Understanding The OODA Loop and How It Applies To Tech Leadership: Ben Ford

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Loop.Com hello, I'm Bob Gourley, the Chief Technology Officer of OODA llc. And today on the oodacast, Ben Ford, the founder of Commando Development. Before Ben founded Commando Development, he was a Royal Marine. And we want to talk about his experience as a commando in the Royal Marines. But what we really want to dive deep into is his approach to training IT teams and technology leaders and corporate leaders today. Ben, welcome to the oodacast.

Thanks, Bob. Great to be here.

Yeah, I can't wait to dive into this topic because I know I have seen you explain and express and translate OODA into the language of business and I want to get into that. But first, would love to start with a little bit of your bio and how you got to this point.

Sure.

Yeah.

Okay, great. Let's do it. So, yeah, as you mentioned, my early career was in the Royal Marines. I joined in 2000. In fact, the anniversary is coming up imminently in a few days. So I spent just under five years in Marines and was lucky enough on the way to Iraq to get extremely bored on a ship and think, you know what, I need to learn something. So I ordered myself a book on Python and a book on Linux. They arrived in the ship's mail and I basically sat down with my laptop and that was how my tech career started, essentially. Since then I've been working in programming roles, leadership roles across loads of different industries. And I guess over the last five years I've just become more and more frustrated with our communication structures, inability to keep up with the pace of change of modern life, especially in the tech industry. It's, you know, many, many people have described it to me as an exponential change. You know, we have this kind of, you know, new things get invented that helps the next generation invent the new thing, the next new thing quicker. Yeah, and you know, it's. Technology is not the gating factor in building things anymore.

It's.

It's communication and alignment and leadership. And that's essentially why I've pivoted away from, you know, on the tools, programming, to try and bring some of the things I learned in the Marines and some of the things that I've uncovered since and translate it to technology.

You know, by the way, I love your brand, Commando Development. It says a lot and it also links to the fact that you were a commando yourself. Can you walk us through what that means? What is a commando?

Sure. So I mean the commandos. Well, I'll go from World War II history, because I'm not actually super, super knowledgeable on the origin, but the origin was in the Boer War, the way the Boers felt fought against us, the invaders. They organized men into columns called commandos. So I'll go from the bit that I know. So the Royal Marines is actually one of the oldest standing military formations in the world, over 350 years old. And in the Second World War the role of them changed to become part of the commando forces of the uk. So there was the army and the Royal Marines. After the Second World War they kept that role. So all Marines are Green Beret trained. So we all have to do the commando course, which is the longest and some say the most arduous basic training in, in the Western world at least. So it's 30, 30 weeks when I did it, 32 weeks now, culminating in the commando test when you get your, your Green Beret. And the Royal Marines now are a kind of self contained light infantry, you know, like, like many other Marine forces, they're literal as in, you know, the coast, agile and able to basically take on pretty much any role very quickly.

Well, there's a lot of fame in my circles of the Royal Marines overall. And then looking back at the history of US Special Forces, there's a connection there as well, going back to World War II, when Churchill really brought together these many different forces to form his commandos. And 1940, the US was not even in the war yet. It was officially a neutral, although leaning very forward. And one of the first, the first training camps for the OSS here was set up by Canada a little bit east of Toronto, Camp X. And trainers came in from the Royal Marines to start training U.S. intelligence and special forces, including this guy, William Fairburn. And I mentioned that because I see over your shoulder there this famous Fairbairn knife that he trained people in the hand to hand combat. I think every single special operations unit I have ever seen has that in their symbol somewhere.

Yeah, yeah, I mean, it's a, I mean Fairbairn story. I've got, I've got his book right here actually. So he came up with this fighting methodology that, you know, he learned in the gutters of Shanghai, right. And I think there's a, there's a, quite an interesting parallel here, right? He, he wasn't taught this through some, you know, grandmaster in an art. He learned it bottom up through, through blood and sweat and, and, and pain. And it's, you know, super interesting that the way it's structured is it's not to be the best martial art in the world. It's to be the thing that, you know, the situation is pretty dire, right? So it recognizes the physiological effects of high adrenaline. You know, your motor, your fine motor skills shut down, peripheral vision shuts down. And I was actually lucky enough before I found this book. Towards the end of my career in the Marines, I was lucky enough to train with a guy who had basically nerded out on Defender and all in fighting, which was his fighting style. We actually were training in the desert in Iraq with a rolled up sleeping roll for a punch bag. But it was like, I've got quite a comprehensive martial arts background and it was super interesting that everything in this art was there was no fancy stuff at all. It was gross motor movement and it was purely designed to, you know, mess somebody up.

You know, here's. There's going to be so many analogies, I think, as we start talking about uda, but also technology development, development team software development and cyber security. Because one of the things Fairbairn talked about was a metric. Now he didn't use that word metric, but to me it's a metric. And that is one rule in a fight like that. It's killer be killed. That's a metric. And now you look at cybersecurity and for years I have seen this metric of you have an enterprise that's going to do one thing, it's either going to keep the bad guys out or not. Now it does get more complicated than that these days. Sophisticated bad guys get into your network. So then you're going to detect them or not and you're going to push them out or not. And I think these kind of fact based reality metrics is another analogy between this ethos of the commando and the IT needs of today.

Yeah, that, that is interesting. I mean, so I, yeah, my background is as a programmer and you know, before I kind of switched into nerding out about OODA loops, I was, you know, quite into, you know, reading computer science papers and learning about all this stuff. And I actually see like a really strong overlap between the study of networks in the abstract form and the role of an attacker in a corporate network, but also the role of the commandos. I read Churchill's Ministry of Ungentlemanly Conduct, which is an amazing book. It's more of an entertainment book, but it's about how the commandos were formed, how the Special Operations Executive and by extension the commandos were formed. And really the whole role of that organization was to pinpoint areas within the axis networks where they were Weak and vulnerable, but also where the centrality of those points was that the impact would be huge and attack them by any means. And the way they had to do that was they had to be outside of the existing armed forces infrastructure in the uk because it was all set up for top down commander control. And the generals didn't want to know about this unfair fighting. We'll fight British and we'll stand up and we'll give the Huns a good thrashing. And of course, Colin Gubbins, who was the guy who basically set all this stuff up, he had fought against insurgents in Afghanistan, funnily enough, all comes back full circle and he knew that. Absolutely. No, that's not how it works. You always have to have these kind of small, mobile, well trained, non regular troops that go and find the weak points and attack first. Otherwise it's just a bloodbath and it's attrition warfare.

Right. You know, you raised a couple other things I want to ask you about. One is this is a piece of history I don't think has been portrayed enough in our movies and literature and stories in history. And that is what is, I think, the largest commando raid in history against a dry dock in France during World War II. St. Nair, 600 commandos sent on an impossible mission known to everybody that this was impossible, which is why they did it, because they thought, aha, that's our mission. Go in and destroy a large dry dock which would make it then this port could not serve one of the largest German battleships out there, keeping it bottled up in the Baltic.

Yeah.

And the story of this raid and how impossible it was, but how these extremely brave commandos did that is one for the history books. And I am a little concerned that it's not taught widely enough. But you know about this, it was part of your culture and ethos. Right?

Yeah, yeah, we got, you know, several. I must admit, my drill instructor would probably, probably thrash me around the parade square. I can't remember most of them now because it was a long time ago. But yeah, we've got Gibraltar and we've got that one, we've got Zeebrugge. But the interesting thing is that especially the stint and zero raid is, you know, they didn't attack the actual target. Right. There's a. This is where the network comes in. Right. You figure out what the. If you've got this thing that you need to attack, you don't have to attack that, you can attack the capabilities that enable it to keep operating and you've still disabled it. And that was what I think the genius of the SOE was, is that, you know, you would take a target that the RAF had tried to destroy several times over and, you know, bombed the hell out of local villages, and you'd basically put one agent in there on a bike with an inside agent, and they'd go in and they'd blow it up. And the really interesting story of, you know, when the. The. The invasion of mainland Europe went ahead, all of the German tanks were down in the south of France. And, you know, had they been able to move, move up on. On right by rail, we would have had a serious problem. And there was a very small team, I think, of five or something. Five SOE agents armed with socks. No, sorry, armed with grease, with sand in. And they put that grease on the. On the axles of the trains.

Fascinating.

That stopped the trains being able to move. And that meant the tanks had to go by road, which meant it took them longer, which meant they didn't get there. And that's a just perfect example of a tiny, tiny, asynchronous attack having an enormous, oversized impact. And that's like the ethos of Special Operations and the Commandos and probably a lot more things that we don't even realize.

This fits so well with other things I want to talk to you about, like cybersecurity and this thing we call threat model and how to find the right controls in your enterprise to exert pressure on to make sure the bad guys don't have a huge effect. But before going there, I want to ask you about one other analogy I think is apparent. From the foundation of the Commandos and Special Forces In World War II, there were a lot of choices on how you do things like that. Organizationally, you could tell each of the services. I want you to have some highly trained people, and we'll use them as we need to. Or you could centralize it in one group. And I want to mention that as an analogy, because when you see projects and enterprises today, let's say a corporation wants to have an artificial intelligence initiative, they have choices. They can let each of their lines of business do artificial intelligence their way and create applications, or you can centralize it and give it some bullet backing. And both of those models work perfectly well. And maybe different businesses will have different answers. But to me, that centralization is how you really leap ahead. Do you see the analogy I'm going for there with the commandos?

I do. So there's a fantastic book written by a physicist who is a biotech entrepreneur called Safi Bakal. Called, and the book's called Loon Shots. And it's basically about what are the conditions that you have to have in order for this kind of innovation to happen and to take it back to the soe. The SOE model was get us the hell out of the centralized bureaucratic machine, the war office and any other big organization. Even if you're prosecuting a war, there's always bureaucrats in there somewhere. And they all want certainty and they want predictability. And it's the antithesis of what you need in order to have innovation. So this is exactly what the SOE did. They removed themselves from that. They got a shit shield in the shape of Churchill, essentially. And they employed a bunch of nut jobs to just throw things at a wall until it stuck. Right. They had a caravan inventor, or, sorry, a caravan builder who is an inventor who invented limpet mines. They had a bunch of other complete weirdos who would not, you know, work in, in the big system, but who's in whose intervention in a system that was right for them was, you know, absolutely enormous. And they started building capabilities without having a strong sense of how it would be needed. It's like, okay, yeah, that looks useful. That looks useful. And you know, this is Boyd snowmobile analogy, you know, perfectly, isn't it? It's like take what you can, break it down, put it together in new ways and use it in new ways. And that requires a completely different kind of bottom up, emergent way of thinking versus the top down kind of commander control. However, top down commander control is where you get the resources. You know, if they didn't have Churchill and they didn't have the support of the big army, they would have been nowhere. So there's this really interesting thing that I think most companies really struggle to navigate is the kind of the top down, you know, vision, direction, alignment, call it what you want, and the bottom up kind of invention. Messy, you know, try new things, no certainty. And somehow those things have to meet in the middle. And I think it takes a really special leader and system that doesn't generally emerge naturally. Emerge naturally in, in today's, today's world, with the constraints of today's business. So it's, you know, I think a lot of these new structures are emerging in the kind of, you know, the startup ecosystem and the creators ecosystem. And it's just super fascinating.

Yeah. And so you remind me, I think if I reflect back on my career, some of my biggest mistakes and failures were in not getting the judgment right on that. In one case, I'm Thinking of, we did a lot of centralization that was awesome. We saved money, we innovated. There was this burst of functionality and capability for the enterprise, but we did it in a way that choked off innovation that was occurring out at the edge. Huge mistake on our part. So it's tough finding balance here, but seeing you apply these military principles gives me hope. So I want to talk a little bit more about Commando Dev and what you're trying to do in the organization now.

Sure. Okay. So the reason that I kind of pivoted away from just doing contracting, you know, I was, you know, five, five, maybe seven years ago, I was perfectly happy. You know, I was in a really quite niche programming language with a great community that I really enjoyed using. There was enough work going around that it was, it was super fun. But I just kept coming up against this friction, I guess, you know, almost like a business version of Clausewitz, Fog of war. You know, almost all of the jobs that I was doing, they didn't have any clarity. Like the, you know, there might have been clarity in like the ultimate vision, and everyone could get around that, but then there'd be clarity, there would be missing clarity between how do we get from where we are or actually where are we? How do we get from there to. To where we want to go? And at the same time, I started reading some. Some books from. From military leaders. You know, up until that point, I'd largely discounted my time in the military, if I'm honest. You know, it was something fun I did in my early 20s. And now I'm a, you know, nerdy software developer. It's not really relevant. And then Team of Teams Turn the Ship Around, Extreme Ownership. And a few other books came out all around about the same time, and I started to realize that there was some crossovers between the fundamentals of the programming languages that I was using with these kind of ideas. So, you know, Jocko Willink's Principles of Combat, you know, they're reduced down to something that applies everywhere. Like for me, a fundamental abstraction in a programming language is something that is atomic, it's composable, and it applies wherever the thing can be made. And then Team of Teams just had this amazing understanding of the structure of changing an organization. And from there I think I probably discovered OODA from perhaps probably from a mention of Cynefin in Team of Teams and then from Cynefin Wardley Mapping. And there's all these amazing mental tools and constructs out there. And some of them pertain directly back to my time in the military, but I'd never heard of them in the military. And so I just think as the pace of change increases and increases in the technology world, in the startup world, but also big companies that are incumbents, this is coming to eat their lunch. So everyone needs to know about how to operate in complexity and how to balance these, these competing pressures. But nobody seems to have the language right.

Fascinating. So, Commando Dev, you help development teams become more agile.

Agile is a difficult word, isn't it, nowadays? Functional, yeah. As adaptive, I guess. Like, I've been doing some really interesting exploratory work with Nigel Thurlow and Ponch and a few others, you know, a few other OODA loop experts. And, and I've started to think, well, maybe we can dig into this a little bit later. I've started to think of UDA as the algorithm of adaptation. And it's not really an algorithm. Algorithms are not the right word for it, but it's a, it's an algorithm in the sense that the way ants move in a swarm is an algorithm. Right. Simple rules that make complex emergent behavior for complex circumstances. So I think, you know, one of the, one of the problems that OODA has is this representation problem. Maybe we could dig into that one as well. Sorry, I think I went a bit off track there. What was the question again?

But the algorithm of adaptation, that's fascinating because you're so right. It's an ability to sense and understand and think and make a decision and don't stop there, but act and understand that you're not just changing yourself, but you're changing the environment. So you need to sense it again. Yeah, I like your approach there.

Yeah. And I started to think of UDA as more of, almost like a hierarchy than a loop. Right. Your orientation can be skimmed through shallowly when you're operating in a domain that you know well. And it's the implicit guidance and control pathway and you don't need to stop and think at all. And that's, you know, that speaks very much to my training in the military. You know, you drill and you drill and you drill until you, you can't do it wrong. So that's one pathway. But then you have these kind of surprises that happen and then it's, you know, and this is what happens to businesses all the time, I think, is that you continually aren't operating in that low energy, fluid pathway. You're continually having new surprises and new things that you didn't understand. And that pitches you into this kind of deep dive through your into your, your orientation and your mental models and by the time you come back out, the world's changed again. So you go straight back in and your entropy just increases and increases and you know, eventually you can't even relate to the reality that you're trying to operate within. Right.

Ben, would you tell me who is your target customer set? You serve software firms, correct?

Yeah, so I've got a couple of, couple of different sort of answers to that. One is individual leaders themselves. Like, you know, I think leadership is as much of a system as it is a skill. Certainly wasn't the military. You know, you could, you could take a leader that had, you know, fairly indifferent levels of, you know, say empathy or leadership skill, but in the system of the military, you can plug those people in and they still, you know, they still do the job of a leader very well. You know, the converse in business side of things is that, you know, you can take the most amazing leader from a company and this is typically how people do it.

Right?

You have a startup, they grow to a certain size, they say, oh, right, we need some grownups now. And they go find somebody that's done it before and that person gets parachuted in more often than not to a place where the system isn't like that. And you know, and therefore their impact is, is lessened and they struggle. So I have a course that's coming out called Algorithms for Leadership, which is aimed at kind of individual leaders. Because I think, you know, ultimately it's exactly the same with programming. You have to have enough of a base understanding of this and you know, there's no point me sitting in front of people saying it again and again if I can just record it and turn it into a course. So that's one. And then on a sort of more bespoke basis, I can come in and train a whole team. So essentially use the basis of the course, use the knowledge in the course, but do it in a more workshop setting so that you can embed things like the variation of the military orders process that I use and the after action report process and test and adjust and figure out how that fits within an individual company specific context.

You know, in this new world we're in, it seems like every single company in every single industry is becoming a software company. So I see a growing need for what you're offering right now. And so I think doing a course the way you're doing it is good because obviously that's going to be able to scale and the world's going to need this to Scale and how do I find this course?

So I'll give you the URL afterwards, but it's courses.comando.dev algorithms for leadership. But I'll obviously give you the URL.

And I'll put that in our show notes for sure and I'll check it out myself. It sounds like a much needed way to get into your brain and learn more.

Yeah, so I mean I'm doing it the kind of the online creators way of building it in public. So you know, obviously I've spent a lot of time synthesizing all this and you know, it's generated, it's kind of the genesis has been my own personal experience but obviously, you know, people need their own hooks to latch onto. Like I'm not super experienced as a mid level leader within a big company, for example, you know, I'm not super experienced as a, as a. I've been a CTO of an early stage startup. So I'm running throughout May, I'm running a bunch of live sessions for early adopters of the course to, you know, basically teach, teach some of the, some of the modules live, but also have a bit of back and forth as I did with my. I did a call on UDO a couple of weeks ago which was really good because it, I think it's in that, you know, the abstract learning is good but you always have to have that, you know. Well, how does this relate to me and the ability to ask questions and poke things and, and you know, reason about things beyond the, you know, sucking up the information, I guess. How do you turn it into a skill? I guess.

Cool, sounds very interesting. So let me ask a couple other questions. One I want to ask. How do you explain OODA to people? I just would love your views on that. Now I have had the pleasure of seeing some of your graphics and I want to link to some of those too. But can you walk us through your explanation of what OODA is and why it's relevant?

Yeah, sure. So this is a big question. There's obviously loads of Boyd's impacts. It's a massive shame that he didn't try and capture more of what he knew into writing. It's all kind of accumulated in briefings and learnings that his acolytes and people who worked with him took away and then resynthesized afterwards. So everyone has a slightly different take on it, which I think is really, you know, that is the nature of uda, if anything. Right. It's a, it's an orientation of something. I have My own and everyone else has their own. So I think there are varying levels of useful definition of ooda. One is, one is the kind of the graphic that you've got behind you that's easy to understand. It's like, okay, you observe. Observation means that you now need to kind of work that into your own, your own mental models. You need to change what you think about the world and then you decide to do something and then you act. So that's easy to understand and it's better. I've seen a, I've seen an explanation of UDA from a police officer who was explaining to a subordinate and he didn't go beyond that level of explanation, but it was still super useful. You know, it was explained in context and it's a useful analogy. And then the next level up is Boyd's diagram. He never drew the circle with the four dots on it, but he did draw a diagram which is the more fully featured one, which includes the feedback and the feed forward mechanisms. Brings in the idea of unfolding interaction with the environment, implicit guidance and control, all very important concepts. And I've actually been spending quite a lot of time with books on cognition lately. Always been an interest. But some of the work, A Thousand Brains is a great book by Jeff Hawkins and on intelligence before that. It's about how do you think of the computational structure of cognition. So I guess where I currently am with OODA is that it's an algorithm for shaping and being shaped by one's environment. And I split it down into situational awareness, which has got a load of really good rigorous academic study from the US Air Force. Although interestingly so, the situational awareness diagram that I have in my course, which I've taken from Wikipedia, it looks almost exactly the same as parts of the OODA loop. But there's no evidence, there's not much evidence that Boyd and the research has ever had much contact. So I find that very interesting that you've got two separate fields of study and essentially situational awareness is like the observe and orient part of uda. And then you've got decide and act. And you know, Boyd was incredibly widely read, you know, lots of pretty deep science that he, he studied. And one of his big, big fields of study was aufrags tactic. I'm gonna probably butchered the German pronunciation of that, but that's what we in the west know as mission command. That's the form of leadership and planning and feedback that I learned in the Marines without even realizing that this was a thing. And for me, the Pressures of today's world in business and needing to move fast means that mission command is what you need to have the decision and the action part of your ODA loop working properly as a, as a business now. So it's inwards is situational awareness, outwards is execution and you know, the bit in the middle is your mental models and how well you understand and can adapt to your environment.

Great, thanks. I think that's very well put and I think it does capture the fact that too frequently we oversimplify what the OODA loop is. As you mentioned, this diagram, very much oversimplification, conversation starter for something that is really much deeper.

Yeah, yeah. And it, you know, it's still useful. Like, I think, you know, you could go into many, many places that have never heard of Voodaloop and you could give them that simple five minute understanding and you leave them in a better place than if they'd never heard of it. So it's still, you know, we all like to think that we've got the best kind of take on something or whatever, but, you know, it's all useful, it's all contextual.

Right. So let me work this into a cybersecurity discussion. One of the reasons that I think the cybersecurity community gravitates so much to the OODA loop as an explainer is that's what adversaries do when they get in our networks and they don't, the good ones anyway don't just come in with a checklist and say, you know, here's your algorithm. Do this, then this, then this. You get in and you check things out and you look around and you observe and you match that against all of your sum total of knowledge. And then you understand what you need to do with the networks and you make a decision and you act on it and then you look for changes. So the adversaries are doing that in our networks and defenders. Similarly, if you go into a defender mindset in your network and you think, all I have to do is become compliant, follow this checklist, make sure my patches are done, then the bad guys won't get in. Well, no, that's a failing scenario too. So the defenders need this continuous monitoring and observing and taking action and seeing what the results are. So it's one reason the cybersecurity community has gravitated so much to that concept. Which leads to another point that I think the commando kind of analogies and history and ethos are so relevant in, and that is this thing called threat modeling. Threat modeling. Is an art form in the cybersecurity world, where an organization seeks to understand who their adversaries are going to be and what the adversary tools and techniques are and what their most important data is and how to protect that. There's a new, relatively new approach shepherded by mitre. It's called the mitre, ATT and ck, which is a comprehensive listing of adversary tactics and techniques and knowledge. An organization that has that OODA approach can take the mitre, ATT and CK and look at their own controls and figure where I need to exert pressure to have that undue influence, just like the commandos in World War II as you described them were doing. So, thoughts on that analogy?

Yeah, that is very interesting. So I just want to bring up one thing. So one thing that was drilled into us in basic training is the commando mindset. And the US Marines have something fairly similar, I think, but it's be the first to understand, be the first to adapt and respond and the first to overcome. And I've been, as I've been putting my course together and I've been thinking about the elements of my service that I can recontextualize and translate for tech. This one is one that you don't even need to translate it. Right. This is exactly what you're talking about, is exactly what we need in growing businesses. And it describes OODA really very, very well. Right. It's how, how well are you understanding your environment? That's observation and orientation. How well are you adapting and responding? That's. That's orientation and action. And then how do you use that to overcome that is doing this again and again and again. And, you know, I think UDA is the, the thing that's amazed me the most over, you know, my. The course of really, really digging into this in the last few years is just how well Boyd's sort of knowledge maps onto contemporary thinking. You know, bearing in mind that Boyd passed away nearly a quarter of a century ago, and all of the enormous progress that's been made on cognition and AI and complexity and chaos theory and all these things, and yet the OODA loop still stands up as a, I don't know, mental model is not quite the right. It doesn't really do it justice. But, you know, it's still contemporary and it still fits with all of this emerging insight and knowledge. I find that absolutely incredible.

Yeah, I agree with you. I really do. Hey, Ben, thanks for the time today. I want to ask you a couple other questions, though, like if you have any books you would recommend for us, anything that has really struck you in the last several years that you think is important for other business decision makers to read and think about?

Yeah. Okay, great. I've got, I've got a few. So one of the books that I read, I think last year that really helped understand this kind of pressure that we're all under is a book called the Dragons and the Snakes by David Kilcullen. And that's a book ostensibly about defense policy, but it's about, you know, the sweep of the last 20 years of the kind of, you know, the war on terror and the new pressures that we're under. But it takes a really, really interesting evolutionary standpoint. So it's looking at, essentially it's looking at the, the international stage as an evolutionary ecosystem. You know, you have things like, you know, the rise of the Pakistani Taliban. And Kilcullen's view is that, you know, essentially we were, we were a fitness function like the west military was a fitness function. On those insurgents, you know, killed off the stupid ones, killed off the slow ones, the ones that were left got better, then the top tier of those got killed off, and the ones that were left were even better. And it's almost like we've trained not only the insurgents, but also, you know, the Russias, China's Irans of the world, you know, have had this ringside seat on how, where our holes are. Right. You know, to take it back to the cybersecurity analogy. It's almost like we've been conducting our defense in the open and left, left these really quite gaping holes in our vulnerabilities that, you know, now, lo and behold, the Russias and the Chinas and the, and the Irans of the world, plus this kind of merging of state and non state actors. So it's really, really fascinating and it's even more fascinating when you take that lens and you put it onto the emergence of startup ecosystems and big incumbents who are under all of these pressures from opening gaps in their niches. And you know, the addressable markets have changed and it's just, you know, there's so many, I mean, we could do a whole episode on just that, I reckon.

Awesome.

So that's one book. Another book that really changed the way I look at things is a book called Sand Talk by Tyson Young Kaporta. So Tyson is a complexity researcher in Australia and his book is a really very, very different viewpoint because it comes from the, the, the aboriginal or indigenous viewpoint, which is very much more about holistic bottom up, you know, emergent viewing things as systems versus the west kind of, you know, we think about things as entities and we try and break things down. And, you know, we've got the legacy of all of our scientific backgrounds that makes us try and deconstruct things beyond the point. That's. That's sometimes sensible. So those are my two. My. My two big ones, I think, from last year.

Well, thanks, Ben. And Ben, it's been great talking with you, and I'm very excited to have learned this about Commando Dev and to see that you have this course coming out, Algorithms for Leadership. I really look forward to that. And we'll definitely be linking to that in our show notes. Thanks, man.

Yeah, my pleasure, Bob. It's been great. And it'd be great to do around two when we let all this stuff settle out and maybe see if there's anything else we want to dig into.

Awesome.

Pretty good.

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