August 10, 2025 • 29 mins
Harry and Jorge discuss the implications of John Boyd's work beyond its original military context.
Show notes:
- The Mind of War: John Boyd and American Security by Grant Hammond
- John Boyd
- OODA loop
- Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War by Robert Coram
- Science, Strategy and War: The Strategic Theory of John Boyd by Francis P.B. Osinga
- Hoyt Ng
- Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths
- How Big Things Get Done by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Harry (00:00):
Where is the just enough, just in time risk management?
(00:04):
Where's the just enough, just intime, and can you, without being
careless, or withoutdisregarding, facts as they are,
rather than how they should be,can you speed up to get better,
faster decisions, and makebetter, more effective actions?
Narrator (00:30):
You're listening to Traction Heroes.
Digging In to Get Results withHarry Max and Jorge Arango.
Harry (00:40):
Hey, Jorge, it's good to see you.
Jorge (00:42):
Always good to see you, Harry.
Harry (00:45):
It's come to a place where I look forward every time
I see your name on my calendar.
I'm like,"Yes! I'm gonna have agood day."
Jorge (00:53):
Oh, I know.
Same here.
it's a bit of a respite becausemost of my other calls are all
like project work, client work,right?
And these conversations are anopportunity to think about like
the meta-work.
It's like, how do you approachthe work as opposed to the work
itself.
Harry (01:12):
That's right.
And it's, not just changed theconversation for me, but it's
changing what I'm reading.
I'm selecting the books I'mreading and the articles I'm
reading with a new level ofintention that is not just to
enjoy for myself and learn formyself, but also how I might
share some of the enjoyment andshare some of the learning with
you and, hopefully, people whoare listening in.
Jorge (01:36):
That's also true for me.
But I will say this (01:38):
this year, I've been reading a lot of
humanity classics, really oldbooks, right?
In some cases, books that areliterally thousands of years
old.
And, I find myself reading thoseand thinking, which one of these
should I bring to Harry?
(02:00):
Knowing that it might take us abit further afield than we want
to go to.
But yeah, whenever I am readingnon humanities-related stuff,
I'm always approaching it with alens of,"Okay, so this might be
fodder for a Traction Heroesconversation." So I am paying a
(02:20):
attention differently to what Iingest.
With that in mind, we weretalking before we started
recording, and it sounds likeyou've brought a reading to
share today.
Harry (02:30):
I did.
And incidentally, I hadoriginally intended to reread
the section of the book that Ibrought a few weeks ago, when we
had our little audio mishap.
But I just finished reading abook for myself that I did not
expect, based on the way thebook was written, that I was
gonna find anything that I couldshare in it.
(02:53):
And yet, at the 13th hour,almost the last page, I found
something that I really wantedto share with you, and hopefully
other people will enjoy it aswell.
Like usual, I'll share the titleof the book when I'm done, just
so it doesn't perhaps send youdown a path that would make it
(03:15):
hard for you to listen to whatI'm reading.
Jorge (03:17):
I'm excited.
Let her rip.
Harry (03:19):
All right.
Here it goes.
"Concern for purpose, not merelyprocess, ends over means, and
the ethical dimension and moralconsequences of our conduct, is
important.
We need people who are moreconcerned about the mental and
moral aspects of the challenge,success and failure both on the
(03:43):
battlefield and in theboardroom, in Congress and in
the classroom, rather thanmerely the material aspects and
technological prowess of ourcapabilities.
"Technology springs from themind of humankind and should be
a servant, not our master.
It is in our minds that weconjure up both good and evil.
(04:07):
It is in our minds that we mustseek to have an impact if we
wish to change behavior.
The perception of the opponentis always the target.
Time is a free good, which, ifused to our advantage, can be a
force multiplier of immenseproportions.
Acting at the right time is asimportant or more important than
(04:32):
acting at the right place.
Wars are planned and foughtfirst in the minds of human
beings in peace time.
What we do between the conflictsduring ostensible periods of
peace is critical to what wewill do and how well we will
fare in the next conflict.
Jorge (04:55):
Okay, so I have not read this before.
I suspect that it's a book aboutmilitary matters just because of
all the talk of warfare and...
Harry (05:06):
It is.
It's a, book called The Mind ofWar, and it's on the life and
contributions of John Boyd.
You could call him the father ofthe F-16 fighter and the F-15
and the originator of the OODAloop, and he's considered to be
(05:29):
one of the greatest strategistswho ever lived and certainly a
military genius.
I wanted to learn more about himbecause the OODA loop, which
stands for observe, orient,decide, act, something we've
talked about before, is centralto decision-making and
action-taking, and I wanted abetter, richer, more nuanced
(05:50):
understanding of where it camefrom.
So, Grant Hammond wrote thisbook and it's a very intimate
portrait of Boyd and his lifeand it is really exceptional.
And I'm not one for readingbooks on war typically, but this
was really amazing.
Jorge (06:08):
I actually have a biography of John Boyd on my
reading queue, and I'm wonderingif it's the same book.
I have not read it.
Yeah, the one I have is calledBoyd: The Fighter Pilot Who
Changed the Art of War.
So it doesn't sound like it'sthe same thing.
Harry (06:25):
It is not, and I read that book as well, and it was a
good, fair, and somewhatilluminating portrayal of John
Boyd's life, but not of hismind.
And this book, The Mind of War,really gets into how he thought
(06:46):
about organizations, how hethought about process, how he
thought about technology, how hethought about change, and how he
thought about our responsibilityand our moral and ethical
responsibility in that context.
Jorge (07:03):
it sounds like that's definitely more up my alley.
We did talk about the OODA loopbefore, but I suspect that we
did that in a conversation thatwill not make the light of day
because we did have audioglitches.
This snippet that you read didnot address the OODA loop
(07:24):
specifically.
Was there something about itthat you wanted us to dive down
into or can I ask you about theOODA loop?
Harry (07:33):
Let's go straight for the OODA loop.
I think I have a much betterunderstanding of where Boyd was
coming from now, in the contextof discussing the OODA loop.
And I have many thoughts aboutthe OODA loop, which I have
thought about writing about andhave certainly been discussing
with people.
Jorge (07:51):
Okay.
First of all, acknowledging thatI don't know anywhere near
enough about this or as muchabout this as you do.
My impression of the OODA loophas always been that it's a type
of cybernetic loop.
What I mean by that is the ideathat you have some kind of
objective that you're aimingtoward and you make adjustments
(08:17):
on your way toward thatobjective.
You read your stance vis-a-visthat objective and correct
course as needed, right?
That's, in my mind, the basiccybernetic loop.
Is that a fair read?
And, if not, can you correct mybad impression of what an OODA
(08:37):
loop is?
Harry (08:39):
It was an absolutely fair read.
I think the thing is, it'ssomewhat incomplete in the
context of how Boyd applied it.
And the thing is, his discussionof how the OODA loop works
becomes very cerebral and veryabstract, and I think there's
(09:02):
perhaps a reason that hestruggled to write this down in
a book.
He gave briefings that were verydynamic and allowed him to
answer extemporaneously on thefly to questions and whatnot.
I'm not sure actually how muchhe valued prose and the context
of capturing his ideas in abook.
(09:23):
So maybe it's not fair to saythat he struggled with that.
But the idea is the OODA loop,the emphasis is really on two
pieces of the OODA loop.
The first is on the second O,which he called the Big O.
So the first O is observe, andthat is, what sensory data is
(09:45):
available.
The second O stands for orient,and one could take...
I certainly took an overlysimplistic view of what that
second O stood for, even thoughI had encountered some of his
writing in the past that talkedabout it in a more fluid and
(10:10):
richer way.
The second O this notion oforientation is really about how
you apprehend the world.
And it's a proxy for how weunderstand what's going on in a
dynamic way around us.
And the term"orientation" tendsto imply more of a
(10:34):
temporal-spatial understandingof what's happening moment to
moment.
So the idea is that the first O,which is observe or notice
what's going on around you, andthen apprehend the world,
understand your concept of theworld and what it means as it
(10:57):
relates to how you are movingthrough space and time before
you get to a decision and beforeyou take action.
So it wasn't simply see, figureout whether you're moving away
from something or towardssomething, then make a decision,
and then act on it.
It was really notice what'shappening around you, stay
(11:20):
conscious of how you areinterpreting the entire world as
it's unfolding in front of you,and then make your decisions and
act.
That was the first thing thatreally stood out for me from The
Mind of War, this book by GrantHammond, was that the second o
was significantly richer than Iever had an understanding of.
(11:44):
And the second thing that wasreally different from perhaps my
initial understanding of theOODA loop was, it's not simply
an iterative process that youroll through and get good at
like a martial art and that theOODA loop becomes, in effect,
(12:08):
cognitive repertoire of observe,orient, decide, act again and
again He really placed it in thecontext of a spiral of
tightening up in a more fluidway.
And I'm gonna read the next bookby Osinga on this to try to
(12:31):
better understand what thispiece of it is, but those were
really the two major takeawaysfor me that I think most of us,
as we learn about the OODA looptend to caricature it and don't
really wrap our minds aroundit's true power in the Boydian
(12:55):
sense.
Jorge (12:57):
I had never put these two together, but hearing you talk
about the OODA loop is making methink that it rhymes with hula
hoop, and it's driving me nuts.
Harry (13:07):
That's great.
Jorge (13:09):
But so, here's the thing.
You used this phrase"a spiral oftightening up," which I wanna
pinch and zoom on.
Because I'll tell you what, thatevoked for me, hearing you talk
about it, and it might besomething that I'm reading into
it just because I think I knowthe context in which Boyd came
up with this model, which isteaching fighter pilots how to
(13:39):
how to perform in dog fights.
Is that right?
Harry (13:41):
That's right.
Yeah, a hundred percent.
Jorge (13:45):
When I heard you say a spiral of tightening up, what
came to mind is, we can be verymethodical and conscious about
this loop of observing,orienting, deciding, and acting.
And what I mean by methodicalis, you can be very conscious
about,"What am I observing?
(14:06):
What am I hearing?
What am I reading?
What is...
what are my inputs?" You can bevery self-aware of your bearing
towards those things, how you'reorienting yourself or the...
how you're apprehending theworld or the attitude you're
adopting as a result of theseinputs.
(14:30):
Same with deciding and acting,right?
Like deciding, like I canimagine like you could make a
long list of,"I've perceivedthis on the pro side and I've
perceived this other thing onthe con side, and based on this
long list of things that I'massembling, I'm going to make
some kind of mathematical choiceabout how to decide, and then I
(14:51):
move on to act." And if you takethis very methodical approach,
you're gonna take a long time.
And a fighter pilot does nothave time to consciously go
through this.
So when I heard"tighteningspiral," what I imagine by that
is you almost wanna make this,become an unconscious behavior.
(15:16):
Is that right?
Harry (15:18):
I think that's exactly right.
Because, as I learned racingcars and driving motorcycles, if
you're thinking about it, it'stoo late.
Full stop.
Jorge (15:29):
Yeah, so let's map that onto the domain that you and I
are at.
Like, I've never, flown afighter jet in my life.
In fact, I've never flown anykind of airplane in my...
i've flown in airplanes, butI've never piloted one.
(15:49):
How does this apply to the kindof work that folks listening in
most folks listening in anywayto this show might care about.
Harry (16:00):
I've been thinking about that a lot as I've been reading
the book.
First I just want a quick shoutout to Hoyt Ng, who's the
Executive Director of Coachingand Programming for the MBA
School of Management at UCBerkeley, at the Haas School of
Business.
Hoyt and I worked together atDreamworks, and he was the guy
(16:21):
that really introduced me toJohn Boyd's work.
I knew of the OODA loop and Iknew of Boyd, but Hoyt really
was the guy who said,"You needto wrap your head around what
Boyd is saying." Hoyt is anamazing character in my life, I
wish I could see him more.
But as I've been reflecting onthe more practical application
(16:46):
of this, the exact distinctionyou're making is the thing that
comes to mind, which is, if youthink about the OODA loop as
this methodical, linearconscious process, it might be
helpful maybe from a decisionrights point of view to take
(17:07):
into account data that's comingin and figuring out what it
means and then making a decisionand then acting on it then doing
that over and over, managingdecision rights and managing
decision processes.
I have clients today that arestruggling with this, and
they're not struggling with itbecause it's getting tighter and
hula-hoopy, they're strugglingwith it because they don't have
(17:30):
any conscious representation ofhow to manage decisions in an
effective way, so they don'tslip backwards or come undone.
When I think about,"Okay, how amI gonna apply this as a leader?"
I think about and you commenteda minute ago on the notion of
(17:52):
possibly making an almostmathematically-informed
decision.
And I just put my hat on thatmaybe what I need to do is think
about this from a reverseFibonacci point of view.
You think about the Fibonaccisequence as a set of numbers
that get bigger and because eachnumber is the sum of the two
(18:12):
proceeding ones.
So it goes 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, and soon and so forth.
But if you think about this froma Boydian point of view, from an
OODA loop point of view, youmight say,"Oh, maybe step one is
34." And then you subtract (18:27):
you go 21 and then 13, and the
spaces are getting tighter andtighter all the way back to one.
And it's about speeding up yourdecision process in order to be
able to stay in front of what'shappening to you or what's
(18:48):
happening to your team or yourorganization.
And we're all experiencing thiswith artificial intelligence
right now and the growth of LLMsand agentic computing.
It is moving fast.
And if we sit...
it's moving really fast and ifwe sit around and get all
methodical about it, that mightbe helpful.
But what might be even morehelpful is recognize, how long
(19:12):
did it take me to make adecision and take action on it
last time?
Can I tighten that up?
What can I do to shore up thisreduce process?
Remove waste, take steps outthat don't matter as much.
Okay, if something breaks, maybeyou put something back in.
And I don't wanna be carelessabout it, but I do think there's
(19:32):
a certain amount of...
When we're developing processesand when we're developing
methods, we will oftenintentionally put steps in place
and put branches in the decisiontrees in place to accommodate
potential exceptions and maybemitigate risks that might come
(19:55):
up.
Not all of those are requiredand they might slow the process
down.
So where is the just enough,just in time process?
And where is the just enough,just in time risk management?
Where's the just enough, just intime, and can you, without being
careless, or withoutdisregarding, facts as they are,
(20:21):
rather than how they should be,can you speed up to get better,
faster decisions, and makebetter, more effective actions?
Jorge (20:33):
This might come across as self-serving, but I'm wondering
if one of the ways in which youcan tighten the loop is by
bringing in people who have moreexperience than you do.
Because one of the ways in whichwe might tighten this kind of
loop is by doing it over andover again to the point where we
(20:54):
internalize a lot of therelevant decision points.
I'm gonna talk about somethingthat I have no idea about, which
is flying aircraft, just becausethis is the subject here.
But I would imagine that anexperienced pilot who has flown
in many different kinds ofweather is, going to know what
(21:18):
kind of risks they can take whenskies get overcast or whatever.
Again, I'm talking completelywithout knowing about this, but
you know the constraints and thecapabilities of the context and
your equipment or what have youbetter if you've gone through
that situation in that sameaircraft, let's say, many times
(21:43):
before, as opposed to your firsttime doing it.
I would imagine that your firsttime doing it, you're gonna be
slower, right?
So you might want to bring in anexpert.
And I think that part of thechallenge with the AI stuff is
that we're all new to it.
(22:05):
It's not an area where there area lot of people who have been
doing it for a long time becauseit just hasn't been around for a
long time.
So, some of us have been doingit for longer than others, but
no one's been doing it for liketwenty five years, right?
So, we haven't yet had the timeto develop the, internal
(22:31):
shortcuts that allow us totighten the loop.
Harry (22:35):
I think that you're onto something here.
I made a couple of notes whileyou were talking, and I have a
couple of books sitting behindme that are on my list of things
to either finish reading oractually read, one of them being
Algorithms to Live By (22:51):
The Computer Science of Human
Decisions by Brian Christian andTom Griffiths, and the notion of
heuristics and understandingwhat these rules of thumb are,
it's how to think about aheuristic or an algorithm, in
effect, is a shortcut,potentially, for making one or
(23:17):
more decisions and taking actionin a way that it's a lot easier
to do if you're experienced.
Because the last thing you wantto do is take a shortcut if
you're in a critical situationand find that it leads you down
a road that, you know, strands,you.
And heuristics these rules ofthumb are ways of taking
(23:39):
advantage of well-trodden pathsthat are shorter and faster and
more expedient.
They're not always perfect, butthey certainly help you get
where you want to go quicker inmany cases.
And for example, I think at somepoint in the past we talked
about reference-basedforecasting or estimation from a
(24:00):
book called, How Big Things GetDone.
I don't remember the author'sname right now, I think it was
Flyvbjerg, and I can't reallypronounce it, horribly butchered
the way I'm sure I'm saying it.
But this notion of, if you'vegot a big complex project that
you're looking to estimate, themost effective way to estimate
(24:23):
and really understand both thewhat's likely to be the more
explicit and understandableaspects of the project and also
the hidden aspects of wherethings go wrong and take those
all into account is to do thisprocess that he calls
reference-based forecasting orestimation.
(24:44):
And that is to take a look atsimilar kinds of projects.
And that's a much better way ofestimating to understand the
realities of what's likely toturn out to be true, than to go
through a long, arduous processof decomposition and
(25:06):
deconstruction of all of thevarious things that are going
into a potentially large projector product development or design
effort.
That's an example of this,right?
Find experts, right?
Okay, so I want to do thisthing.
Who's done it before?
And how would they walk youthrough the thinking?
(25:29):
And where is it that you need tobe more intentional and
conscious and methodical, andwhere is it that you can rely on
rules of thumb andreference-based estimates to get
a better handle on what it'sactually gonna take?
Jorge (25:44):
And I would expect that that heuristic of looking for an
expert can help you especiallywith the two Os, with observing
and orienting, because if you'recompletely new to a situation,
you might not know what to lookfor, right?
You might not know what therelevant inputs are the relevant
(26:08):
data points on the one hand, andthen on the other hand, even if
you did know what the relevantdata points are, you might not
know what they mean.
So that's the orientation thing.
Harry (26:19):
Yeah.
Jorge (26:20):
And the other thing that I heard there and this is just
to put a bow on it is that, inaddition to bringing in expert
help, you might also look foranalogs: situations or projects
(26:41):
or what have you that, eventhough not identical to the
thing that you are facing, atleast have some similarities
that relevantly map to whateveryou're dealing with.
And I'll give you an example ofthat, in my case.
This is the first time that anyof us have had to deal with AI
(27:01):
as a part of these systems thatwe're designing, at least the
kind of AI that we're dealingwith now.
But at least some of us wentthrough the radical
transformation that theworldwide web entailed.
And I'm seeing a lot ofparallels between what's going
on with AI and what I saw whenthe web happened in the early to
(27:26):
mid-nineties, and I'm using thatto help me orient myself in this
new world.
And that might not be perfect,but it's better than nothing,
right?
Harry (27:38):
Absolutely.
And as you say it, I realizethat is the reference case that
I lived through as well, and Ihave been using as I think about
the kind of transformation thatwe're living through right now.
The going from the 1993 NCSAbrowser to where we are today,
(28:00):
it's like there's a before andthere's an after.
And who in the world would'vepredicted where we are today?
Jorge (28:09):
Some of us who were alive then and working in the space
could have predicted that theworld would look different, but
we couldn't have said how.
And at least in my case, I betmy career on that, and that was
a bet that paid off for me.
And I think it's a similar thingnow.
Anyway, that feels like a rabbithole we could go down, and we
are running short on time here.
(28:30):
This is very useful and like Isaid, I've been aware of Boyd
and the OODA loop, but I haven'tdug in.
This is a really good incentiveto do that.
Harry (28:40):
Yeah, and it was an eminently readable book.
I learned something every fewpages and I feel like I've got a
much richer understanding of theworld, of our country, of why
wars happen, how they're foughtand won and lost.
Definitely put it on therecommended list.
Jorge (29:00):
It sounds like a fabulous recommendation.
Thank you for that, Harry.
Harry (29:03):
Yeah, certainly.
Thank you, Jorge.
Narrator (29:09):
Thank you for listening to Traction Heroes
with Harry Max and Jorge Arango.
Check out the show notes attractionheroes.com and if you
enjoyed the show, please leaveus a rating in Apple's podcasts
app.
Thanks.
Where is the just enough, just in time risk management?
(00:04):
Where's the just enough, just intime, and can you, without being
careless, or withoutdisregarding, facts as they are,
rather than how they should be,can you speed up to get better,
faster decisions, and makebetter, more effective actions?
Narrator (00:30):
You're listening to Traction Heroes.
Digging In to Get Results withHarry Max and Jorge Arango.
Harry (00:40):
Hey, Jorge, it's good to see you.
Jorge (00:42):
Always good to see you, Harry.
Harry (00:45):
It's come to a place where I look forward every time
I see your name on my calendar.
I'm like,"Yes! I'm gonna have agood day."
Jorge (00:53):
Oh, I know.
Same here.
it's a bit of a respite becausemost of my other calls are all
like project work, client work,right?
And these conversations are anopportunity to think about like
the meta-work.
It's like, how do you approachthe work as opposed to the work
itself.
Harry (01:12):
That's right.
And it's, not just changed theconversation for me, but it's
changing what I'm reading.
I'm selecting the books I'mreading and the articles I'm
reading with a new level ofintention that is not just to
enjoy for myself and learn formyself, but also how I might
share some of the enjoyment andshare some of the learning with
you and, hopefully, people whoare listening in.
Jorge (01:36):
That's also true for me.
But I will say this (01:38):
this year, I've been reading a lot of
humanity classics, really oldbooks, right?
In some cases, books that areliterally thousands of years
old.
And, I find myself reading thoseand thinking, which one of these
should I bring to Harry?
(02:00):
Knowing that it might take us abit further afield than we want
to go to.
But yeah, whenever I am readingnon humanities-related stuff,
I'm always approaching it with alens of,"Okay, so this might be
fodder for a Traction Heroesconversation." So I am paying a
(02:20):
attention differently to what Iingest.
With that in mind, we weretalking before we started
recording, and it sounds likeyou've brought a reading to
share today.
Harry (02:30):
I did.
And incidentally, I hadoriginally intended to reread
the section of the book that Ibrought a few weeks ago, when we
had our little audio mishap.
But I just finished reading abook for myself that I did not
expect, based on the way thebook was written, that I was
gonna find anything that I couldshare in it.
(02:53):
And yet, at the 13th hour,almost the last page, I found
something that I really wantedto share with you, and hopefully
other people will enjoy it aswell.
Like usual, I'll share the titleof the book when I'm done, just
so it doesn't perhaps send youdown a path that would make it
(03:15):
hard for you to listen to whatI'm reading.
Jorge (03:17):
I'm excited.
Let her rip.
Harry (03:19):
All right.
Here it goes.
"Concern for purpose, not merelyprocess, ends over means, and
the ethical dimension and moralconsequences of our conduct, is
important.
We need people who are moreconcerned about the mental and
moral aspects of the challenge,success and failure both on the
(03:43):
battlefield and in theboardroom, in Congress and in
the classroom, rather thanmerely the material aspects and
technological prowess of ourcapabilities.
"Technology springs from themind of humankind and should be
a servant, not our master.
It is in our minds that weconjure up both good and evil.
(04:07):
It is in our minds that we mustseek to have an impact if we
wish to change behavior.
The perception of the opponentis always the target.
Time is a free good, which, ifused to our advantage, can be a
force multiplier of immenseproportions.
Acting at the right time is asimportant or more important than
(04:32):
acting at the right place.
Wars are planned and foughtfirst in the minds of human
beings in peace time.
What we do between the conflictsduring ostensible periods of
peace is critical to what wewill do and how well we will
fare in the next conflict.
Jorge (04:55):
Okay, so I have not read this before.
I suspect that it's a book aboutmilitary matters just because of
all the talk of warfare and...
Harry (05:06):
It is.
It's a, book called The Mind ofWar, and it's on the life and
contributions of John Boyd.
You could call him the father ofthe F-16 fighter and the F-15
and the originator of the OODAloop, and he's considered to be
(05:29):
one of the greatest strategistswho ever lived and certainly a
military genius.
I wanted to learn more about himbecause the OODA loop, which
stands for observe, orient,decide, act, something we've
talked about before, is centralto decision-making and
action-taking, and I wanted abetter, richer, more nuanced
(05:50):
understanding of where it camefrom.
So, Grant Hammond wrote thisbook and it's a very intimate
portrait of Boyd and his lifeand it is really exceptional.
And I'm not one for readingbooks on war typically, but this
was really amazing.
Jorge (06:08):
I actually have a biography of John Boyd on my
reading queue, and I'm wonderingif it's the same book.
I have not read it.
Yeah, the one I have is calledBoyd: The Fighter Pilot Who
Changed the Art of War.
So it doesn't sound like it'sthe same thing.
Harry (06:25):
It is not, and I read that book as well, and it was a
good, fair, and somewhatilluminating portrayal of John
Boyd's life, but not of hismind.
And this book, The Mind of War,really gets into how he thought
(06:46):
about organizations, how hethought about process, how he
thought about technology, how hethought about change, and how he
thought about our responsibilityand our moral and ethical
responsibility in that context.
Jorge (07:03):
it sounds like that's definitely more up my alley.
We did talk about the OODA loopbefore, but I suspect that we
did that in a conversation thatwill not make the light of day
because we did have audioglitches.
This snippet that you read didnot address the OODA loop
(07:24):
specifically.
Was there something about itthat you wanted us to dive down
into or can I ask you about theOODA loop?
Harry (07:33):
Let's go straight for the OODA loop.
I think I have a much betterunderstanding of where Boyd was
coming from now, in the contextof discussing the OODA loop.
And I have many thoughts aboutthe OODA loop, which I have
thought about writing about andhave certainly been discussing
with people.
Jorge (07:51):
Okay.
First of all, acknowledging thatI don't know anywhere near
enough about this or as muchabout this as you do.
My impression of the OODA loophas always been that it's a type
of cybernetic loop.
What I mean by that is the ideathat you have some kind of
objective that you're aimingtoward and you make adjustments
(08:17):
on your way toward thatobjective.
You read your stance vis-a-visthat objective and correct
course as needed, right?
That's, in my mind, the basiccybernetic loop.
Is that a fair read?
And, if not, can you correct mybad impression of what an OODA
(08:37):
loop is?
Harry (08:39):
It was an absolutely fair read.
I think the thing is, it'ssomewhat incomplete in the
context of how Boyd applied it.
And the thing is, his discussionof how the OODA loop works
becomes very cerebral and veryabstract, and I think there's
(09:02):
perhaps a reason that hestruggled to write this down in
a book.
He gave briefings that were verydynamic and allowed him to
answer extemporaneously on thefly to questions and whatnot.
I'm not sure actually how muchhe valued prose and the context
of capturing his ideas in abook.
(09:23):
So maybe it's not fair to saythat he struggled with that.
But the idea is the OODA loop,the emphasis is really on two
pieces of the OODA loop.
The first is on the second O,which he called the Big O.
So the first O is observe, andthat is, what sensory data is
(09:45):
available.
The second O stands for orient,and one could take...
I certainly took an overlysimplistic view of what that
second O stood for, even thoughI had encountered some of his
writing in the past that talkedabout it in a more fluid and
(10:10):
richer way.
The second O this notion oforientation is really about how
you apprehend the world.
And it's a proxy for how weunderstand what's going on in a
dynamic way around us.
And the term"orientation" tendsto imply more of a
(10:34):
temporal-spatial understandingof what's happening moment to
moment.
So the idea is that the first O,which is observe or notice
what's going on around you, andthen apprehend the world,
understand your concept of theworld and what it means as it
(10:57):
relates to how you are movingthrough space and time before
you get to a decision and beforeyou take action.
So it wasn't simply see, figureout whether you're moving away
from something or towardssomething, then make a decision,
and then act on it.
It was really notice what'shappening around you, stay
(11:20):
conscious of how you areinterpreting the entire world as
it's unfolding in front of you,and then make your decisions and
act.
That was the first thing thatreally stood out for me from The
Mind of War, this book by GrantHammond, was that the second o
was significantly richer than Iever had an understanding of.
(11:44):
And the second thing that wasreally different from perhaps my
initial understanding of theOODA loop was, it's not simply
an iterative process that youroll through and get good at
like a martial art and that theOODA loop becomes, in effect,
(12:08):
cognitive repertoire of observe,orient, decide, act again and
again He really placed it in thecontext of a spiral of
tightening up in a more fluidway.
And I'm gonna read the next bookby Osinga on this to try to
(12:31):
better understand what thispiece of it is, but those were
really the two major takeawaysfor me that I think most of us,
as we learn about the OODA looptend to caricature it and don't
really wrap our minds aroundit's true power in the Boydian
(12:55):
sense.
Jorge (12:57):
I had never put these two together, but hearing you talk
about the OODA loop is making methink that it rhymes with hula
hoop, and it's driving me nuts.
Harry (13:07):
That's great.
Jorge (13:09):
But so, here's the thing.
You used this phrase"a spiral oftightening up," which I wanna
pinch and zoom on.
Because I'll tell you what, thatevoked for me, hearing you talk
about it, and it might besomething that I'm reading into
it just because I think I knowthe context in which Boyd came
up with this model, which isteaching fighter pilots how to
(13:39):
how to perform in dog fights.
Is that right?
Harry (13:41):
That's right.
Yeah, a hundred percent.
Jorge (13:45):
When I heard you say a spiral of tightening up, what
came to mind is, we can be verymethodical and conscious about
this loop of observing,orienting, deciding, and acting.
And what I mean by methodicalis, you can be very conscious
about,"What am I observing?
(14:06):
What am I hearing?
What am I reading?
What is...
what are my inputs?" You can bevery self-aware of your bearing
towards those things, how you'reorienting yourself or the...
how you're apprehending theworld or the attitude you're
adopting as a result of theseinputs.
(14:30):
Same with deciding and acting,right?
Like deciding, like I canimagine like you could make a
long list of,"I've perceivedthis on the pro side and I've
perceived this other thing onthe con side, and based on this
long list of things that I'massembling, I'm going to make
some kind of mathematical choiceabout how to decide, and then I
(14:51):
move on to act." And if you takethis very methodical approach,
you're gonna take a long time.
And a fighter pilot does nothave time to consciously go
through this.
So when I heard"tighteningspiral," what I imagine by that
is you almost wanna make this,become an unconscious behavior.
(15:16):
Is that right?
Harry (15:18):
I think that's exactly right.
Because, as I learned racingcars and driving motorcycles, if
you're thinking about it, it'stoo late.
Full stop.
Jorge (15:29):
Yeah, so let's map that onto the domain that you and I
are at.
Like, I've never, flown afighter jet in my life.
In fact, I've never flown anykind of airplane in my...
i've flown in airplanes, butI've never piloted one.
(15:49):
How does this apply to the kindof work that folks listening in
most folks listening in anywayto this show might care about.
Harry (16:00):
I've been thinking about that a lot as I've been reading
the book.
First I just want a quick shoutout to Hoyt Ng, who's the
Executive Director of Coachingand Programming for the MBA
School of Management at UCBerkeley, at the Haas School of
Business.
Hoyt and I worked together atDreamworks, and he was the guy
(16:21):
that really introduced me toJohn Boyd's work.
I knew of the OODA loop and Iknew of Boyd, but Hoyt really
was the guy who said,"You needto wrap your head around what
Boyd is saying." Hoyt is anamazing character in my life, I
wish I could see him more.
But as I've been reflecting onthe more practical application
(16:46):
of this, the exact distinctionyou're making is the thing that
comes to mind, which is, if youthink about the OODA loop as
this methodical, linearconscious process, it might be
helpful maybe from a decisionrights point of view to take
(17:07):
into account data that's comingin and figuring out what it
means and then making a decisionand then acting on it then doing
that over and over, managingdecision rights and managing
decision processes.
I have clients today that arestruggling with this, and
they're not struggling with itbecause it's getting tighter and
hula-hoopy, they're strugglingwith it because they don't have
(17:30):
any conscious representation ofhow to manage decisions in an
effective way, so they don'tslip backwards or come undone.
When I think about,"Okay, how amI gonna apply this as a leader?"
I think about and you commenteda minute ago on the notion of
(17:52):
possibly making an almostmathematically-informed
decision.
And I just put my hat on thatmaybe what I need to do is think
about this from a reverseFibonacci point of view.
You think about the Fibonaccisequence as a set of numbers
that get bigger and because eachnumber is the sum of the two
(18:12):
proceeding ones.
So it goes 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, and soon and so forth.
But if you think about this froma Boydian point of view, from an
OODA loop point of view, youmight say,"Oh, maybe step one is
34." And then you subtract (18:27):
you go 21 and then 13, and the
spaces are getting tighter andtighter all the way back to one.
And it's about speeding up yourdecision process in order to be
able to stay in front of what'shappening to you or what's
(18:48):
happening to your team or yourorganization.
And we're all experiencing thiswith artificial intelligence
right now and the growth of LLMsand agentic computing.
It is moving fast.
And if we sit...
it's moving really fast and ifwe sit around and get all
methodical about it, that mightbe helpful.
But what might be even morehelpful is recognize, how long
(19:12):
did it take me to make adecision and take action on it
last time?
Can I tighten that up?
What can I do to shore up thisreduce process?
Remove waste, take steps outthat don't matter as much.
Okay, if something breaks, maybeyou put something back in.
And I don't wanna be carelessabout it, but I do think there's
(19:32):
a certain amount of...
When we're developing processesand when we're developing
methods, we will oftenintentionally put steps in place
and put branches in the decisiontrees in place to accommodate
potential exceptions and maybemitigate risks that might come
(19:55):
up.
Not all of those are requiredand they might slow the process
down.
So where is the just enough,just in time process?
And where is the just enough,just in time risk management?
Where's the just enough, just intime, and can you, without being
careless, or withoutdisregarding, facts as they are,
(20:21):
rather than how they should be,can you speed up to get better,
faster decisions, and makebetter, more effective actions?
Jorge (20:33):
This might come across as self-serving, but I'm wondering
if one of the ways in which youcan tighten the loop is by
bringing in people who have moreexperience than you do.
Because one of the ways in whichwe might tighten this kind of
loop is by doing it over andover again to the point where we
(20:54):
internalize a lot of therelevant decision points.
I'm gonna talk about somethingthat I have no idea about, which
is flying aircraft, just becausethis is the subject here.
But I would imagine that anexperienced pilot who has flown
in many different kinds ofweather is, going to know what
(21:18):
kind of risks they can take whenskies get overcast or whatever.
Again, I'm talking completelywithout knowing about this, but
you know the constraints and thecapabilities of the context and
your equipment or what have youbetter if you've gone through
that situation in that sameaircraft, let's say, many times
(21:43):
before, as opposed to your firsttime doing it.
I would imagine that your firsttime doing it, you're gonna be
slower, right?
So you might want to bring in anexpert.
And I think that part of thechallenge with the AI stuff is
that we're all new to it.
(22:05):
It's not an area where there area lot of people who have been
doing it for a long time becauseit just hasn't been around for a
long time.
So, some of us have been doingit for longer than others, but
no one's been doing it for liketwenty five years, right?
So, we haven't yet had the timeto develop the, internal
(22:31):
shortcuts that allow us totighten the loop.
Harry (22:35):
I think that you're onto something here.
I made a couple of notes whileyou were talking, and I have a
couple of books sitting behindme that are on my list of things
to either finish reading oractually read, one of them being
Algorithms to Live By (22:51):
The Computer Science of Human
Decisions by Brian Christian andTom Griffiths, and the notion of
heuristics and understandingwhat these rules of thumb are,
it's how to think about aheuristic or an algorithm, in
effect, is a shortcut,potentially, for making one or
(23:17):
more decisions and taking actionin a way that it's a lot easier
to do if you're experienced.
Because the last thing you wantto do is take a shortcut if
you're in a critical situationand find that it leads you down
a road that, you know, strands,you.
And heuristics these rules ofthumb are ways of taking
(23:39):
advantage of well-trodden pathsthat are shorter and faster and
more expedient.
They're not always perfect, butthey certainly help you get
where you want to go quicker inmany cases.
And for example, I think at somepoint in the past we talked
about reference-basedforecasting or estimation from a
(24:00):
book called, How Big Things GetDone.
I don't remember the author'sname right now, I think it was
Flyvbjerg, and I can't reallypronounce it, horribly butchered
the way I'm sure I'm saying it.
But this notion of, if you'vegot a big complex project that
you're looking to estimate, themost effective way to estimate
(24:23):
and really understand both thewhat's likely to be the more
explicit and understandableaspects of the project and also
the hidden aspects of wherethings go wrong and take those
all into account is to do thisprocess that he calls
reference-based forecasting orestimation.
(24:44):
And that is to take a look atsimilar kinds of projects.
And that's a much better way ofestimating to understand the
realities of what's likely toturn out to be true, than to go
through a long, arduous processof decomposition and
(25:06):
deconstruction of all of thevarious things that are going
into a potentially large projector product development or design
effort.
That's an example of this,right?
Find experts, right?
Okay, so I want to do thisthing.
Who's done it before?
And how would they walk youthrough the thinking?
(25:29):
And where is it that you need tobe more intentional and
conscious and methodical, andwhere is it that you can rely on
rules of thumb andreference-based estimates to get
a better handle on what it'sactually gonna take?
Jorge (25:44):
And I would expect that that heuristic of looking for an
expert can help you especiallywith the two Os, with observing
and orienting, because if you'recompletely new to a situation,
you might not know what to lookfor, right?
You might not know what therelevant inputs are the relevant
(26:08):
data points on the one hand, andthen on the other hand, even if
you did know what the relevantdata points are, you might not
know what they mean.
So that's the orientation thing.
Harry (26:19):
Yeah.
Jorge (26:20):
And the other thing that I heard there and this is just
to put a bow on it is that, inaddition to bringing in expert
help, you might also look foranalogs: situations or projects
(26:41):
or what have you that, eventhough not identical to the
thing that you are facing, atleast have some similarities
that relevantly map to whateveryou're dealing with.
And I'll give you an example ofthat, in my case.
This is the first time that anyof us have had to deal with AI
(27:01):
as a part of these systems thatwe're designing, at least the
kind of AI that we're dealingwith now.
But at least some of us wentthrough the radical
transformation that theworldwide web entailed.
And I'm seeing a lot ofparallels between what's going
on with AI and what I saw whenthe web happened in the early to
(27:26):
mid-nineties, and I'm using thatto help me orient myself in this
new world.
And that might not be perfect,but it's better than nothing,
right?
Harry (27:38):
Absolutely.
And as you say it, I realizethat is the reference case that
I lived through as well, and Ihave been using as I think about
the kind of transformation thatwe're living through right now.
The going from the 1993 NCSAbrowser to where we are today,
(28:00):
it's like there's a before andthere's an after.
And who in the world would'vepredicted where we are today?
Jorge (28:09):
Some of us who were alive then and working in the space
could have predicted that theworld would look different, but
we couldn't have said how.
And at least in my case, I betmy career on that, and that was
a bet that paid off for me.
And I think it's a similar thingnow.
Anyway, that feels like a rabbithole we could go down, and we
are running short on time here.
(28:30):
This is very useful and like Isaid, I've been aware of Boyd
and the OODA loop, but I haven'tdug in.
This is a really good incentiveto do that.
Harry (28:40):
Yeah, and it was an eminently readable book.
I learned something every fewpages and I feel like I've got a
much richer understanding of theworld, of our country, of why
wars happen, how they're foughtand won and lost.
Definitely put it on therecommended list.
Jorge (29:00):
It sounds like a fabulous recommendation.
Thank you for that, Harry.
Harry (29:03):
Yeah, certainly.
Thank you, Jorge.
Narrator (29:09):
Thank you for listening to Traction Heroes
with Harry Max and Jorge Arango.
Check out the show notes attractionheroes.com and if you
enjoyed the show, please leaveus a rating in Apple's podcasts
app.
Thanks.
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