fine. But how does that apply to strategy? What it applies to 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 your opponent can't handle. And there's conceptually two buckets it falls into. You can take the gadget you already have now, or you can take the skill set you already have now, and 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 impression of the blitzkrieg. And on one side it's got one jagged arrow. 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 conceptual spiral is. Is essentially about how you generate novelty. And it covers both new ways to use what you already have, but also coming up with something that you didn't have before. But it, oddly enough, doesn't include how you actually use it. If you've. 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 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, where he talked about the need for generating. 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 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. 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 it's 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 Aspira. And you meld those two together at orientation. What you get is the OODA loop. OODA loop, which you put in quotes. And it's really very, very, very clever because it takes those two processes, the using what you already have and generating that kind of novelty, coming up with new ways and puts them all together in the same diagram so you can see them all working at the same time. So anyway, that's kind of my introductory loop thing to where the OODA loop came from. And I got involved pretty heavily in Conceptual spiral. You know, every chart, you know, write this down, write this down. Well, what do you think about this. Write this down. Write this down. Yeah, that's really neat, John. Well, write this down. Well, what do you think about that? It went on for hours. And then the very, very last thing he did in 1996, he actually started in 1995, was I got this envelope from him. And I don't remember whether it was a. I think it was probably just a piece of paper with a sketch on it. But we always like to say it was a. It was a napkin from the bar at the Fort Myer Oak Club where every Wednesday evening 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 had been dashed, some of them 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? It's a function of a bunch of things. Some of it may be a genetic in the sense that, 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, the analyses that we do, in other words, 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 actions. The idea here being that your action is the action that your orientation is predicting is the one that you want to do, which he defined in Patterns of Conflict as generally being in a conflict situation. One is that the least expected and basically anything else that you think affects your ability to make mental models and assess the result that goes into that orientation block. And we had a lot of stuff back of which ones should be solid, which ones should be double headed arrow, single headed arrow. Finally he just said, make everything solid in a single headed arrow and leave it at that. See, back then the question was, for example, can you change your genetic makeup? And there had been this thing you remember back in the Soviet Union in the 30s, this scientist Lysenko, who said, you can make the new Soviet man by training and after a while it'll get into their DNA. We know about DNA then. But it would get into their genes and voila, new Soviet man would. And of course, Stalin loved that. Wildly discredited in the, in the West. So Boyd didn't want to act like he was a Lysenkoist by any means. On the other hand, ideas like neuroplasticity were beginning to come out that the brain can actually change itself as a result of what's going on in its surroundings. And then long after Boyd died, the field 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 experiences. And some of that can be inherited, oddly enough. So life Sinkhole may have 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 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. He had, he had 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. First, I want to mention 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 rereading your book and thinking through Patterns of conflict, now every time I read about a great general, I think, aha, that general was using the principles of the OODA loop and maneuver warfare and out thinking the adversary.

He was using him, wasn't using him, in which case he lost. Yes, that's right. That's right, yeah. If they're not using them, it's. First thing that happens is they become predictable. And which case then if you are, if you're actually using the OODA 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 the OODA loop's all about.

And I wanted to ask one question here, and the way I understand your book and way I understand the OODA loop is 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 he says 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 and 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 Apple. When we started with the ipod, Microsoft was always two generations behind. And it's a fairly interesting thing. They did a interview with Bill Gates back during this period, I'm thinking maybe 2003, 2004, and they asked him, they said, well, do you actually have an ipod? And he said, no, no, I'm not an ipod user. And I said, rather, Microsoft is finished. If the CEO, the guy who's making these decisions, doesn't have 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 a new. What did they call it, that it was a zoom, I think, wasn't it? The Microsoft came out, the reviews were all the same. This would have been really good two years ago. And so 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, you know, it didn't match his predictions of what its effect on the marketplace. The classic case, perhaps being the Mac Pro Q, he predicted millions of copies and I think they sold 190,000 something numbers. So, okay, after 18 months it was gone. You know, he learned his lesson. But yeah, absolutely, 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 key to the OODA 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. 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 passing, 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 coup de grace. But you never lose the initiative. You see, the other person's not falling into your trap. You immediately pull your ambush back and do something else. And that's something that he got from the Germans. It 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, Jet.

Oh, yeah, absolutely. In fact, that's one of those areas where war and business kind of intersect. They are so different endeavors that I tell people you'll go to. Very, very strong links not to include them. 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, but that's okay. An acceptable outcome for a lot of people in business is to have your business bought up at an outrageous price by somebody else. Whereas that's generally not an acceptable outcome in. So you see. But the idea of keeping the initiative, I think, is. Runs through all implementation. Boyd's work. Business as well as war.

Can you step us through? Was there an aha moment when you recognized that there was this intersection between business and what was happening?

Odd that you should mention that there was. 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, they took about three weeks off for Christmas vacation because it's basically a big factory, and 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 Absolute. And at that time, about three or four years earlier, it had been the Big Book. It put Tom Peters on the. You know, on the map. He'd been a Stanford professor, you know, at that, when he. When he wrote the book. And I believe he was a McKinsey consultant before that, I believe he got his PhD, I think, from Stanford. He'd been a naval officer anyway. And he and his partner, whose name conveniently forget at the moment, a Waterman, I believe it was, wrote this book 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 on Thriving on Chaos Excellence. 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 parc a classic, classic case. All this neat stuff came out of parc and it made billions and trillions of dollars for companies, not one penny for Xerox, Apple being probably the most, the best known. 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 figure it out. And 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. 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 out of point. John would love this. So I sit down and I wrote Tom Peters a message, a note actually had the secretary type it up. When I got back on Lockheed stationery and said this is really good stuff. It reminds me a lot about this dumb, this, this Colonel John Boyd. And Peters wrote right back and he said, you know, you're right. I read about Boyd in James Fallows book National Defense came out in 1982 and about Boyd's ideas, you know, for, again for taking the initiative and for his fighter opera operating inside the OODA 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 yeah, that was, 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 met at the coffee shop. I think it was in the Crystal Gateway or It might have been the high Crystal City. Unfortunately, for a variety of reasons, I wasn't able to go. But yeah, it was that moment I was reading Thriving 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 GS, put power to, you know, 95%, 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 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 Driving on Chaos had a little bit too much of a checklist mentality. I disagree strongly. I thought that 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 checklist mentality. Anyway, 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. 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 OODA loop at a very high strategic level within the company. And for a long time Tom and I wrote back and forth. I still have enormous respect for him, by the way. I think of the practicing business strategists today, he's certainly the one that's closest to Boyd's philosophy. Present company, except it, of course. And even in the stuff that he's writing today, I think that the Underlying philosophy is still, was still there. So that was kind of my aha moment when I was reading Certain to Win, not certain to what I was reading, I was thinking, I thought that was that book, by the way. By the way did give me the idea of writing Certain to Win 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 War Chaos in Business. And every time I do a new chart, I'd send a new copy of a briefing. Boyd, Boyd would write back, call back, phone would ring, hey, can you talk? Or no, he would say, hey, can you call me back? Because he didn't want to pay for long distance cars. Remember back then you had to pay for long distance. So I'd hang up and I had the Lockheed a telephone system at that time I could do that, 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 them around and he'd send me feedback on them. I'd do another new copy of the briefing and finally about 1988 or so 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. He said, the audience you're trying to reach now is not a decision maker 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 in business and 16 years later it's all the light of day. But yeah, and it was really Boyd kind of encouraging me along. He read the stuff on the Toyota production system then and they agreed that again the underlying principles of Toyota production system are basically the same that he was going up, particularly the climate, the organizational climate and which he once called the blitzkrieg climate and then later we used the acronym of German words ebfest, 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 underly underlying set of principles. And there have been A couple others since then that I've been able to find, but I found very, very few people, I don't know what your experience is, can just sit there and, quote, implement Boyd by itself and come up with an implementation. Again, maneuver warfare being one total production system, which of course greatly predates Boyd by whole generation, but it's still an implementation of the same principle. And there have 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 things that work for them. And so I said, when you can write your own doctrine manual on this, like The Marine Corps MCDP1, at that point, then you know it well enough to. To begin thinking about how to actually. How to actually use those. People will use the OODA loop methodology, but they won't sit down explicitly and say, okay, and I've got to have 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. Ovid is intuitive and implicit. So anyway, long way around the thing, but that's. That's how it all started. It was a search of, I'm sorry, thriving on. Not in terms of thriving on chaos and then Toyota production system, while I was also looking at Voyage stuff at the same time and seeing the same deep underlying principles implemented in completely different ways. So I hope that long discourse answered some of your questions.

Yeah, no, that was excellent. The one thing I want to touch upon, and obviously we could keep you here for days, probably. There's a tremendous amount of informal collaboration that seems to take place. I noted in the Boyd biography you were tasked with finding the happy hour spot.

That was one big contribution to the boy. Yes.

I need to know, was it whiskey or beer? You know, what was the happy hour?

Whatever you wanted. As far as I know, nobody made. We call them boilermakers, where you take the whiskey and drop it down and.

Drop it in the beer.

No, we were looking and we tried several. We decided we couldn't use a commercial establishment for several reasons. One of them was the conversations, while they didn't get classified, certainly weren't things we wanted people to overhear. And although people could, at that time, Fort Myers was totally open post. Anybody could just drive on, go to the old club, walk downstairs to the old guard room and join in. But newcomers to the group kind of, you know, people started asking questions. You're in A kind of a good natured way feel you're out while you're there. And considering that Boyd was giving out copies of his, of his presentations to anybody that would take them at that point, didn't seem to be too much reason for, for worrying about security there. We did have people though, with very high security clearance. A guy like Tom Christie, who at that time was deputy under Secretary of Defense for something or acquisition and something or another, essentially had every clearance in the book. But also getting Tom to talk about anything at all was a real challenge. And 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 going back and forth with Al Price at that time. Air Force colonel, went on to command the flight dynamics lab and then overnight to find his own company. He and I sort of, sort of bounced ourselves 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 what we really need happy hours right in the middle of the week on hump day on Wednesday. So Al and I and a couple other people from that shop, names will go unmentioned for a variety of reasons. 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, 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 had around the table, you know, you had all these conversations going. And then at that time, 73, Boyd didn't really join us till 75, maybe late. 74 he got back from Thailand. 75 when he retired from the, from the air Force, started working as a consultant for Tom. And at that point he kind of, even though it was a circular table, somehow he was at the head of it. Everybody helped him Sort of like King Arthur in the round table. May have been a round table, but you knew who King Arthur was. Same general principle. And conversations would range all over the place. They were really, really fun to be in. And then. And throughout the week, Boyd, typically it was Boyd would call people on his little list and bounce ideas off them 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 to figure out why models didn't always predict the outcome of air to air combat. We had all these air to air 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 fastest rate of change survives. Well, an air to air combat survives and wins are basically the same thing. The loser 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 within 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 little briefing for NASA on that being really what it was. And to this day I have no idea what NASA thought of that, you know, being basically a bunch of engineers. And what they wanted to know was, well, are we not. Are we not modeling, you know, aileron roll fast enough, you know, things like. Things like that. And it was that reason that also explained, by the way, why the F16 got. Got picked as the winner of the lightweight fighter competition and not the YF17. But that story is told pretty well in Coram's book on Boyd. So I won't 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're all in that same little office there in the TAC air shop that time. He was the director of Tactical Air. The office had changed its name to Program Analysis and Evaluation. And then he moved up to be the head of General Purpose programs shortly after that. And so he had not only attack air, but he also had the Tactical army, you know, Navy, Marine Corps kind of, as opposed to the 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 consultants to the Pentagon, 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 talk about, you know, 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 helping this stuff develop is that anytime, 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 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 the 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 them about their experiences, about what it actually felt like and what it felt like to have control and lose control and how they actually exercised leadership. And he also, because of that position there in osd, he was able to interview several of the German generals. Battelle had a contract at that time and Pierre Spray did the, who's fluent in German, did the translation. So he was able to take a lot of these ideas and actually talk to guys like Hermann Balch, who was one of the Germans, regarded him as perhaps next only to Romilly's being their greatest exponent of maneuver warfare. And von Mellenthen, who wrote the book Panzer Battle. The Bott's chief of staff for a while and 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 the synthesis beginning to form. Ideas could be tested and things could be changed. And this went on for about 20, 10 years while patterns of Conflict was being written. So if you compare that to a PhD dissertation takes two or three maybe if you're slow, you know, three years, one or two. Due to writing all this up, this was 10 years, intense study, almost 24, seven with all of the resources in the American Defense Department, you know, available to you. Since he was a consultant to Tom, he kept his security clearance and he kept access to basically where he wanted to go. And Tom course open doors for him if you needed to. It was the kind of thing that basically can never be, never be repeated. Yeah, very, very interesting question.

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. We have this pandemic 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 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. You mentioned initiative, you mentioned agility, you mentioned 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 or you're certain to lose instead of being certain to win.

That's exactly right.

So 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. I think the point of interest for me there would be 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. So if you put it in Void's terms, what he's really talking about is it sort of designates a Sver punk. But vast, vast majority of the time, if you're doing Boyd right, most people should know what to do most of the time. So then the question becomes, then what is this CEO's job? And that's where I think if you, if you take it the next step Du Bois did and put it in this leadership and appreciation. And again, I think most, in fact, maybe all real successful CEOs have been successful over a period of time. Could always be lucky once, even a blind hog. Da da da da da da. But what happens is if you're not, then the people within your organization that are really good will even go somewhere else to 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. Or again, his Boyd used to ask about, well, you know, General Motors didn't operate according to this and they were successful for so many years and he had Two answers to that. Well, where are they now? And the second is who is the competition? He said it's not necessary that you, that you exercise his, his philosophy perfectly. He said you just have to be better than your competition. He said that's really the mark of a maneuver based strategy as opposed to what he called a false strategy. False strategy is it doesn't work. People say, aha, 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, Bibsky 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, he came out of the military. There's not enough time to make decisions for everybody in your 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 Itaichi Ono, one of the creators said 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, maybe exaggerate 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 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 people are pulling the and on to stop the line and what happens when they do. And the level of general chatter and the level of flow. You can tell if things aren't flowing. Once you understand, you can, you develop this intuitive feel and then that's what you want to use. So that's what I think I would entail. A really good CEO has an intuitive feel for how well his organization is doing. And let me switch over to make it a little less gender specific. Their ability to exercise that feel and influence their organization is really what we pay them to do. Because the only people that can do it at 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 properly. Once it's working properly, then the organization does the work of the Organization really, really, really good CEOs do that. And this is not to say that 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 this bunch of clowns in the first place, you know, maybe kind of help, you know, help them work through their problem. So that would be my advice. And it's all about orientation. Orientation that 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 of the future, then things happen the way they're supposed to happen. And so when I really talk to CEO, I said, in an office environment, it may not be possible to close your eyes and sense how it's going to work, but you can sense how it's working from other things, from people's attitude in the staff meetings. Are they sitting around water coolers talking to each other? Is the building emptied out at 501pm 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 what you're doing, people can't fool you because you live the organization. You either created it or you came up through it. You came up with similar organizations, and you can tell when your organization, as a finely tuned machine, is not working right. And 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 supposed to? Which is one reason, by the way, that quotas drove Boyd absolutely bananas, because there's so many ways to meet quotas. With a lousy functioning machine, 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. You made a guess that it's just not going to happen. But the question is, how well did your organization do in trying to do that? Do we need to help them work better, or we need to shift the share pump a little kind of things. These are things only CEOs can. Only the CEO can really go to the shareholders and 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 answered, good context. That's how I see it.

Definitely great context. I know we're coming up a few more minutes before we're booked on the hour, a kind of a novelty question. John Boyd is relatively well studied. Multiple books being written. Is there a nugget of truth about him or an insight about him that is not well known out there in the public domain?

Coram put so much into his book, there was hardly anything left. And by the way, as an aside, I was living in Atlanta and actually working for his wife. He was writing the book. And he and my wife, who knew John also and Robert, would get together at the Restaurant at the DeKalb County Airport. DeKalb. Peachtree Airport, by the way. Cora, I don't think you mentioned that book or not, but he's licensed commercial instrument pilot. And so even though he was ever a fighter pilot, he knows aviation pretty well. So we would get together, we'd meet there, and he'd exchange copies of the manuscript and we'd look at. 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 in that book was checked and double checked, and anytime any one of Boyd's people told him something, he would try and find another one of Boyd's people to, you know, to verify 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, gruff fighter pilot, Anthony Quinn type, you know, exterior that he, that he put out, A Tywin Lannister type exterior, he would talk with the kids, hey, how you doing? How you doing in school? Well, how you doing in math? Well, tell me what math? What are you doing in math now? What are you taking in your science classes? And he would sit and talk with them until either I became available or at some point he'd say, oh, well, ask your dad to give me a call back. And so my kids, in some sense, probably knew boy at least as well as I had. And even though, you know, they both eventually did end up in scientific type type stuff, my oldest daughter being in public health and being a biologist and the youngest one being an actuary and now doing app development, so. And both, you know, so in that sense I thought was kind of funny, is that he really got along very, very well with the kids. Something I would not. Would not have predicted ordinarily. So I can pass that along to you. He could be very aggressive in debates, but he never took it personally. As long as you could make. As long as you could hold up your end of the argument, he didn't mind talking with you. And every now and then he'd come out and say, you know, tiger, that was a good one. You got inside my own Luke. Tiger didn't happen very often, but every now and then, which he took as a big kudo from John. So, yeah, he was a 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 he would never have had the ability or the time to have done any of this 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 from that point, that was probably good. I know, to the day he died. It kind of irritated him. And he died, you know, 21 years after he retired, 22 years after he retired. So. But it was probably for the best.

Yeah, great body of work, you know, in exchange for the lack of promotion. What are some books that are on your radar screen right now or that you're reading that you might recommend?

I tend to read mainly. Mainly fiction. I'm retired. I've been through, you know, business books, and there's a lot of good stuff out there. I'm not. I'm not going to denigrate any of it. And every now and then I get to read something good. I thought the Art of Action by. What's his name? Stephen. He's gonna kill me. Remembering his name here is very good. Talks a lot. It's about Offtrox Tactique. Manages to write an entire book on Offtrox Tactique and never uses the term hoota loop, but he never mentions John Boyd either. But that's right. This is a long tradition. John Boyden, for all I know, he never heard of it. He's British. British consultant. It's an excellent, excellent Stephen Bungay excellent book. And of course, L. David Marquette's Turn the Ship around is also a very good book. It's a good book because it talks about basically how he runs a submarine, a cruise of a ballistic missile submarine, without ever giving an order. And he wanted to do it totally by implicit guidance and control. And to do that, you need an extraordinarily high degree of iron 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 iron height, which begs the question of why other submarine commanders weren't able to do it. How did Marquette get the idea to do this? And the technique he used, basically the technique that Boyd prescribes in organizational organic design of putting people together and working them through a variety of scenarios together so they can form those implicit bonds and develop the common outlook that makes harmonized action possible. So 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, much, much younger than Sherlock, gets married, I think, when she's 21, and he's whatever. But they're extremely well done books. And if you want fiction that kind of embodies books and it actually mentions the OODA loop and uses it, I think, in a very good way. Charles Strauss's Laundry Files books, science, 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 Stross S T R O S S, you can find the citation to it where he talks about the OODA loop and actually has his character using it correctly. Focusing on orientation and then letting actions flow, putting the focus on getting the orientation back. Right. 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 and then thing. So I'll suggest those.

Awesome.

Starting to think what else? I read everything Martin Van Crevel puts out. I thought Hitler in Hell was hilarious. Recommended highly. But his transformation of war and he knew Boyd and whenever he would come to dc, he'd come by the Pentagon and he and Boyd would talk. And transformation war has a lot of the flavor of the boy. Then Boyd quotes his Command and War book in his, I believe it is organizational design, organic design for command and control. So those go to. And he's currently finishing his Last book, which is on prediction. It's a history of what we use for prediction. And of course, orientation is all about prediction. So you can see that.

That sounds fascinating.

Yeah. How that goes on there. So, anyway, 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, I do think. And that's basically about it.

Chet, you're still writing, correct? Or your book is being translated into Japanese, I understand.

Yeah, Just happened to have a copy here. Just came out in Japanese. It's those of you that can read Japanese. There it is. They did a good. Just physically, it's a. It's a work of art, as 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 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. And the last two things I've written have all been papers, the last two being the final, I hope, version of Boyd's real oodeloup that I did for the Norwegians for their defense journal called A Necessity, and then the one on Conceptual Spiral, John Boyd, Conceptual Spiral and the Meaning of. Of Life. So. And they're available also on Slightly east of New. So my wife keeps saying that I should do a new book. And as I tell her, as soon as I think of some new things to say, I will. I would like to do a book going back, tracing the roots of Boyd's philosophy back much deeper than just the war stuff. Boyd never wrote anything in any of his books about Zen, although it's clear that there's a lot of Zen in Boyd stuff. And he read a lot of it after he completed the books, but he never wrote anything on it. My problem is I don't really know enough about it. You know, it's a very, very rich history of Zen and Buddhism, Taoism 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, Shinryu Suzuki in Zenman Beginner's Mind, which is a good description of Boyd just in the title. So the purpose of Z is to see reality clearly. What's the Ooda Loop all about, guys? Anyway, yeah, the answer is, yeah, I'm supposed to be writing. I tell my wife I'm writing, but in fact 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 in the description obviously to the book and to the translated versions and of course to your blog as well so that people can dive a little bit deeper.

Just second, my production staff just handed me a note here. Don't go away. There is a Portuguese version of Certain Duen out nice. And there is an Indian version of which is in English. It's been translated twice and then I have one country specific version of it. Anybody that's interested in doing a translation, please get a hold on me.

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 analysis on cybersecurity technology and global risks, please visit www.oodaloop.com.