Unlocking the Power of Ancient Wisdom for Modern Leaders with James Gimian | Ep 24

What if ancient wisdom from The Art of War could improve your modern leadership skills? Join us for a captivating conversation with James Gimian, co-author with Barry Boyce of  The Rules Of Victory: How To Transform Chaos and Conflict; Strategies from The Art of War, as we explore the interconnected whole and how it applies to setting objectives and understanding complex adaptive systems theory.

Discover the importance of being present and self-aware in leadership, as we discuss situational awareness, the challenges of self-assessment, and the need for emotional intelligence training. Learn from examples in the aerospace industry and even a Taylor Swift song as we delve into the difficulty of self-awareness. Additionally, we explore military conflict management techniques and their applicability beyond warfare, revealing the triad of view, practice, and action as a tool for effective leadership.

Finally, we discuss how shifting our view and leadership strategies can lead to success, by looking at the interconnected whole through emulation, not imitation. We examine the power of mindfulness, psychedelics, and narrative-based approaches, diving into how these practices have been used in the US military and beyond. Don't miss this insightful episode that will empower you to thrive in complexity and become a more effective leader.

Be sure to use the Chapters Feature on Apple and Spotify to quickly browse and navigate to segments of this episode.

To learn more please visit:
http://www.rulesofvictory.com/

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Recent podcasts where you’ll also find Mark and Ponch:

Eddy Network Podcast Ep 56 – with Ed Brenegar
The School of War Ep 84 – with Aaron MacLean
Spatial Web AI Podcast – with Denise Holt
OODAcast Ep 113 – with Bob Gourley
No Fallen Heroes – with Whiz Buckley
Salience – with Ian Snape, PhD
Connecting the Dots – with Skip Steward
The F-14 Tomcast – with Crunch and Bio
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Transcript

Transcripts are machine generated and are NOT edited for grammar or spelling.

Mark McGrath: So, Jim, you were saying that you would just listen to our episode with Viv Reed, who came to us from down under, down in Australia. What were your were some of your thoughts? 
 
James Gimian : Well, i was only able to listen to a little bit of it And the part that really struck me was where she gave an example of kind of the the leader's mandate to improve customer service by ensuring that all calls would be answered in three rings. And they were faithful in doing that. But of course, what they couldn't anticipate was the collateral damage, the fact that in doing that they in fact caused a lot of customer complaints because they weren't either taking the time with the calls they had, they were jumping off the calls they were. They were not doing the customer service part by adhering to one rule, and the point that she made was lack of coherence, that they didn't look at the situation as a whole. Rather than using improved customer services the guideline, they isolated one action, specific action that people were rewarded for following and how, in fact, that produced the opposite result. So that's a central theme in the parts of the art of war that we've extracted in order to teach leadership training that it has to be about, starting with realization of the interconnectedness of the system and the fact that if you don't look at it as a whole, you will continually come up with those short-sighted actions. So I thought that was a great connector between the specific complexity approach. She was talking about the work she was talking about In the. 
 
James Gimian : As you all know, in the first chapter of the art of war it talks about the five, the assessment you can take in addition in in preparing for war, or in our case it's. It's the model we use when we're going to do a some kind of intervention with a team or a company. We'll interview people in advance, applying the five. So now heaven, earth, general and methods, all of them, not just what the general is doing or not, or the objective, but what's the big picture. You know, what's the heaven, what's the ground of the situation, what are the qualities of the leader, how are people experiencing that system? And you get a picture that's. That's, as she would say, coherent. Yeah, um, well, there's lots of ways we could go from there. No, i mean, that's just what I thought. 
 
Brian “Ponch” Rivera: Yeah, you're talking about the law of unintended consequences, some things like the Cobra effect that people may be aware of, and then taking, you know the whole, looking at the large perspective, the interconnectedness of the entire system, if you will. So as I'm reading through your, your book there, a couple of things stand out there The way you you call Sun Tzu, the Sun Tzu. and then two, it reminds me as I'm reading it, i'm reminded of complex adaptive systems theory. without going into complex adaptive systems theory, so just can you start there with why the Sun Tzu and not Sun Tzu? 
 
James Gimian : Sure, um and I think that leads a little bit into the second point that you raise It may or may not be the case that some single historical fat person, uh, with that name existed, or Sun Woo with that name, existed. Um, and I would say, you know, the scholars and historians are not unified in the view about that. But if, even if that was the case, what has been handed down to us as a text, remnants of a much long, a longer work, is the accumulated wisdom of leaders in the warring states period over many, many years and many, many campaigns, and seeing, seeing it that way, speaks to the content. So we're not talking about a single dominant, brilliant, exemplary leader who has the wisdom, and we don't. We're talking about the fact that this was created by conversations, from campaign to campaign, by leaders trying to figure out how to do something better, and so it evolved and it changed. And so when we use it to talk about leadership and leadership training in a current context, we actually invite participants to take that view that they are part of that stream of leaders going back centuries who are essentially sharpening fundamental human leadership qualities which are resident in all of us, not some removed ancient Asian wisdom that we have to struggle to connect to because it's foreign And that just changes the dynamic. 
 
James Gimian : So calling it the Sun Tzu means that we're acknowledging that there may have been one historical person, but really this is wisdom that was gained in an evolutionary sense over a long period of time, through a period in China that was surprisingly much like the period we're living through now, and it makes the learning process different, because we're then speaking to current leaders who are not dumb. They have instincts, internal wisdom and through practice study that can be sharpened and that can be joined, so the learning process becomes changed in that way. I'm not sure Did I get to the second part of your question in that? 
 
Brian “Ponch” Rivera: Not on the complex adaptive system side. I think we're heading that direction And that's that second part. Can you correct me on the pronunciation of? 
 
James Gimian : Sun Tzu. I mean, i'm not a Chinese scholar or affluent in Chinese, but I was trained by. The co-director of the translation process was the head of Chinese studies at Bowdoin College and a 40-year friend, and he was the one who provided us with the gloss translations that, when we were doing the work, was the fodder for us coming up with the best English translation. Sun Tzu. 
 
Mark McGrath: Okay, before we go into the complexity, just following what you just said, if people start looking at their own environment as the warring states period and you start the book off like that, you paint a description and everybody would say, yeah, that sounds like what I'm dealing with every day in any industry, in life, and raising children and going to work, whatever. 
 
James Gimian : Totally. And we have that reaction every time we were in a workshop And you know it. As I said, it changes the ground of the learning process when people identify so immediately that it is the reality we're facing now, the uncertainty, the constant change, the interconnectedness which for some time we've forgotten was the ground of the world we deal with and we attempt to lead. So it does help create, you know, a lot of people will say to us. Well, what does this ancient Chinese text have to do with me? 
 
James Gimian : You know, the art of war seems like it's hard to understand. I'm going to spend a lot of time, I'm never going to get there. Why? Well, in extracting some of the basics from it to apply to a leadership, a broad leadership training conversation, it creates the ground of talking about what's important to people, what they experience And, like you say, everybody's experience is things are uncertain, increasingly uncertain, they're changing constantly. It's hard to make a plan and fulfill it. You don't know about your supply chain, you don't know if you can be able to get the labor that you need to do your job, i mean on every front. And this was, you know, what all the scholars and books on the warring states will tell you was characteristic of this time in China. Over several hundred years, all of the rules and regulations and laws and cultural norms were being reshaped and reformed, and so the art of war was a manual for a leader dealing with that reality, and that's why it is so helpful and relevant to our times. 
 
Mark McGrath: You draw two really big distinctions too. You say at the very beginning to set us, to set the course for the rest of the book. You tell people that in the warring states period they had a view as an interconnected whole. Right As you say, there's not one dominant leader. You go on to say that leadership is everybody's business in the entire system, not just one person or a team of people at the top. It's something that we all do, correct. 
 
 James Gimian : Totally. If you define it simply as you have an aspiration, you have a goal, you have obstacles to that goal and it's not always specifically conflict, but it's definitely resistance And you have to get through that to accomplish your goal. There's nobody in life that doesn't have that dynamic And that's where a lot of the lessons of the art of war would be very helpful for a leader. So it's not a class Now in. The interesting thing about the warring states period is that in the beginning there were no standing armies. So if the king wanted to take over the neighboring kingdom he had to do two things One, hire a general who were mercenaries in the time then would work for different kingdoms and different kings on different campaigns, often fighting a kingdom that they then had previously led. And the second thing was, since there were no standing armies, they conscripted farmboys, untrained young men who worked on the farm in their kingdom. 
 
 James Gimian : So one of the reasons the art of war is so compelling is it's a manual, for how do you take a group like that and form them into a disciplined, highly effective, coordinated group? How do you create deep cultural norms and systems within which a previously relatively untrained person could flourish? That again is a very valuable lesson for our times. You know, you've heard many, many times if you need as a leader, you need a strategy and a character. You should choose a character, because no strategy survives contact with the enemy. Or the simpler version that Mike Tyson said everybody's got a plan until they get punched in the nose. You know. So culture, you know, eats strategy for breakfast. So that's why the manual, the art of war, is so powerful The means to create deep culture and systemic training for a group of people acting successfully in a coordinated fashion during a time of great uncertainty. 
 
 Brian “Ponch” Rivera: I want to come back to culture here in a moment, because culture is central to a lot that we talk about with Boyd's OODA Loop and there's a lot of unknowns there. 
 
 Brian “Ponch” Rivera: And going back to the complex adaptive systems side of the house, when we talk about complexity theory and understanding VUCA, we look at what's possible and adjacent possible, and in the book that you have you talk about, we want to look at not new ways of doing things, but rather a new way of being. 
 
 Brian “Ponch” Rivera: So that's kind of what we're asking for people to do when we talk about complexity theory is to understand what's happening now, what's going on around them, and we can move in different directions as we go right. So this new way of being or thinking about being has another connection. We don't want to copy other people. We want to understand what's going on within our system and emulate from others. So in complex adaptive systems there we talk about exacted practices, borrowing something from somewhere else that was intended for another purpose and using the features of that for what we're using now. All right, so there's, I think what's in your book is a solid connection of let's shift away from copying folks to really putting into work, to understanding what's going on around us And that's what we push for in complexity theory and then find out what's possible from there. Is that consistent with your thinking? 
 
 James Gimian : That's beautiful. Yes, very well said and completely consistent and very helpful for me. I'm sitting here making notes to start stealing some of the language that you formed to weave into our conversations. Did you say something called the? 
 
 Brian “Ponch” Rivera: adjacent possible. The adjacent possible We get this from Dave Snowden and I'm sure he gets it from somewhere else too. But when we look at our system, we're looking at what's already existing in the system and we try to amplify the things we want and dampen the things we don't want. To make some clarity on this and make another connection here is we don't try to describe a future perfect, utopian end state and close the gap from where we think we are today to where we want to be in the future, because there's so many obstacles between us and there It's never going to be a direct path. That's kind of why we want to look for multiple perspectives to see what's possible. So that's the connection there that I think, when I'm reading your book, that I see strongly make a connection back to complex adaptive systems theory and what Boyd was looking at as well. 
 
 James Gimian : Totally. You have raised two related but sort of different themes that could take up the rest of our conversation, but I'll say a little bit about each of them and see where we want to go from there. One of them is this notion of focusing on the being part, not the doing part, and that has several features. One is and I think you've alluded to this We are never going to be present at whatever future campaign the people we train or talk to are going to be facing. We can't know all of the changing factors they're going to be dealing with. So any specific guidance we give them about what to do, if it's too specific, it's obviously not going to fit or work for them. So what we have to do is give them the capacity to see clearly and respond to whatever emerges in front of them. So I would think the work that we're trying to do focuses on the O in the OODA Loop, on the observe part, and so that's where working on the being how do we know things? I mean one shorthand we use is all effective action arises from clear seeing. If we can't see the situation clearly, then any action is going to be a flailing about. In that context And what we do in the workshops is the first give people an experience in very kind of simple, graphic ways of how they're in fact not seeing clearly, and there's so many ways. 
 
 James Gimian : You know, Daniel Kahneman has written really great stuff on just how the mind works, and so it's really important for a leader to be aware of those obstacles to seeing clearly, and that's sort of why we emphasize, you know, the being part as the first part. That's also why we integrate nervous system regulation practices. You know, if a leader can't regulate their own nervous system, they're not going to give the opportunity for the people on their team to regulate theirs. Matter of fact, i can't remember who the great leadership, business leadership writer was who said that in fact could be the greatest leadership skill is being able to regulate your nervous system. So breathing practices, attention in mind, training practices also in terms of the being part, listening and seeing practices all those kinds of things contribute to that first part of being able to see the situation clearly, from which effective action on the spot in changing circumstances can arise. 
 
 Brian “Ponch” Rivera: You're talking about being present, right, like here, in the here and now, exactly So. This is a hard thing to coach organizations is don't tell me where you want to be. Tell me where you are right now from multiple perspectives, right, and they can't do this, and I think it has to do with the fact that humans are kind of lazy and we don't like putting in the work. Is being present, hard work in your mind? 
 
 James Gimian : Well, i don't think it's actually that hard. I think that we have multiple recurring natural experiences of it in our lifetimes, daily, but somewhere along the line we've been convinced or accepted that It wasn't a high-valued skill and that we had to, out of probably insecurity. If we didn't know the skills or if we didn't join the club of lawyers or whoever it was that had the training, we couldn't convince others that we had the capacity to offer anything very helpful. That change has happened in the last 10 or 15 years. From my observation, when we would be doing leadership workshops 15 or 20 years ago we talk about the so-called soft skills which we're talking about now There would be nobody who'd really want to hear it or think it had any value. 
 
 James Gimian : Now we have the HR people seeking out that kind of training because they know it's essential for the worker. They need in this time the leader foremost emotional intelligence skills, so to speak. So, being present at the last workshop that we did, these are largely engineers in the aerospace industry. The thing at the end we always ask them at the end just one thing If there's one thing that you're going to take away and learn and integrate, tell us what it is and tell us why. At least half of them said that the emotional regulation, the nervous system regulation, breathing practices and the mind training practices were foremost because they had immediate applicability to the challenges that they were facing Coming into a meeting, leaving whatever had just happened totally behind and seeing what was going on in this meeting, being present, just like you're saying. So now there's a recognition. I think we could move more quickly, the more it's accepted as what a standout leadership quality is and how it can help. 
 
 Brian “Ponch” Rivera: So there's a huge parallel to what we're doing right now with situational awareness three levels of essay what's happening now and then what could happen in the future, and a lot of it has to do with being present as a team, looking at their context. Now let me give you another example. in the cockpit of aviation, one of the worst things you can do is sit around and wonder what happened, right, because that will kill you right. 
 
 Brian “Ponch” Rivera: What's more important is what's happening now. You can always come back and figure out what happened later when you're done flying right. So there's many great examples of this in the industry, and I'll give you right now my mom's in palliative care here in Colorado, trying to keep the family focused on what's happening now, because what happened in the past isn't going to fix what's happening now. And this is really important when we talk about the art of feedback loops and debriefing and things like that. So what you're saying resonates with a lot of the work we're doing now, but the angle you're coming at it is so powerful because you're also connecting it back to the individual right. What's in it for them? Because they could take this away and use it right now. You're right, we could spend many, many hours on this. Mark any thoughts that you want to reject? 
 
 Mark McGrath: Well, yeah, we talk often about. I have a series of things from that, but the one thing that really struck me, Jim, was it seems to me that people have a very hard time of looking in the mirror and doing the necessary self-awareness assessments in order to get that point where they can have effective situational awareness. Now I have four teenagers, two daughters, and there's a song that I've heard 20 million times, recently called Antihero, by Taylor Swift, But there's this line where it says I'll stare directly at the sun but never in the mirror, And that, as much as I'm sick of hearing that song over and over again, that line really stands with and sticks with me because I can think of leaders throughout my life. And I'm guilty of this too. I mean not even guilty. we all do this right. We have a hard time doing that necessary self-awareness, that very seemingly Eastern thing of self-knowledge, in order to gain that situational awareness that we need to thrive in our own version of warring states, to thrive in that complexity that we encounter every day, 24-7, 365. 
 
 James Gimian : Yeah, I mean in my observation, those tough lessons are often only learned in the wake of failure. I mean, i think, in aggregate the reason why relational approaches like complex adaptive systems, the stuff that you guys are teaching people there's an openness to that now, because people have just seen how command and control feeling you can make a strategic plan based on some dependable data just isn't working, it's just failed, and so there's an openness. So oftentimes a very powerful learning thing not with clients that you hire, but in some situations that are right is allowing people to fail Absolutely, because that's the only way that they're going to accept something as their insight in wisdom when they're not ready to accept something coming from the outside your course or your lessons And oftentimes you can point to that in the middle of a workshop How's that working out for you? 
 
 Brian “Ponch” Rivera: There's a saying we use and we learn more from failure than we do from success, and we always remember success differently than we remember failure. So when somebody has an outstanding project or product that they developed, their success is basically on how well they perform, when in fact, it could be due to luck. So, there's a nice connection there. Command and control military methods And I think I'm going to get this term wrong Bing fa. Am I saying that right? Bing fa? 
 
 James Gimian : Bing fa. That's, bing fa is actually the title of the text. Okay, bing is war. The neat thing about the Chinese language is a single character has the range of meaning. So Bing means weapon, soldier, general army warfare not general, but army warfare, so it means the whole range. Fa is methods, so rules of victory is actually a different way of translating Bing fa. It's kind of a secret thing we don't talk about. But rules as method, victory is, bing is military is. So that's what Bing fa is really the title of the text. 
 
 Brian “Ponch” Rivera: So a lot of folks in industry push back on lessons from the military right And they're like, wow, we can't learn anything from there. But it's not just military warfare, it's really conflict or competition right. 
 
 James Gimian : Right, and that's the. You're absolutely right, and that's something everybody understands. 
 
 Brian “Ponch” Rivera: But you can still learn a lot from military Correct. Well, you can. 
 
 James Gimian : I mean, i know there's a stigma for many And we do our best in extracting lessons from the art of war that don't emphasize the military. 
 
 James Gimian : But you know, a lot of the learning that we do is we have people reading lines from the text and gaining their own insight And we make it clear to them that we've been doing this for 35 or 40 years And inevitably we'll hear something new and fresh and interpretation of the text that we've never heard before. 
 
 James Gimian : It's an ongoing, you know, wisdom, but one of the features is that we'll give people a list of. Well, if you read the word enemy, it doesn't really mean someone who means lethal harm, because that's not the context you live in, but it does mean resistance to what you're trying to accomplish. Do you experience that? And so all the words that are in the text as military terms we've given broad general meaning to enable people to get to the gist of how it's a leadership manual in dealing with conflict and, in certain times, not just a. You know how do you destroy your or trick. You know your enemy, and it doesn't take long working in a group for people to see the value in the lessons from the text. So that's kind of how we get around it. 
 
 Mark McGrath: In conflict. You do a really good job of defining and making everyone aware that we try this to. It's not just capital C conflict in the battle of marathon or the Blitzkrieg that John Boyd talked about. He even could extract the principles that conflict is everywhere. Humans are involved. So if it's cold outside, i'm in conflict with the weather. I'm in conflict with organizing my kids to get them together in a car. Like you're constantly in conflict. That's the experience of living in complexity. 
 
 James Gimian : No, Yeah, we have taken to use the word obstacle as much as conflict. It's easier for people to see things without feeling it's a warlike reality that we're trying to drag them into. So that's kind of. But you're absolutely right, it's. I did have once a lawyer who maintained that the whole book was unfounded because he didn't experience any conflict. Conflict was not a reality of the world And I thought okay, that's an acceptable point of view If you can make that work for you. 
 
 Brian “Ponch” Rivera: Yeah, well, we know neurons are in conflict, cells are in conflict, and I think you looked at this in your book too. You looked at neuroscience to understand feedback processes, right, and I think you gave it a number. There are 10 times the number of feedback century signals in the brain. That number is fantastic when you think about it. It's happening. 
 
 James Gimian : So you did look into neuroscience, You looked outside of just No, we really learn a lot now from neuroscience and behavioral science in terms of how the brain works and perception and all these things that we thought we knew all about, and that's changed dramatically in the last 15 or 20 years And it's been very helpful. And I'm sure you've experienced exactly the same thing that we do, that things that we learned or knew or observed but there wasn't broad acceptance for. Now every week a new book comes out that confirms exactly what something like the art of war has been saying for thousands of years, or more recent text, so it's made the job a lot easier. 
 
 Brian “Ponch” Rivera: Yeah, so I'm going to anchor on this. This is great Large learning models, which include chat, gpt three and four. They have limitations They lack the ability to actively engage with the external environment. They're cannelly closed systems. I'm not going to say they're closed systems. What we're talking about here and you've known this for many, many years is we need to actively engage with our environment. That's an adaptive system. So what you just pointed out there the neuroscience, the neuroscience and artificial intelligence is starting to find out the why behind what you've told people for years, jim. It's pretty amazing. We got to be open to the external environment And there's a lot more in your book. 
 
 Brian “Ponch” Rivera: You talk about containers in the book a little bit, putting a boundary around things, and that's a lot that we talked about as well. You also have a triad, and I think this is very important, and what I mean by triad it's got the view, practice and action Right Right And embedded in those are some pretty important things. Can you walk us through that triad of thinking, of view, practice and action? 
 
 James Gimian : Sure, and it's just a helpful way to separating as a lot of systems are separating the elements and to have a more helpful and productive conversation. And actually this model is in broad use in the coaching world. When I took a more formal coaching course, that was one of the models that was amusingly one of the models that was given that we have our view, which is, as you know, the cultural values, the deep beliefs, the assumptions that shape our practices, and the practices are the whole body of methods that we employ to express that view And then they result in a particular action. I mean, the example I think in the book we use is I live in Nova Scotia, canada, and forests are a predominant component of the economy here. There's one body of people who consider the product to be the tree And so that, in that view, harvesting trees and turning them into lumber is the action that they take And that has about a 60-year cycle, meaning you clear, cut a forest, turn it into logs for making pulp or wood and you've got to wait 60 years for that forest to regenerate, to be harvested again. In the meantime you have a lot of land that's devastated and also you have monoculture, because you're looking for one tree and most forests are multicultural. Water in smaller part of the industry sees the forest as the product. So the methods in that product are selective cutting through, using other means. You're not using feller bunchers machines that come in, grab a bunch of trees, cut them in and stack them. You may be using horses or other non-impactful to the forest means of harvesting wood And that would maybe going for things like finished carpentry, making instruments higher value. And they're not saying one's good or bad. What I'm saying is the different view produces different methods, leads to different actions. One of my favorite examples is if you believe that people are stupid and they're bad, then your methods are going to be screaming and yelling and meeting out punishments. That's your methods. That's your methodology. And what happens on the shop floor? somebody screws up and you scream at them and you fire. I mean that's just a consistent view. 
 
 James Gimian : Practice and action in the coaching world And I think it's what we've been saying for a long time is when people have failure on the action part, something doesn't work. Generally speaking, the line goes back to practices. You pull another practice out of the bag and you try to have some success. But really nowadays, particularly when we're talking about such dramatic change in uncertainty, the only effective leadership approach is to go back to the view That unless you can broaden your way of looking at that challenge and see it in a different, bigger way, it will not allow new practices to emerge that you'll need for that particular challenge. 
 
 James Gimian : So you know most of the, i would say one of the two or three main themes that we talk about in the workshop and in the coaching that I do is shifting your view, the capacity to be able to do that, to extract yourself from the cognitive biases, the confirmation bias, primarily, that you always see what you're looking for. That leads you to confirm your view. That leads you to fall back on the same family of practices. That leads often to consistent failure on the application. Is that what you're asking? Let's continue with this. 
 
 Brian “Ponch” Rivera: So the connection here? there may be a connection to orientation, the way you use orientation in your book and the way John Boyd looks at orientation. What I heard from you just now is we need to look at the system, the whole, and really reorient around that. You know, figure out, update our internal model of the external world, if you will, one way to think about it, or improve your, reshape your orientation. So that's kind of what I heard from you just now. I do want to ask you a question about your use of orientation and the connection to the word orientation in your book and if there's a connection to view, to the way you use the word view. 
 
 James Gimian : So say that again. So you use this. 
 
 Brian “Ponch” Rivera: So you do use the word orientation in your book and then view Are they the same? Is there similarity or overlap Orientation? 
 
 James Gimian : I think orientation in the way we wrote about it, was just giving the reader another handle to understand. So I think it's very much parallel. Well, we tried to give in that section three or four different gateways or doorways to understand what we meant by view. But that's definitely the case And I think you're right. What we would call shifting the view is about orientation in the biggest possible way, and it's not just understanding the particular system, but it's understanding where the system fits into any larger system as well. 
 
 Brian “Ponch” Rivera: Right, so we're not just running out there and picking up the new practices just because Deloitte or BCG or Mackenzie says we need to use them. We're actually looking at our current context and then emulating. right, this is the emulation thing. We're not going to imitate what everybody else does, And that goes back to understanding your current condition. Where are you being present and things like that. 
 
 James Gimian : Totally Well said Yeah. 
 
 Brian “Ponch” Rivera: So, I just want to make sure I got a grasp on the triad of view, practice and action. 
 
 Mark McGrath: That's very helpful. 
 
 Mark McGrath: It seems like a very relatable practical example that you have in your book for leaders is the one section where it's like Tom and his team. And the way you describe Tom is sort of like any leader in a sort of a Western viewpoint, where they come up with all kinds of creative solutions that they learned at Harvard or wherever And they're going to implement all of those with their teams, like chess pieces or boards pieces on a board. They move around And then the transformation, the reorientation, if you will, the, looking at it in a different way Tom comes up with well, wait a minute, what if I treated these people differently and I'm more empathetic to their own situation and who they're leading and look at this as a dynamic whole rather than me being some kind of a you know a marionette master? And then, as you say, he winds up with less control but a lot more power and influence on the direction and mission of the system. 
 
 James Gimian : Yeah, i think that you've touched upon another element that we were talking about before, about why often people won't include them in the themselves in the equation, won't want to look in the mirror, as you put it. It's scary to approach every situation as being so fresh and different that it may be resistant to your bag of tricks. You know, one of the really wonderful things about the art of war, i'd say, stated in two different places. one is the victories cannot be transmitted in advance. You can't tell somebody That's going to be the most effective situation because it's going to come out of those circumstances. Another one of the lines is Victory is determined in accordance with the enemy, that it's relational. I mean those words are heavily laden victory, enemy. but we could say the solution arises from whatever the mix of elements in the situation are. 
 
 James Gimian : Now, for a leader, thinking that you can apply some tool you've mastered to that set of circumstances gives you a certain set of I would say partially false confidence that you're going to be able to meet the moment and be successful. 
 
 James Gimian : But it's a lot scarier, particularly for the way we've been trained in our educational system, growing up, to feel the success can come from a deep relationship of knowing, with that set of circumstances, a trust that the interdependence of that situation and the fact that it's continually changing will in fact give rise to opportunities for solutions that you could not have predicted in advance, and the confidence to sit in that uncertainty. I mean, that is really a challenge for a leader. but you know what? I think many of the leading leadership training programs are trying to produce people who will have the confidence to be in the unknowing, to be in direct relationship with whatever is emerging in their team or in their situation, and trust that, in the ever-changing circumstances of interconnection, there will be an opening, there will be an opportunity, there will be something that you couldn't have predicted and you can seize upon that. 
 
 Brian “Ponch” Rivera: So the rules of victory actually help build that confidence and complexity, right? Is that what you're kind of alluding to? 
 
 James Gimian : That's the hope and certainly in some cases, the evidence. We hear great stories of breakthrough. One of the lessons of the art of war in what I was telling you about with the conscription of farm boys for creation of armies, is that, you know, if there's a lesson of the art of war that's best known, it's the greatest. Success is not 100 victories, it's without fighting, it's subduing the other without fighting. Well, the insight there can be connected to I mean, we can't say where it came from, we don't know but it could be connected to the fact that at a certain point the two armies fighting each other were all made up of the farm boys in those warring states. And so the Sunza talks about the leader who realized that if they attained victory by destroying the opposing army, there'd be nobody left to grow food when they took over that part of the kingdom. So we relate that to take corporate takeovers examples and things like that. 
 
 James Gimian : So we had numerous people. We have a slide that shows soldier, farm boy with a circle in the X. You know, kill one, kill the other. And after the workshop we would have people come to us and say all I needed to do is show my colleague this, you know. In other words, we had people from the finance department and people from the shop floor fighting about reports and sharing of information and how it's going to happen, and they had forgotten the fact that they were part of an interconnected whole that needed to produce success for the company. And so, finally, one of them said this is what we're doing, you know. By fighting, we're killing our chances to be successful. So there was just an insight there We can look at this differently and it produces, you know, a success. 
 
 Mark McGrath: John. 
 
 James Gimian : Boyd was the point we started with in terms of Yeah, it made me think. 
 
 Mark McGrath: you know John Boyd. the one book that he never could really find fault with was the Sun Tzu, like the Art of War. And one of the books that he did find a lot of fault with although he took some of it well was Clausewitz, and Boyd emphasized repeatedly that with Clausewitz it all seems to end in some kind of attritional bloodbath And in business that we might define that maybe as some exorbitant expenditure of capital, or buying this new system or doing this takeover or whatever that you know. quote unquote looks great on paper, but when we ignore what the Sun Tzu is talking about, we're missing the overall connection of the whole. We're missing the much bigger picture. Our thinking maybe is not as long range or as big as it could be. Is that following along? Yeah, totally. 
 
 James Gimian : I think the only thing I'd like to add to that and it's more about, you know, the comments that I've been making is that we're definitely not describing this as a zero sum game in terms of all of the western models being faulty and the Art of War being pristine and always correct or always the right answer, or that a trained, successful leader, an executive in the business, doesn't have to have a bag of tricks or shouldn't rely on the training that they've received. And I think one of the great examples of that is Dr. Groupman was a Harvard doctor who wrote about medical challenges and doctor challenges, and he wrote a book about how doctors miss key things in their diagnosis and it turns out to be fatal for the patient. And what he talked about in that book is that doctors need and use an algorithm that they employ when they're facing a patient. The patient presents something and it triggers an algorithm. If this, then I'll go down that path and I'll follow this in terms of a diagnosis, and it often has to be done in a very tight container, a very short period of time. And what he pointed out was that that algorithm defined and contained, but, as any container, it left some things in and it left some other things out. 
 
 James Gimian : Now, in the end, dr Groupman's final recommendation was not we've got to throw out the algorithm, he said, and this is really stunning and wonderful for us. 
 
 James Gimian : He said all the doctor has to do is to put in, to insert some 30 second gap in that, in employing that process, allowing things that don't fit to come in to see things for that 30 second gap, for 30 seconds from a slightly different perspective. So that's a pretty simple remedy. It's not saying throw out all the ways that the brain works or that you know the, the, the, the, the learnings and systems that we have. We have a lot of respect for those. But what we're adding to that in the training we're doing is saying all you need is a little awareness of how the brain has been trained to acquire information and the limitations of that, cognitive biases and things like that And to put in a little gap somewhere in there And that's where a lot of the mind training exercises come from to enable some other way of seeing to come in in the midst of that. So in a way, it's like it's not shock and awe, it's more like gap and awe. 
 
 Brian “Ponch” Rivera: You know. So this, this, when we scale this out to a team because it sounds like an individual thing, we use red team technique, red teaming techniques, so ways to mitigate cognitive biases. We use chaos theory to our advantage. We use wisdom of crowds, we separate, we talk about chaos theory, or use a shallow dive on the chaos. We're trying to break any connection between humans in that case. So it's a high energy approach where we don't want people to know the other person's answer, right. So what we get from that is kind of this gap, right, And that's what we're trying to tell people is to go from system one thinking to system two thinking. 
 
 Brian “Ponch” Rivera: You know that the high energy approach that what Conerman talks about, which requires energy to do that, and that's what you're asking folks to do too is find the energy to go from system one what we're the way our brains normally work in an autonomic response to slowing that down to a higher energy approach. So that's that. That relates well with what we're work, coach and organizations. When we do that, there's so much more to unpack here. There's the in the book you talk about deception you talk about. 
 
 Brian “Ponch” Rivera: Hopefully I get the name right. 
 
 James Gimian : But hold on a second. I just don't want to leave this moment uncommon. I'd like to take your, your training, whatever, whatever opportunities are. Every time I hear about what you are doing in response to our conversation, it is a. It is a very, in the most positive sense, dense and rich response to the kinds of issues we're talking about. I mean, i tend to talk about it on a 30,000 foot level and we dip down and give people an experience of. It Sounds to me like you're doing very deep training in groups with these things, with all these kinds of fairly, fairly sophisticated systems, that that will produce the same kind of experiences we're talking. Yeah, well, let's talk about that. 
 
 James Gimian : Do you do this in a weekend? Do you do this in a four year? four year engagement, it depends, right. 
 
 Brian “Ponch” Rivera: So let's walk through this real fast and we'll kind of give some insights here, and I think you brought up some things. So what I heard from you earlier is you're going to help people understand how the brain kind of functions right, and the way you're going to do that, from what I heard in this conversation, is you're going to take them through some type of troop test, some type of illusion, some type of like a mooney test or something like that, where they you show them, you show them how their brain tricks them right And then you explain to them why that's happening. We do the same thing, but we do that through the OODA loop And now that we're having this conversation, we can back that up with Eastern philosophy and we can connect it to the latest in neuroscience, which includes active inference and the free energy principle, the constructal law, from physics, constructor theory, assemblage theory. We're taking all these things that are out there and, by the way, you and I talked about this before, there's nothing new under the sun, right, these are not new concepts. They've existed elsewhere, and what I'm learning from you is what we're learning from you is the Eastern philosophy has had this as a known quantity before, just using a different language to share it. So that training I believe it connects back to the way of being right. 
 
 Brian “Ponch” Rivera: If we coach you on these things, you now have a fundamental understanding of kind of how the universe works. I hate to say that, but that's kind of what we're trying to show folks A low energy approach, meaning that I'm not going to take you through all the you know, kinevan framework, the deep knowledge of cybernetics or anything like that. I was going to give you the basics and I have to reassure you that we know as a company that we understand the theory behind this as well, and then from there we can build practices up, including red teaming things, mindfulness practices. You know how teams work, what the concept of flow, which I want to talk about here in a second with you. But we take them through that and we could do that in four hours, six hours, 16 hours, 40 hours. 
 
 Brian “Ponch” Rivera: Right, it depends on who are we training And then, of course, they need to coaching behind that. This is different than what is being sold to most organizations right now is follow this framework and magical things will happen. And we're like that's not true, that framework and I just wrote this to the day it's like going to a basketball game and as a spectator, and now you're qualified to coach, to go coach a or go help an orchestra out right, because I saw the framework of a team over here. Therefore, i know how this works. 
 
 Brian “Ponch” Rivera: That's not it. So I do believe there's a lot of overlap with what you've been doing in the past, and I do want to get back to some of your successes you've had. I think you had some pretty big names that you worked with in the past as well, but I don't think we're doing anything different than what you're doing. 
 
 James Gimian : I think what I'm saying is that you are employing I mean, when I look at the flow system guide that I downloaded in Red Thru and I look at the three pillars and I see what's underneath them, i would say half and I think I mentioned this last time half of them are things that were not deep experts in but have informed how we're doing, what we're doing under the guise of an ancient language, and the other half of them are maybe things I've heard of and sometimes things I haven't heard of, and it feels to me that you are fairly, you know, thoroughly incorporating a lot of emerging knowledge in these areas into something that can be experienced by the client as pretty well integrated whole that then can be adjusted to particularly who they are and what they need, and that's just very impressive to me. 
 
 James Gimian : And I'm saying that, yes, there are lots of parallels, but I think I would say, you know, ours is more, our program is more immersed in the kind of contemplative being stream of it and not nearly as fleshed out, you know, fleshed out in the more sophisticated current. I mean, there was a learning annual conference, really gosh. When was it in the late 90s to the 2000s, here in Halifax that brought together people who I don't know if you would have heard them now people out Peter Senge, adam Cahin, meg Wheatley and you know we were all really lucky to be able to kind of spend a lot of intense time And so a lot of the familiarity with the things that you're talking about came from that area and have seeped into what we do. But I'm just very impressed at the the comprehensive nature of what it is that you're able to bring together. 
 
 Brian “Ponch” Rivera: And I think that's the, the, the connection to have these conversations. We learn more in this conversation than we will do anywhere else, right, in fact, when I, when we lead a workshop or a talk, we're excited to do that because we have that's where we're going to make new connections. Right, and that's why we're doing this podcast is no one person knows enough to do this. 
 
 Brian “Ponch” Rivera: Right, it takes a team it takes, a network So we can help others understand what really matters when it comes to either agility or fighting off deception or manipulation or fourth generation warfare You name it. There's so many connections here that I don't think people really can grok at the moment, and that's why we're doing this podcast. To bring you in, mark. You had a point. Yeah, it's fun, yeah. 
 
 Mark McGrath: Well, i mean, if you meet our other teammates and the rest of the folks in our network, i mean you hit on. I mean we're all students, we're all learning. No one person can know everything. And, more importantly, when you engage with us, i think one of the critical distinctions is you know we could go in and do a workshop and give a great talk and then we leave, and then everybody's left to say, okay, now what? And in the approach that we take is, since it's scalable, since we're talking principles and since it's all fractal, we want to be able to sustain it such that if we only talk to leaders, we can't do that. If we only talk to leaders, we can help them implement this themselves rather than try to, you know, follow what they may have heard of a prescribed in a book or something to make it real for them and applicable to the people that they interact with, both within their company and in their customer base or their client base, or their partnerships. 
 
 James Gimian : I'll ask you a little something about that and your experience of it. You know I mentioned that we start off and end off at, say, a two day workshop, by making the point of just one thing that it is fractal, that if there's one thing that jumps out and makes you that you make a kind of real connection to you know you can feel the friction when there's something that hits you, that opens your mind, and that if you do that, then that's a gateway into everything else that will unfold from that. Is that because we're realizing, you know, people got so many inputs, so many newsletter, so many books, so many wisdom things that are coming at them. It's like an ocean of too much to incorporate. So how do you deal with that in terms of? 
 
 Mark McGrath: that's an adapt. I'll start and I'll let punch add, because I was going to say that the critical thing is to never give somebody something set in stone as if it were a recipe or a formula, because it's always going to be evolving and that's always going to be, it's always going to be changing, so that when we share those ideas and somebody does grasp on, they have to understand that this is not going to work in every context, but this is something that can get you started to get the necessary thinking as as the situation evolves and flows. Yeah, would you add punch? 
 
 Brian “Ponch” Rivera: So it's an adaptive process for us delivering any type of workshop. It's not a recipe, right. we have a nice desired outcomes that we're trying to go after. We start off with something and we're going to adjust right, based off the feedback we're getting and you can see the body language and all that the connections, conversations, the connection to sports, the connection to music, the connection to warfare, if they have a military background, just depend. it's dependent, right. And then we adjust from there to figure out what's going to resonate and what do they actually need, because generally when people come to any consultancy or consultant, they already say I want this, but that's not what they need, right, because you got and they're going to discover that real fast with us. 
 
 James Gimian : They're going to well. This is not what we want. 
 
 Brian “Ponch” Rivera: We need this now. So it's an adaptive process. Right, it's pretty powerful and it's I'm going to be honest it tires us out when we deliver, because our brains know they have to be waiting, anticipating what's next, whereas when you go to most workshops, it's. I'm going to show you this, we're going to do this, we're going to do this. I got to stay on timeline and I got to get you right which it's a script. 
 
 James Gimian : It's a script that's yeah. 
 
 Brian “Ponch” Rivera: So I want to bring this back to something that you brought up earlier with the flow guide, and that is flow, and I'm going to get the name wrong. My pronunciation is probably going to be wrong. Sure S H I sure. S H I H. 
 
 James Gimian : Yeah, you kind of pull the second arc back in Sure. 
 
 Brian “Ponch” Rivera: Sure, sure, okay, yeah, what is it? 
 
 James Gimian : and why did you put it in your book? Well, we've talked about a view that's you have, you know you helpful to start with that. The world is interconnected, it's constantly changing. That. From that comes conflict and and really the only way to deal with that is taking hold this notion of preserving while moving through those obstacles. And that's all the sort of view part. And then, in terms of the methodology or the practice, the way of interacting the world is what we call knowing. It's, it's like a relationship, it's sensing, it's. It's not data that you're you're collecting because, as we know, it's over as soon as you collect it, it's old news. 
 
 James Gimian : Then the action part arises. How does the art of war, from that perspective, advise one to work successfully in the world? and that's the theme of sure, starting in the fifth chapter with some really beautiful imagery that helps The basic meaning of sure. You'll find, if you were to read 25 books, translations of the art of war, there'll be 25 different words. It can be power, it can be potency, it can be potential, it can be a lot of different ways of this, of the same kind of sort of general theme. And you know current things like what is it that Malcolm Gladwell made tipping point. You know that's a very, very close to understanding, sure, and that is simply that in any system there is movement and energy happening based on the qualities of things in that system and that if one is connected to it, then the possibilities of capitalizing on the flow, the direction, the potentialities in that system can lead to successful leadership actions. 
 
 James Gimian : The imagery that the text gives us is water starting off as a very active little rivulets from the high mountains into flowing streams and then, when it hits a certain part of the natural terrain, it's raging rivers. and one capacity of a raging river is talk tosses rocks about. It has a lots of power. And then there's also the potential energy there of when you dam up a body of water. The natural contours provide maybe three dimensions and you put the human made dam and you have potential power. Another bit of energy is disconfiguration. In the old days the kings in China could have been a five year old boy, but they commanded because of the seat they sat in and everybody revered that seat as the central emanation of wisdom for the kingdom. So whatever came from the seat didn't matter who was sitting in the seat. The power came from the seat. So that's the way in which configuration conveyed a kind of power and energy. 
 
 James Gimian : Okay, there's some overlap here and I want to come back to this as the mates, let me just finish one other little image, and that is there's a wonderful pair of lines which very one of the first engineers in Google said was how the Art of War helped him, and that's round rocks roll down hill. Square rocks don't. So the effective action is as simple as allowing round rocks to roll down the hill. That's an example of, sure, using the natural qualities in a system to create momentum in the direction that you would like to achieve an objective, and that's all kind of theoretical. We can talk about a lot of examples, but I'll stop As I'm reading the book I wrote in there and margins. 
 
 Brian “Ponch” Rivera: I put this is flow right, and this is mine, and so you use a lot of configuration. 
 
 Brian “Ponch” Rivera: So, going back to, we had Professor Bayjan on several episodes again, who came up with the Constructal Law, which is about flow systems, the physics of flow, basic design hopefully I get this right basic, two components of a flow system. There's the design, which is a noun, which can include, include intent, configuration, planning, purpose, things like that, and then there's the currency which flows through that design. Right and that's, and that's what I'm hearing when you're walking me through. This is the. The philosophy of flow meets the physics of flow. Seems to be a lot of overlap there. So am I wrong in thinking that sure is flow or could be flow? 
 
 James Gimian : No, i think that would take me a little bit of thinking to see where the sort of nuanced differences are, but I think it's. 
 
 James Gimian : We're talking about the same family. We're talking about maybe a slightly different, different view, but flow captures the fact that there is a sort of naturally existing stream of energy in a system. I mean, one of the great things for me has been working in an airspace company that is has as its differentiator the Kaizen practice to production lines and so in flow in their terminology, it's a naturally existing way things should work and your job is just to remove abnormalities. You're not creating something and you know you're just allowing some, something that has a natural energy flow to it, to happen by removing the abnormality. 
 
 James Gimian : So I think flow and sure would be different ways of talking about now in in the meaning of sure, it is something that the low that the leader can encourage, can capitalize on. You know there are actions, and when you talk about the specific ways of employing sure in the book it talks about forming and transforming. That's a whole nother conversation, but a lot of things that the leader does is shaping and forming, creating a system within which the individuals fit into to create maximum capable work together. And so and this is it that what you you're employing sure create the context? 
 
 Brian “Ponch” Rivera: yeah, thanks to merge. Right, you, that's. 
 
 Brian “Ponch” Rivera: That's what I just heard yeah the leaders job is create that that's right, enables their people to to work in that fearless environment, to speak up, to pool work which it goes back to a little bit of the Kaiser and you were talking about there to see the flow of value through the system, to see the system as a whole and and that's what I, you know so many things read and I got it continue going back and forth within your book here. It's just amazing to see that the things that we're talking about already existed and something that was maybe handed to me 25 years ago to go read and in the military circles, right that I'm like I don't know what this is. Yeah, this is amazing, and I don't know if I don't know if Mark agrees with me, but as you were speaking there in the last five or seven minutes, energy maneuverability theory came up in my mind too. I could, i could visualize that and I don't know. Did you see that? 
 
 Mark McGrath: yeah, I said it's first thing I thought of. So I I could see the equation and I could just think of Boyd basically saying the same thing through a narrow, dynamic equation of shifting energy states and knowing or having the ability to pump and dump energy, as he would say, as the situation would require. Because the control coming from the outside in bottom up, you know you're not gonna necessarily use the, the power of whatever it is in his case, fighter plans, you're not gonna necessarily use that in every situation. You're gonna have the ability to understand that energy states have to flow, flow back and forth, and if you don't do that, you're not in a state of flow, then you're in a state of force and and then, i think then you become exhausted. It's very tritical and you can exhaust you. You know you eventually become a relevant entropy wins, totally. 
 
 Brian “Ponch” Rivera: You also read about deception and to me, deception is when you suppress information, you're actually decreasing the flow of whatever that currency may be. Can you, can you say the first? 
 
 James Gimian : part of that again, anytime when you we we support. 
 
 Brian “Ponch” Rivera: Through deception or manipulation, we're cutting off information to a system right could be a person, it could be a group of people or we're altering. We're creating mismatches in the environment, as John Boyd says, or we're creating surprise in the environment, which which forces us to increase the energy spend on trying to figure out do we need to adapt our internal model or do we need to change the external world? so, through deception, you are influencing the flow of something, a currency, and you write about that in your book. As far as the dangers of deception and how deception is used in military methods, given the context of the world today where we are, and going back to the warring times that you talked about in the past, can you walk us through what are we experiencing through deception, manipulation, in our current environment? what's that look like to you? and and and make some connections back to the rules of victory. That's a tall order well, we. 
 
 Mark McGrath: One of the things that makes me think of when punch says that, jim, is that deception like conflict or like war. It's a very misunderstood term that when we're speaking with people that don't have a military background like we do, so they see that word and it sets off a lot of negative reactions to them. Right, but you write on it extensively and we want to understand the importance to convey and to build on what Mark said. 
 
 Brian “Ponch” Rivera: So on that manipulation or deception, leadership and manipulation are the opposite side of the same coin, right, that's it's to be a good leader, you actually have to manipulate people, but that's not what we say. Right, we're trying to. You know, we're not trying to deceive people. 
 
 James Gimian : But please build on what Mark pointed out there and help our listeners understand what's what's in the book we wrote in the particular way we did about reset, about deception, just because it's the first task is to get somebody extracted from that reaction of negativity and a negative value that's automatically put on to that word. And we're not saying that those, those negative things don't exist, but it's, i'd say, limited understanding. As many books have pointed out in scientific work, we use deception in nature in our lives in multiple ways. I think the the the attempt we made was to set aside those most seemingly egregious expressions of it outright lying, to manipulate for personal gain, you know, is certainly not what we were talking about, but the I mean the starting point from our point of view is the multiple realities that coexist, that we choose to sort out in our individual ways. So, right from the beginning, to think that we're all talking about the same external reality that we experienced the same is a misconception. So therefore, the notion of deception changes completely if it's not about there is some right thing out there that I'm going to distort your understanding of what's being talked about in the the bingfaw. 
 
 James Gimian : The art of war is that knowing for me and for others is a central element to success. Clear scene leads to effective action. So if I'm trying to prevail by having my goal succeed. It may mean that part of that is to shape others understanding of the elements so that they can't mount resistance in ways that in fact might be counterproductive for them. 
 
 James Gimian : And we, you know, when you talk about manipulate leadership is manipulation, i mean leading. What does that mean? that means others are following. So you know, we don't, we don't blanch at the word leadership that it's evil because that we're helping other people will follow us, because the presumption is we're doing that for the success of the whole, for their success, for the enterprises, success that people will benefit from that leadership, so that, therefore, shaping the world, which is making choices about what's real and what's not real, what's important and what's not important, you could call that deception, but it's inherent in bringing about something that could benefit all. 
 
 James Gimian : So that is the presumption in the way we're applying this work, the leaders we're talking to, their goal is in fact to surmount the obstacles to bring about a success that will benefit the company, the customers, the society, the, the, the people that they lead, the staff and workers in that enterprise. So I think just normalizing that common human capacity is a very helpful thing and it doesn't necessarily mean we're now endorsing that. You can go and lie about your taxes or lie about your, you know, whatever it is, that's purely about fulfilling your soul. Limited benefit as opposed to the interconnected reality, the interconnected entity that you're a part of. So that changes the view of deception right there. If you're acting on behalf of the whole, you're taking home. 
 
 Brian “Ponch” Rivera: Here's what I, what I just heard from you. I'm gonna make another connection here. The basic loop that we go through as humans is the perception, or action. Perception, right, we, we sense the world, we try to make sense of it and we emit actions that change it. Right? so deception is just in the way you're describing. It is emitting some type of action that changes the system. That may bring about a behavior that we want. Is it? can I say that? okay? 
 
 James Gimian : yeah, you could say that, sure, yeah, sure. So I I mean we do it in raising children all the time. Yeah, you know, we don't tell them. We don't tell them all the whole story of everything at age four about why they should behave this way or that way. We create little ruses for them to behave in the way that we know will be actually beneficial, because we have their best interest. 
 
 Brian “Ponch” Rivera: So we're all decepticons in the world of the Transformers. 
 
 Mark McGrath: Then right I didn't say that no, that what you say with children I mean that I think if anyone who's listening, who's a parent, can certainly relate to that. And it evolves as they age and they. You know what I? what I say to my almost 20 year old daughter now is very different what I said there when she was five right. Things evolve, but the core, the core essence of what I was trying to teach, doesn't change, maybe just the way I explain it, but that's helpful because I think that you know I got saying people don't like the word deception and warfare and conflict. You know they have a, they have a preconceived notion what those things are and it's usually not positive. So thanks for clearing that one thing that I want to just one one aspect. 
 
 James Gimian : There is when you are, you know there's. There are among some in the leadership training world that have adopted this concept of not knowing, somehow suspending the grasping onto reality as being just your version of it to allow others. You know, right, there is deception, you know, so it's. It's, it's sort of that fundamental wonderment awe, as opposed to a definite understanding of how everything works and what's important. I mean, what's his name? Adam Grants book. Think again, you know his. His point in there was the most powerful thing. You can just ask yourself for others how do I know that? 
 
 James Gimian : right how do you know that? That's more on the wonder side and off side, but really some would say, well, that's deceptive. We know, i don't know. 
 
 Brian “Ponch” Rivera: Do we? I have a question. I want to shift a little bit. Somebody's taking your training and has been really successful with it. Can you share any insights to who those people may be and what type of success they've had by employing the lessons that you're sharing with us today? 
 
 James Gimian : I would say that most of the people that we have engaged with, they're already on a path to changing and shifting their view. I don't know that I would ever take full credit because, for example, one engagement that was wonderful and fun was with the strategy leadership group of Cargill, the very large privately owned company. They take the cream of the crop every year. 25 people go through a year now maybe two of being part of the central strategy group, which is a training ground for their future leaders in the organization. They had us come in and do our training as the central piece of their two-day off-site for their setting their sites for the year. It was similar to so many of the cases where there was a leader in the organization who was a huge fan of the art of war. The leaders came up with it and pitched it to him. He knew that there were very few examples of the training being of anybody interpreting the book in a way that was more immediately usable for people. Nonetheless, they wanted to build their whole two-day off-site as an art of war thing. We built part of it and they wanted to build part of it, which they just did separately in terms of activities that they did. What we were able to do was, without knowing it we didn't really interview the head boss at the time We interviewed the people who were going to be taking part in the training. We managed to tap into the unique strategic and I use that word carefully because strategy in general as a fixed thing is not really have that flexible, responsive, sensing, interconnected approach But a strategic view was very much what he was trying to teach them how to see the world in that bigger, systemic, shifting ground way. 
 
 James Gimian : At the end of it, he took me aside, was sitting in the back of the room while he was doing some other exercise. He said I didn't really trust that this was going to work out. I knew how hard this was to do. You have the capacity for being able to convey this stuff in a way that really conveys the meaning of the text and is usable, and it's going to be immediately impactful on the way that the team goes forward in the next year. We didn't really follow up with them. We just was just, in fact, just a two-day engagement, but it was gratifying to see somebody who was gratifying to us, to see not that he was confirming us, but that somebody responsible for the training of 75 future leaders in a corporation that impactful in the globe understood that what the text was presenting was of such high value. Of course, then to hear that he saw our ability to make it immediately relevant to the learning experience of those people was a great thing to hear. As you can imagine, there's a trend. That's one example that comes to mind. 
 
 Brian “Ponch” Rivera: How about any work with anybody in Silicon Valley or San Francisco? Any work? with any companies in Silicon Valley, San Francisco, I think in the book you mentioned Salesforce and any work there. 
 
 James Gimian : That was a series of dialogues with Mark Benioff, who had himself a deep appreciation for the value of the contemplative approach, of going back really to the years where he was founding Salesforce. We had a dialogue on that point. Then I did a keynote when they turned into a half a billion dollar company and had their annual gathering of their key people and salespeople. It was cute that that seemed to be such a big deal compared to what it is now, what their value is a company, but they were celebrating half a billion dollars that they'd reached in their growth. He had already written and spoken about his use of the art of war. In specific, those are well known in his books where he talks about the means they use to, without the resources, provoke responses from the leadership in the leading companies in the field. I spent a couple of days at the workshop and delivered a keynote. That was more of a for me personally again, seeing that a lot of these wisdom approaches taken from other cultures were actually seeping in a deep way into the way business and leadership successes were happening. That then followed with contact with people in the intelligence communities who were studying, sure partly because they knew it was in that all the people going through military training as officers in China study it. That would be a good thing to know. Even more than that, that this could be a very helpful, useful understanding for dealing with complex situations in the in leadership situations in the West. 
 
 James Gimian : For me personally I think I mentioned when we talked last time this has been a labor of love and personal understanding. I have tremendously enjoyed the work of doing right now it's a big aerospace company. This has not been, as you guys are doing, a franchise. That has been developed as the foremost business way that I've interacted with the world. Most of my work has been in the nonprofit sector, in the publishing world and in the small sector of the publishing world. On the contemplative side of things, it's not like I've been ever marketing and seeking clients, but both the workshops and the coaching of individuals has been really what's arisen from already established connections of people. The context has been high going in, which I find makes a complete difference in terms of my ability to be really helpful to a team or a company. That's been the pathway. 
 
 Brian “Ponch” Rivera: Like you, we find this not work, but it's a passion, it's fun, it's a nice connection. Speaking of connections there's a history that you have and this is going to get into some of the newer developments not new developments or developments that are becoming more mainstream. That has to do with mindfulness and psychedelic-assisted therapies. Our background in the military. We see a lot of PTSD, tbi, traumatic brain injury. 
 
 Brian “Ponch” Rivera: When we last talked, we talked about Chet Richards coming on the show and him talking about the connection to yoga and mindfulness and things like that There is a connection here right. Can you walk us through the connection between the lessons you put into the rules of victory and maybe mindfulness and maybe even psychedelic-assisted therapy? 
 
 James Gimian : Yes, i think I want to start by describing what I think is probably the most successful example of what you're describing. That is something called M-Fit that was created by a woman named Elizabeth Stanley, who's a professor at the Security Studies School at Georgetown University. She was an Army brat, went into the Army, had big challenges in Kosovo when she served there, came back, had a breakdown and, among other things, learned about contemplative practices and engaged deeply in them. She developed this program that involved deep learning in trauma and the sciences of trauma, deep learning in the sciences of mindfulness and meditation, and joins that into a program that she titled Mindfulness-Based Mind Fitness Training. I may not have that exactly right, which is terrible, but this was a training that combined the best of trauma science in terms of understanding what's going on in the nervous system and what practices are scientifically indicated to work on a deep trauma level, integrated into mindfulness practices, and she taught those. The organization she founded them taught them to the US Marines for a period of time In order to and at a certain point the Marines had made a decision to integrate this program widely in the Corps. 
 
 James Gimian : It ran into all sorts of difficulties with how do you add another significant element into a Marines day that requires, to be successful, significant hours of training. This is not 10 minutes a day. What was most astounding was the personal trainings that she did for Marine generals, who required to know what she was talking about before they would let it get involved at all. The stories that she was able to share as a member of the board to me about how transformative this was for leaders in our country who are protecting us, who had a decent night's sleep in 25 years because of the trauma induced by service, by training, by the kinds of in the midst of warfare kinds of things that happened to you. The latest news on that front is I spoke with her about a month ago and the head of the military officer training institution and the Secretary of Veterans Affairs in Ukraine who decided to adopt her training, not only for people like the 100,000 soldiers Ukrainian soldiers who can't go back to the front anymore their trauma and their stress is too great but to the people in the countryside, the people in the cities who live constantly under the attacks and pressures and challenges. 
 
 James Gimian : I think that's an endorsement about the joining of the mindfulness practices in the most traditional sense, which means not just grab and run. Let's do this for three minutes and say we got it. Like you had said earlier, it's not 10 minutes and the deep science part of understanding trauma and what it does to the nervous system and how to work with that. I'm talking to some folks. She's got some funding from the Ukraine. She's also got some funding on the US side. She needs some additional private funding and I'm talking to some people and it's probably of all the ways in which mindfulness practices have been integrated into significant military and brought her that even to leadership is one of the best examples I can think of. As I say, it's not just the best science from hundreds of years in the traditions that have perfected the deep understanding of those practices, but it's also the Western science of trauma of the nervous system. I definitely recommend you guys just looking in a little bit and she would be an amazing person for you to have. 
 
 James Gimian : This is her By the window. 
 
 Mark McGrath: Wide in the window. 
 
 James Gimian : Earlier book, yeah okay which. I recommend you taking a look at, and I think she's got an idea about a next book as a killer idea. it's exactly what we're talking about Not speaking out of school, because I'm not an expert. it's about how we're still training leaders in the old model of command and control, while the stuff we're talking about is the dominant theme of emerging how you actually deal with tough situations, and she's trying to blow the whistle on. We've got to do things differently. 
 
 Brian “Ponch” Rivera: I'd highly recommend her This is why we're having this conversation is how do we reduce the energy spend that people have to, that they have to expel when it comes to learning this, how do we put that down? 
 
 Brian “Ponch” Rivera: And I believe and I think Mark believes the same thing we can do that through a deeper understanding of John Boyd's Oodleoo. He looked at this stuff, he looked at it and he said, hey, and I believe the free energy principle which emerged in the last 20 years, active inference, which emerged in the last 20, 30 years or so. John Boyd wasn't privy to that, he didn't know that was out there, but he put it within his Oodleoo. and that allows us to talk to folks not just about how do you work deception in, how do you work leadership in, but how do you clear the mind, how do you remove trauma or not remove it, but how do you look at trauma in a new light, from a novel perspective, shake that snow globe up and really see things differently. And that's what we're getting to is we think John Boyd gave us this gift by looking at all of these things over the years and saying, hey, it's not done right, you got to continue moving this forward. And that's why we're here. 
 
 James Gimian : Yeah, Yeah, yeah. The funny thing about it, in a way, is the Oodleoo and the art of war have something similar in the sense that they're in the past. They were prescient, they really understood a lot of things that nobody had written about or talked about or made scientifically accessible, and we're seeing all those things emerge And there's definite parallels in terms of that. 
 
 Mark McGrath: Yeah, one of the things that you talk about in the book, staying in that vein, is the power of stories, and you also mentioned earlier how data can be highly overrated. So if I'm a CEO of a company, i'm a coach of a sports team, i'm a human in a difficult situation, why are stories so much more powerful than data? And we began talking about our podcast with Viv Reed and we've interviewed with, we've talked with Dave Snowden the power of narratives and the power of really truly understanding. I unpacked that a little bit because you have a whole section in the book on that And I think it's worth noting for others to really dig into. 
 
 James Gimian : Well, there are several things I could say. I think the first that comes to mind is you yourself said you don't tell people what to do in future situations. What we're trying to do is create an appreciation for a systems approach that allows a specific application, and that's what stories do They tell you about a situation in the past that somebody's found a way And it's not the particular way they found that's going to be extracted and used All the way. In some cases that can be helpful. It's going to be connecting to your story, connecting to how you can look at your story differently, more creatively, see things that you didn't see before, so that the imagination comes into play, the creative intelligence comes to play, rather than that repeating the lessons of the past, which really has serious limitations. 
 
 Mark McGrath: So stories in one way can help shift the orientation. 
 
 James Gimian : Yeah, in a big way. Another way that I think is connected is There are a lot of conversations going on in our country that have to do with people trying to change other people's minds about things, and normally it doesn't end well, it doesn't succeed. And some of the articles about that are interesting in how I don't know how deep the science is here, but I know that it is scientists are saying we don't make decisions based on facts, we gather facts. Kahneman has a great quote about this. You know, we gather facts that support the position we already hold. We trust people. In other words, in making a decision, we find out how people we trust approach that decision and has a bigger influence on us. 
 
 James Gimian : And I think storytelling creates that kind of a sympathetic connection. When somebody is telling us a story there, letting us into their world, they're establishing a really deep connection. We want to kind of explore what they're experiencing, experience what they're experiencing, and so there's a kind of ground of appreciation that is much more conducive to helping somebody to learn than telling them what to learn. You know And it goes back to what we talked about at the beginning I think our goals are common. In our sort of learning goals. We're hoping. The way we put it is we're hoping to create the conditions for somebody to have their own insight. We don't know what that's going to be, but that's going to be far more powerful than anything that we tell them is true or not. True is creating the conditions, and I think that's what stories do. They get us into a zone of imagining our world and creating our solutions, our insights, our victories in the art of war language. 
 
 Brian “Ponch” Rivera: Absolutely. We use the narrative-based approaches to understand context And this goes into the survey world right. 
 
 James Gimian : Yeah. 
 
 Brian “Ponch” Rivera: We like surveys because you're never surprised by them. You always get what you put into it. So the narrative approach is very powerful And that's where Dave Snowden came up with the Kinevin framework, which was from knowledge management, understanding narratives, and not a lot of people understand that that he came to the idea of complex adaptive systems through his work in knowledge management, which is narrative-based work, and I think you put this in your book. 
 
 Brian “Ponch” Rivera: You put show me don't tell me. And that show me how this works, don't tell me how Right The writing victim. Yeah. 
 
 James Gimian : And that's what most writers are told by their editors in first draft. 
 
 Brian “Ponch” Rivera: That's hard to do, by the way. 
 
 James Gimian : Yeah, Yeah, Yes. Our default is to say you know to do the tell me Yeah. 
 
 Brian “Ponch” Rivera: And that's why we do. Experiential-based learning is we want to see what people make the connection to, Instead of telling them here's what you need to do is we're going to experience this and they're going to tell us what they need to do. And, by the way, it looks like a common practice, a good practice that's already known And we go that's now. He has a name, People are using it. You can use it if you need to. 
 
 James Gimian : Yeah, yeah, cool. I have to say I'm glad this is taped because I want to go back and extract all of my comments so I can listen to when you describe how you do those things that we're doing and you describe them with very detailed, systematic ways of accomplishing understanding in that area. I've just noted at least eight or nine times when you ask me a question and I talk for a while and then in about a minute and a half you describe well, here's how we do that, which is like being being being being being in ways that I'd like to learn more about, and I'm here with notes, thinking maybe I'll be fast enough to capture on notes in real time, but I'm not. 
 
 Brian “Ponch” Rivera: No, that's why we're recording this, so I want to thank you, but I want to point out to all our listeners out there, and I want to tell you this the rules of victory how to transform chaos and conflict is a must read. in Agile X. Everybody you know we put it out there everybody must read it. It is absolutely phenomenal. It gives us another perspective on the things we're talking about For our listeners out there I mean people like pop culture books. this is not a pop culture book. I guarantee you that This is not, Absolutely not. 
 
 Brian “Ponch” Rivera: This is a right, I can tell you you and your team put a lot of work into this, barry I believe it was Barry Boyce, correct You put a lot of work into this over many, many years and it shows And this is by far one of the most important books on my bookshelf And I actually the only book I traveled with is right here. 
 
 James Gimian : Wow, and there's you know, any time I buy it in a hard copy. 
 
 Brian “Ponch” Rivera: It's drowning in marginalia. 
 
 Mark McGrath: Any time I have a hard copy of a book. 
 
 Brian “Ponch” Rivera: It is worth buying And I highly, highly, highly recommend to our listeners that they can run out there immediately, get your book and then come back with more questions And let's do this again. 
 
 James Gimian : Absolutely, mark over to you. That's great. I so appreciate the dialogue. You know I told you right at the beginning I have no idea what of interest to your listeners I could fill up a whole podcast with. But I've learned so much and it is gratifying to know that people who are working with the John Boyd influences the complexity, learning, all the things that you're bringing into it. See, the parallel track that we're on is just a really wonderful and gratifying And for me, feeling we have an extension out in the world we didn't even know about, that's doing this work in very deep and meaningful ways with lots of people in need And that's really gratifying. Thank you very much. 
 
 Mark McGrath: Yeah, that's the beauty of this stuff that we do And, as Pontra's saying earlier, it's a passion, it's our life, it's what we aspire to, and I would tell anyone about your book. It applies to literally anyone, and it's the same thing we say about Boyd and Uda It only applies where humans are making decisions and actions. And I think that what I love about your book versus I mean, as you mentioned earlier, there's plenty of translations of Art of War and there's plenty of briefings and scholarly courses taught about it But I think that what people should know about this particular book, regardless of what they're doing, this is a very accessible book in the sense that it's going to ground you into principles that you need to thrive in complexity and not just merely survive, and I think that's when a lot of people at the end of the day, are looking for Yeah cool. 
 
 Mark McGrath: So well, that's a phenomenal discussion. Yeah, it's a feast. 
 
 James Gimian : A definite feast And let's stay in touch. I'm going to look a little bit more into the work that you're doing. I'm sure I'll have some follow up questions and I look forward to the next time we chat again.