No Way Out
Welcome to the No Way Out podcast where we examine the variety of domains and disciplines behind John R. Boyd’s OODA sketch and why, today, more than ever, it is an imperative to understand Boyd’s axiomatic sketch of how organisms, individuals, teams, corporations, and governments comprehend, shape, and adapt in our VUCA world.
No Way Out
Reorient Your Planning Process with Annette Nolan and Johan Ivari
Defy the conventional wisdom that the best-laid business plans emerge from the highest towers of consultancy firms.
Join us in this episode of the No Way Out Podcast as military strategists Johan Avari and Annette Nolan challenge conventional business planning methodologies. Guided by teachings from John Boyd's influential OODA loop, they present an adaptive approach that emphasizes process over product and underlines the values of empathy and humility in strategic decision-making. Explore with us the indispensable role of a generative culture in creating sustaining, flexible strategies that go beyond rigid plans. This episode also delves into the intricate connection between language and organizational culture, along with the management of emerging properties. This is a compelling discussion that offers a new lens through which to view planning in today's disruptive times.
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Hey, mark, one of the big challenges I'm seeing in corporate America right now is this big shift from agile, and my experience with agile is you can't teach process. You can't teach a planning process punch, because everybody knows that agile is about self-organization and that was a big mistake that the agile community took upon themselves years ago is to push out the idea of effective processes, and today you and I were talking a little bit earlier about what we're seeing in industry, and that's a shift back towards the merchants of certainty, those organizations like McKinsey and Accenture what I like to call McKinsey-attracted management. Right, they're people that are trying to go after these certain ways of doing work where somebody else does the planning for you and hands it off to you. So our guests today are actually here to talk a little bit about effective planning, not from a business perspective, but from a military perspective, and I believe what they have for us is fantastic. They have a couple overlaps with what we talk about all the time.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Those who do the work should be part of the planning process. We emphasize that every single day. Unfortunately, in industry, most people disagree with us. They think that they should just do the planning, centralize, hand it off to somebody else and execute, outsource the work and then bring it back in and see what happens. That's a sure recipe for failure. And then that also lines up to another point that our guests have, and that is there is no fire and forget direction in an organization. Right, you just don't have McKenzie come in here and plan everything and you execute it and, by the way, that happens quite a bit. That is not a great way to do business, and we know from the military your time in the Marine Corps, my time in the Navy that those that are part of the execution need to be part of the planning process. So, without further ado, I'd like to introduce our guests. Today we have Johan Avari and Annette Nolan from the Swedish Defense Forces. Welcome to the show, folks.
Johan :Thank you. Thank you, a privilege to be here Longing for it, maybe I should clarify that I'm not from the Swedish Defence Force.
Annette Nolan:I'm from the Defence University, so it's a slightly different. Although Johan is a serving officer, he is seconded now to the university as well, and that's how we've gotten to know each other.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Well, thank you for that correction. That's fantastic and it's good to see you in uniform there, johan, thank you All right, so a set-based approach.
Johan :It's good to see you in uniform there, johan.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Yeah, thank you. All right, so set-based approach. You know I work with Nigel Thurlow quite a bit. He teaches me a lot about the Toyota production system and we know John Boyd studied TPS quite a bit as well. One thing that Nigel's been working with me on is understanding set-based concurrent engineering, and I understand your set-based approach to planning has a connection back to that. Can you talk about that connection there?
Johan :Yeah, you're absolutely right and I'm glad you picked up on that. That was when I was an agile coach and read about the set-based approach and that led me into Alan Ward and his new product development or something like that book and I really those methods, those approaches resonated with me. And also when I connected it back to how we did operational planning in the military arena. So that was I got me on and this how we would be able to do it, just like Toyota does it, but in another environment, and their operational planning is to bring out a new car, but our operational planning is to win a war or peace and reconciliation. But I think we can learn from each other.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:And on the set-based approach, you have five. Uh, they're not necessarily um planning steps, are they? That's not how you look at them. What do you call them?
Johan :that's more like principles, like a philosophy, or maybe annette, you have a more. I think.
Annette Nolan:I think principles would be a way to describe it. You know that we have these kind of, you know, principles that we aim to to promulgate and to suggest are useful ways of thinking when you're in the process of planning, and with an emphasis on the ING dimension of planning rather than the plan.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Right. So plans are continuous. You know the whole idea of you know, mike Tyson, everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face. That's the idea we're kind of building on here. Annette, I have a kind of a leading question here for you, and that is what do you see wrong, not only in the military NATO, your military, our military but in industry? What's wrong with the way they plan? I just kind of want to get your ideas on what that is.
Annette Nolan:Yeah, I think you know I don't have massive insight into industry or the military.
Annette Nolan:I have to say I'm a linguist, so I'm interested in observing how people communicate and I think that when you observe how people communicate, competition can take over before collaboration. And then there's, you know, in our efforts. You know we're trying to compete with each other and there's an opportunity cost in that attempt to compete with each other, because very often we miss opportunities to collaborate more effectively and language and languaging are not successful unless you're willing to collaborate and cooperate, and then they're also not successful if you can't understand your interlocutor. So if I look at the military and I've read a lot of case studies in the military and I've taught a lot in military context in terms of language usage and so on so when does the military, when does military planning fail? And I think it's when you cannot empathize with your adversary, as we say, and a lot of that has to do with you know engaging them, understanding them, and you know engaging them understanding them and, you know, mitigating the gap between competition and collaboration, if that makes sense.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:No, this does make a lot of sense. So the the first part of empathizing with your adversary or, in the case of industry, their customer. We like to do a lot of. We like to start there. Number one is who is your customer? Who is your adversary, right? Who are you trying to fight right now? That might be one of the first steps that we look at, and you know, during the Gulf War and in Iraq and Afghanistan, we learned that we have to understand not just our enemies, but our friends as well, right, our allies as well. So we created a foreign area officer program that was key to having military officers understand what's going on culturally in the region, so we can be effective planners, more so than we were in the past, and that's something that I think, mark, you studied this quite a bit during your studies of Boyd and looking back at Vietnam. But, mark, is that something that we lost in Vietnam too? Thoughts.
Mark McGrath :Yeah, when I was reading the paper, I thought immediately of CAP, the Combined Action Program, and I thought about why Boyd was such a big fan and that principle of empathy for your adversary. And that principle of empathy for your adversary, I think it was probably. You know, I think CAP is probably one of the best examples of that, you know. Or something like that. Or One Tribe at a Time by James Gant is another one that comes to mind. Lawrence of Arabia is another one that comes to mind. The Green Beret A-teams in Vietnam. The green beret a teams in vietnam. There's this deep empathy and understanding for what's actually going on and what people are actually going through, which is far removed from the white house oval office or the pentagon or anything like that. That's making decisions for people on the other side of the earth and just just one add to annette's introduction.
Johan :Why do we need another approach of planning? It's also, I think, the lack of humility against complex problems. You know there is no then and to think that you can grasp another living human being and affecting him in a plan, in a gant chart or something like that, that's kind of illusion of control, and that was we tried to be open towards, and that's also why we connected to john boyd's your boys in order to show that double continuously, what we do affect the opponent and he received us.
Mark McGrath :Something affect us, and that's when the ball starts rolling or when you're in the ring, if you're mike tyson I'm glad you used the word humility because I think that ties into how punch started this with the merchants of certainty and the and the and the predisposition to take the advice of what I would call big box consulting is that there's not a lot of humility. We know what's better for everybody and we're going to push down and force on everybody. We're not going to create a system of flow and I think that when you point out the empathy of the adversary, I think that that's promoting and encouraging and getting people attuned to flow Absolutely.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:So you have four other principles here that we'll dive into in a moment. One of the things that popped up when I was reading your paper is we have a tendency to think of the, you know, start with the end in mind and work backwards. One of the things we talk about is that's okay in an ordered system where you know the relationship between cause and effect. Building a house perhaps. Okay in an ordered system where you know the relationship between cause and effect. Building a house, perhaps, but that's not where most of us work at the moment. So the idea that we have to define a future end state, create smart goals, specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time box goals doesn't align well with what we understand to be complexity theory or complexity or complex systems. So can you talk a little bit about that and where we go wrong in military planning with starting with the end in mind, if we do at all?
Annette Nolan:Well, I think this is a very complex question, obviously so in itself, it's something that you know. With deep reflection, you can see that if you anticipate outcomes and consider that these are the likely outcomes as a product of your planning, then you're assuming that there's no other actors in the environment, or else you're underestimating the actors in the environment, Don't you think?
Johan :I agree, it's a bit of being tone deaf, and it's in order. When you're working with a complex phenomena, you don't really understand it and you're looking for those subtle cues. And in order to find those cues, you need to be really using all the resources, all the possible sensors, hence your team and personal organization in order to see what is really going on. And the cure is openness that you don't grasp it, you don't know, and if you think you know, you can be wrong. So those kinds of perspective, openness, humility and always curious of finding out what's the meaning, what does all this imply? Does it connect with our current end state or is it another story that we haven't understood yet?
Annette Nolan:Yeah, I'm just thinking about it like this. You can, as a linguist, I would always draw the analogy to a communicative situation, you know. So, as I mentioned earlier, I think you're you're always, in a sense, there's always, when you're they're different interlocutors in an environment. You're always looking for cues in which you can determine when it's your turn to communicate and what you can contribute with that will be collaborative in some way. So this is a factor as well that you have to consider. You know, like, when you're planning in a complex, complex endeavor, it's going to involve a range of different interlocutors, communication, or, in that event, that will result in well, should we call it success? Maybe not, maybe not success, but having an effect at least.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Yeah, I think it increases the likelihood of quote unquote success, so that's always a good thing. Your second principle here is a shift in focus from product, which I believe. Product means a plan. Right, planning is not about plan, it's about the act of planning and a shift from the product to the process. All right, and there's a process involved with this. And help us understand that a little bit more, and I think you can make some connections to Gary Klein's thinking in this as well. Is that right?
Annette Nolan:Do you want to begin? Yeah, I can begin.
Johan :Yeah, when we first tried to use those kind of five principles that we'll talk about today and I showed my professor them, he said, well, that's pretty much the answer to Klein's flexicution and I wasn't aware at the time. But then I read flexicution and, as I understand Klein, it was what he said. It's very problematic to do a plan to understand, to think you understand the problem and then produce a solution prior to your enacting with environment. So that is exactly what we're going to do. The plan can't be the solution to the problem. It could only be one or several hypotheses how to address the problem. And even if the problem could be different problems, all those need to be taken into consideration.
Johan :So we talk instead of a problem and a solution. We're talking about expanding the problem space, or the possibility space in order to. You're much into sports, and I'm not but visualize the whole game and every opportunity, every angle of the arena where you can take that, who you can collaborate with and how it will go. And the more time you have to be engaged and marinate yourself in the game and your opponent, the more likely it will be that something in there will be usable in the reality, instead of assuming it will be and then just following the plan and your opponent is on another game field.
Annette Nolan:Yeah, obviously there has to be some kind of product thinking in any endeavor. But process is always going to mean that any kind of reverse engineering that you had in mind is likely to be unstable in some way that you know it's going to. There's going to be shifts Once you begin to engage in the process. Anything you thought that would be a predictable outcome is likely to change because there are going to be other people engaging in, you know, complementary processes or competitive processes at the same time, depending on which situation you find yourself in. So there's always going to be a necessity to reflect and to consider, um what effect you're going to have and if you are already having effect which I guess will happen in any kind of military endeavor what needs to change for an order in order for that to be um to lead to even greater effect or to have greater success.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Um in if setbacks happen so can you talk a little bit about how does a, a group or a team expand the cognitive space? What are some, what are some of the actions they can take to do that?
Johan :I think we use in the article ron vestrum and his uh label use in the article ron vestrum and his label generative culture.
Johan :And the generative culture is to avoid and I know boyd wanted as well the kind of group think it's to be to embrace the constructive conflict in in order to to expand this kind of possibility, what, what is really going on, and that that demands some kind of trust that you need to establish. And so that's also, if you're the commander or if you're the head of the planning team, maybe your most important skill is to see, to build that kind of trust and to really acknowledge and appreciate all those maybe odd things coming out there. And instead of just saying, oh, you're the red team in this day, let it be within the culture to see those subtle signals and really appreciate it when someone comes up with it, even if it's odd and it could be odd nine times out of ten, but the tenth time you don't want to miss it. So that's kind of brutalizing, that kind of culture that's really key, important, a generative culture that we are trying to achieve here at the Swedish Defence University.
Annette Nolan:And I think this is something that's really you know. I think it's sort of embedded in military educational theory already. I think there's a good understanding that you know that what you're trying to do when you're educating an officer is to make them a very effective thinker, to help them to adapt in uncertain situations. And somehow that's in the wallpaper or it's in you know, it's in the floorboard somewhere, like. So you know you have all this, like there's typical repetition, there's practice, there's, you know, using the time as effectively as you possible as possible, like, for example, in peace time, in order to train, train, train to be effective. And I think this is expanding the cognitive space of possibilities. If you consider the range of possibilities or the potential range of possibilities, if you anticipate and stay fresh in your approach, then I think you've got a real chance in the education process to make more adaptable officers, better thinkers.
Johan :Basically yeah, and to add, from that I think we can learn from jeff bezos and amazon. You see, the most junior person starts to talk instead of the highest paid people in the room start to talk and frame everyone else that want to adhere to the general in the room or the colonel in the rooms. So I think that's important to don't frame as a commander. Your role is to fertilize the process, not to frame it with your perspective. That can wait.
Annette Nolan:Yeah, bottom up generative. I think, that's what Alicia Carrero called it when you interviewed her, and in her book she's talking about these things the emerging properties that come from situations which are in the planning situation to pay attention to them. These are, I think, what we're trying to get to when we talk about developing cognition.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Mark, it looked like you had something pop up there.
Mark McGrath :Well, yeah, and that really struck a chord with me developing cognition, mark, it looked like you had something pop up there. Well, yeah, and that really struck a chord with me when she described the development of officers. And I learned this from my dad years ago. You know, my dad went to West Point and it seems to me that at some point there was a disconnect in how officers were trained.
Mark McGrath :In the old days they were exposed to a broad range of cultural things, including art, literature and other things, to make them worldly adaptable thinkers, as you say. And it seems to me that when I came into the military and it seems as I observe it now from my vantage point as a veteran it seems to me that there's always this rush we got to get this done, we got to get this done, we got to get this done and I think that they've lost a lot of the connection of you know to the world and to culture. And I wonder if you observe that in other NATO forces and if you think that there is something that we could pinpoint which has gotten us away from that sort of you know like, for example, ponch mentioned foreign area officers, but I think there was a time where any officer could be a foreign area officer because they had a very broad cultural palette and I wonder if you've observed where the disconnect actually happened or how do you see that regressing or progressing currently?
Annette Nolan:I think culture is a complicated concept, isn't it? Because I don't know like when we look at sort of a large alliance like NATO, we have a range of different cultures, people coming from different cultural perspectives, different values and so on. It's complex to pin it down. And then I think that this creates an even greater challenge for the officer. If you're working in wider communities, you have to be very tolerant of very different values from your own. I think that's my impression as somebody who educates officers, not as an officer myself. So I think that that's a challenge.
Annette Nolan:And then, of course, there's the competition between training the officer. I think I have a kind of my own perspective might be a little bit interesting on this one because I train both the officer cadets and then I train captains about to become majors. And what's the difference between those two sets of individuals? Well, the primary difference is, of course, that the officer cadets are inexperienced, they're just beginning to learn about the profession, and the military officers who are already serving and are captains already.
Annette Nolan:They've been brought up in a culture where they've been, you know, company commanders.
Annette Nolan:Their job is to discipline been brought up in a culture where they've been, you know, company commanders. Their job is to discipline, it's to listen to orders, it's to give orders, and then there's an expectation that they evolve into the post, field level, officership, where they are supposed to be greater critical thinkers. So there's competition, I think, for them in terms of what they should know, being confident and grounded in what they know, and then what they need to know for their future profession, where they will begin to need to have influence, to be able to influence the plan, influence the organization, be more culturally informed, be more aware, have greater, I suppose, cognitive abilities, or you know, and communicative abilities on top of that. So I think that here that there's a different pressure on the career because of internationalization, which could mean that you know, you sort of dismiss sort of the softer aspects like art and culture and literature, and then go for more of the sort of the engineering, influence, law, international relations, those kinds of more hardcore Like STEM, yeah, yeah, no, no.
Mark McGrath :And I think that there's a correlation maybe Ponch can comment on this too that a lot of times, businesses and companies the same thing Like we don't have time for leadership training, we don't have time to learn about how to improve as a team we got to get this done for this quarterly result, or we have to get this done for this objective number and they miss out on that. And ultimately, what's happening is there's a degradation, the orientation is degrading, and thus the organizational OODA loop is imminently doomed to crash, because they couldn't have the flexibility, adaptability. What do you think about that, ponch? I mean, is that kind of like? That's where I see the bridge.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Yeah, One of the things we talk about. In the military we spend 99% of our time trying to get ready for the Super Bowl. That one time we're going to go execute that 1%, Whereas in business and organizations they get 1% to execute the Super Bowl. Right, that 1% training time and what you put into that 1% to execute the Super Bowl, right To that 1% training time and what you put into that 1% matters. So if you're going to go out and do scaled agile framework training or TPS or Six Sigma, whatever it may be, you got to make sure that that training is the best available training that's out there. And that's one of the reasons we created the flow system is to say, here's the methods that allow you to execute against the very things that Annette and Johan are talking about today is, how do we actually execute against expanding the cognitive space? Right, and I got another question or comment on that, Annette, for both of you actually Design thinking.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:You brought up design thinking in there and a few years ago I spent some time in Budapest with a bunch of not necessarily NATO members, but some NATO members and some folks from Israel as well. We looked at design thinking and the overlap or the connection to complexity theory, and in fact, at the end of the day it was complexity thinking is design thinking. There's really no difference. So can you walk us through you know what you're thinking, or why? You added design thinking into a way to expand the cognitive space, and if you see complexity thinking as the same as design thinking, Well, both yes and no.
Johan :I think there is a false dichotomy between design thinking and operational planning and I think we need to take them back together because we're aiming at the same thing. We we want to produce something useful, but but we don't want to. We need to be very humble that we don't really understand exactly what we need and I think sometimes but that could be my bad experience design thinking cut completely lost from reality and go away somewhere else. But I'm really influenced by shimon avea, also ben swivelsons work, so we have looked into that and I also attended one of those courses. But I think the we need to mix this up. So some kind of those interventions from design think you could use be used in this operational planning, but but I I would take it more back to the context in your operational planning and only use those kind of tools in order to put some cognitive load on your brain.
Johan :There are some mechanisms like the jaws exercise, for example. That's really good to to see things are new to do. Okay, what you come up with us so far, we take a stop sign on that. You can't reuse it. How would you affect? Now, those kind of mechanisms is good, but but in the end of the day, you need to be very marinated in the actual context. So I would try to stick into that and not add any other context in it.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:So I've seen this, where the misapplication of design thinking to a problem that just is really about what's actually happening now, what's the current status of the situation now, get the right people in the room, have them value stream, map it out, and you're going to solve a lot of problems that way, and in those instances I've seen people use design thinking to figure out what the future looks like without knowing what today actually looks like. So context determines method, that's. I guess that's what we're going at here is what methods should you be applying there? Annette, did you have anything else to add to that?
Annette Nolan:No, just maybe just a reflection there when we talked about from product to process. I think, in design thinking and addressing complexity, I think you have to have the ability, you have to understand how products work in order to be able to engage in processes. And I think this is, I mean, when I look at it from an educational perspective. You know, when you are teaching inexperienced people or people are learning about their profession, the product can really help to scaffold them into understanding the types of problems that they're going to address. Problems actually exist and it is within.
Annette Nolan:I mean, if you try to look at design thinking, it can have that kind of scaffolding function as well. But you have to understand that once you meet the process, that you're likely to have to expand your cognitive space of possibilities and consider different alternatives and use that. You know, I think Chet Richards' drawing of the brain and the orientation function in the Oda loop, I mean it sort of shows this kind of expansion. You know this development with experience, with testing yourself against the environment and the types of environment that you meet. So I think there is product and process. On the one hand they go together. Design thinking does go with addressing processes, but it's an evolution for the more experienced practitioner.
Johan :Perhaps yeah, and I would like to add to that, if you're a head of this planning team, this design should be about the environment for the team, in order to expand the space and, like in Toyota, ask the right questions what haven't you considered? And instead of just coming with some Lego pieces and colorful Duplo or something, To build up a little bit more on the process.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:you mentioned red teaming in your paper. We've had Keith McCandless on the show. That's been out about a week or so at the time we're recording this, so liberating structures. We had Colonel Rodkoff on the show. We've had some other folks who talk about red teaming. Can we get some of your thoughts on red teaming as part of the planning process, if at all? Sure?
Johan :Well, I think, instead of red teaming, I think this generative culture should be everyone is responsible to take a red team approach. When you see it, instead of just having that as a role, how we do it here at the Swedish Defense University is if you are two parallel planning teams and you know that you're going to test your plan against the other team, you get some kind of gaming in and it's tricky by balance between helpful gaming and too competitive. But I think that's better effect when we see that instead of me trying to pretend being a general and take the mutualized spreeree for causes action decision brief to let them to take it with each other, that produces a lot more tension in order to compete with your cool classmate to have the more thought through plans. So that's an instrument that we think it's really good to use to expand the space of possibilities and in the cognitive space yeah, gary, uh, gary klein's work in that space is great too.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Uh, pre-mortem thinking um you know how will this fail in the future?
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:yeah, uh hey, you brought up devops in your paper development operations and many people are not really aware of what DevOps is. They think it's some technology that they apply to the organization. That's not true. It's really about a culture, and you talk about a culture of ownership in there as well. But this kind of connects to your fourth point or your first fourth principle about if you plan it, you run it. That's nice that you went outside the military to find something and make a connection back. But I wonder if you can elaborate more on your fourth principle there with the connection to I think it was Westrom's model, again, generative culture, devops and then ownership, if you will.
Johan :Yeah, those two last principles. It's some kind of that's enabling for the first three to be relevant. But if you don't adhere to those two laws, those first three are useless. Because if you shift focus from the product to the process, then we understand to marinate yourself and your team in the context. That's what this is about and the context that's why we talked about the room of possibilities, to make it as big as possible.
Johan :So you have been all over the place, if you, you can compare it to computer games. You know when the kids play grand theft out or something they're drawing around in los angeles or whatever it is, and they know the streets in their body, they know the hills, they know the shortcuts, so when they have tasked with a new mission, they can connect it. And that's kind of the process that we intend to do is, you don't need to figure out the exact missions, but you need to take the context environment into your body. And it's no use if you aren't going into the theater then if you stay at the highest level in the hedge queue or some other building. It was waste of time.
Johan :So a big part of the team that is planning must follow the way out to, to conduct it. Because that's the important thing, not what is on the paper, the plan, but what's in their body, that they all the simulations they have done, all the if you call it red teaming or the competition with other planning teams. That's in their body, not in the paper, and that's how you use the information. That's the important thing. And I think the german word building build moon and building in swedish it's when you forgot everything you learned, because it's in your body what's left. That's the important thing and that's the same when we're thinking of the planning here. It's the process to ingrain the orientation right.
Mark McGrath :That means like we've, we've reoriented, we've learned, it becomes uh, our implicit guidance and control right becomes faster. Is that? Is that kind of what you're hitting on exactly?
Annette Nolan:as an excel, you enhanced orientation, like figuratively, it becomes bigger yeah, I, I, as a linguist, I'm interested in this in terms of language development and there's a lot of, I mean, I think, that organizational theory we ended up having this conversation ourselves, that when we talk to each other we come from very different backgrounds, but when I looked at, you know, sort of language philosophy in the 20th century, it was very similar to organizational thinking in the 20th century. We could find parallels throughout and I think we get into the sort of the cognitive dimensions of analysis and control which has been very popular in linguistic theory since the 1990s. So how is the representation of language in mind and same with any kind of cognition, I think. How is it represented in mind and I think we become our analysis, our schemata become much more sophisticated.
Annette Nolan:Mind, um, and same with any kind of cognition, I think. How is it represented in mind and I think we become our analysis, our schemata become much more sophisticated as we have more experience, more exposure, um, I looked at it from at it from a second language perspective, but when I think about my own language development and my own uh, you know conceptual development over time or other individuals, you can see that exposure and engagement are the things that lead to more sophisticated analysis of concepts in mind, and I think this means as well that if you want to, you won't be fresh. You won't have access to that kind of analysis, regardless of how sophisticated it's become, unless you're actually engaging it. So it becomes sort of memory rather than ability if you're not involved with it.
Mark McGrath :What effect do you think on that point? What effect do you think the technologies that we have now with instantaneous communication and social media and other things, what effect do you think that that's having on cognition and language development over the last 50 years?
Annette Nolan:I think it's accelerating it. You know, acquisition, um, I think it's. It's positive. The effect, um, I think it accelerates your ability to uh, to acquire skills and abilities, including language skills and abilities. Abilities because you're able to expose yourself without actually immersing yourself in the actual environment. You can game in this case, like you can play your Duolingo app every day if you want to learn a little Italian before you go on holiday. I mean, those things are all there, they're available to us, but when it comes to, for example, artificial intelligence, chatbots and so on, and these kind of sophisticated processes that we can use for productive purposes, you still have to have the basic cognitive competence to be able to critically appraise the outputs that they produce for you. So I think they create opportunities for us absolutely Greater practice, deeper engagement, but you have to keep up. This is the challenge. Is that the question?
Mark McGrath :I think that's yeah, no, I think it goes back to Boyd's implicit guidance and control, because orientation can augment faster than it ever has because of the widespread availability of information and knowledge and it's allowing us to see things quicker. I also think that there's downsides, because you know you can. You can create a hive mind. You know you can create what we talked about earlier about avoiding groupthink. There are some, there can be some danger or misuse, but uh, that's an interesting analysis.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:I think it's valid absolutely yeah you use a quote from, uh, somebody we know, all know, dave Snowden. The power lies in the interpretation for your fifth principle to kind of guide us through that, and that's there's no fire and forget directive. What is the connection between that Dave Snowden quote and your fifth principle of set-based approach and planning?
Johan :your fifth principle of set-based approach and planning.
Johan :Yeah, I think, if we go back to complexity and humility, that we don't know until we start to enact with the system. And, as Dave says, the power is in the interpretation, not what I try to convey or influence, because the response will be in the feedback loop, and that goes all the way up to the highest level. Because, since no one knows, regardless of if you're an expert or if you're a president or a general, you need, because you're constraining the mission, the operational, the constraints that you're able to have, you know as-is requisite variety, depending on your presumption of the mission. If that's right or wrong, then it could have a deeply effect. We see it in bosnia and other places that you need to adapt, to be really in it until you get the feedback from the environment and then you might be able to take a step back. But until you get the first hit, as tyson said, in the ring, you can't fire and forget. You need to be in there, prepared to adapt as fast as possible, otherwise it could be severe damage with unnecessary killing.
Mark McGrath :I was going to ask we're all military people who are around the military and fire and forget. We know exactly what it is. So for that person in, say, a manufacturing company or in a university setting, when we say fire and forget, let's really explain that so that they understand exactly what it means and why they shouldn't do it. So when you use it in that context, would you just give a little bit of help to?
Johan :people that don't have a military background.
Johan :I think maybe it's jeff sutherland that has an article about our firefighter gripen, that how that is developed, and I think it's about 100 agile teams with 1000 people to develop the e-version, if I remember correctly, and every morning they start with a stand-up 15 minutes and then after that is a 15-minute scrum of scrums. The next level, and I think before 9.30, it's up to the CXO level and the CXO has committed themselves to they will respond at any level within 24 hours and that is to be no fire and forget because they understand that those kind of decisions that will hamper the progress from those 100 teams will affect the deliverance of the fighter aircraft. So that's not no fire and forget directives to be committed at the highest level.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:In order to do that, you have to create some type of cadence and I think that kind of leads into your paper on harmonization emergence model. But you know, if there's a good one, good way to think about this, if you put a bunch of metronomes, you know, that are kind of off, you put them on a single platform, over time, over a couple of minutes, they'll all sync up right, which is kind of neat to see. That platform you could think of as a cadence or those touch points throughout the organization and that enables that organization to create that feedback. And I think the fire and forget that we see in organizations is they think that their teams that are out there doing the work, or maybe doing the work that they need to be from teams and they need to be agile or the rest of the organization doesn't change. The truth of the matter is you have to.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:It's a self-similar thing, it's a fractal organization that what happens at the top, which is a higher level of task interdependence, which means you need to know everything that we're talking about in here today, the process of planning red teaming this way, to open up the cognitive space, if we will, you have to know the how on how to do that, not just the what at that higher level of the organization and that cascades or transcends throughout the organization and those feedback loops. Which is a constraint, according to Alicia Herrero, is you need that back to feedback in that system. That's not the way we're seeing organizations organized right now. They're just doing stuff and going on this mad, crazy path towards quote unquote, agile. So I really like this idea in your harmonization emergence model, which harmony, as Mark knows, is critical to what John Boyd writes about. And, Mark, I want to bounce it to you before we talk about the harmonization emergence model and the connection there to a cadence what did John Boyd talk about when he was talking about harmony? Why is that so important to Boyd?
Mark McGrath :Harmony was important because it's organic and it is aligned and emergent, versus synchronization, which was his big rift with the US Army that he wanted them to not use the word synchronization. Because synchronization, which was his big rift with the US Army, that he wanted them to not use the word synchronization, because synchronization alluded to mechanistic, linear, mathematical, predictable, whereas what Boyd's idea of harmony, in line with Eastern thinking and Sun Tzu and the other things that he incorporated into his final version of the OODA loop before he died, was was more emergent, organic and human centered.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:So your five principles of a set based approach to planning, how does that connect to your harmonization emergence model and is there a? Connection there.
Annette Nolan:I think. So I think I think we're talking about um human systems, human organization and and then we're back to boyd and the notion of harmonization rather than synchronization. So I think there's a strong connection actually between the two um. So if you're looking at, you're looking at organizations like military organizations, where you're working with people and essentially people are responsible for all the outcomes that are produced and they're very dependent on each other, then of course you know harmonization is obviously something you should really strive for and in order to have that kind of harmonization, there has to be an understanding in the planning process that it's human beings we're working with and we're working with their cognitive abilities and their ability to communicate, their ability to get engaged in planning and processes and to interact.
Johan :Essentially, yeah, and I think the why we started that paper is we talk a lot about interoperability, we talk about harmony and harmony of effort, but when you try to dig a bit deeper, what do we really mean? It's kind of hollow. So we try to nuance it a bit more and you know, as Boyd said, there are people, ideas and things in that order. But I think when we're talking about interoperability and harmony, we usually end up with starting with the things Can we connect this system to this system? And that's the we want to turn it up. It's the other way around and the things we always hold in the end, but the people, the ideas, the double contingency between culture, between persons, in order to have the interoperability we need, that's where we need to start. And that's also hard to talk about interoperability, taking the context out of the situation, and usually that's what we do at a lot of the meetings I attend around the world, talking about different standards.
Mark McGrath :I think Annette also used a Boyd I word interact and the opposite would be isolation. And synchronized is very easy to isolate, especially when you can identify as a competitor, as an opponent. You can start to identify the linear processes, the logical systems that people are flowing off of and you realize that that's not harmonization, that doesn't work in complexity, that doesn't work in complexity, that doesn't work in reality. Thus, harmony suggests that we're interacting and humans interact with our environment and as we interact in those unfolding circumstances, that's how we augment and build our orientation such that it can shape better. It's that strategic game of interaction and isolation. As you say, we have to interact and isolation, as you say we have to interact.
Johan :Boyd was also a lot of the misinterpretation that that's to be fast. Sometimes slow is fast. It's about. We talk about Kronos and Kairos, the timing and the deception. To grab him by the nose and kick him in the ass. That kind of that takes timing more than speed.
Mark McGrath :So that's what we're trying to address so punch and I were just having a conversation about an article that was recently written, uh, in the wall street journal and it was sent to us. I don't know, punch, I probably got it like 30 different people sent it to me and it's talking about.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Let's go ahead and let's reveal who actually wrote that. Because of the connection, it was a former nato supreme allied Commander there you go.
Mark McGrath :Admiral James DeVritas writes about the OODA loop and describes it inaccurately. It did not emerge from his thinking in the 1950s. And it's not just about speed, as Johan just said. It's not about speed because you can have the fastest OODA loop. I'm sure Blockbuster had a very fast OODA loop, but they were not attuned to the reality of their environment, they weren't interacting with their environment. And speed, I think, often is mischaracterized. It becomes haste, it becomes just rapidity for rapidity's sake. And if I'm misoriented, it's wrong, I'm off and doom and defeat is imminent. So when I read that article and I see how OODA loop is being explained, and now the whole world that reads the Wall Street Journal thinks that that's what the OODA loop is and that's what it means. It's way off and it's exactly what you want your competitors to think the OODA loop is. You want your competitors to have that simplistic model of just speed because you're going to take them to the cleaners every single time.
Annette Nolan:Exactly, that's an american word for yeah, defeat them. I don't know if they use that in sweden, but no, maybe not. Take them to the cleaners. Take them to the cleaners, you're gonna.
Mark McGrath :You're gonna defeat them handily and decisively every time if they're operating on the simplistic, mechanistic model of the oodle loop, that's only speed driven, not context, not interaction, not orientation driven.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:So, mark, I would say that's actually the merchant of certainty model of John Boyd's OODA loop, or their view of it. Right, if you want.
Annette Nolan:Johan asked me before we came on today. Well, you know when did I first come in contact with Boyd? And it is like, obviously, at the basic level of education for officer cadets studying for the Air Force and this notion that the ODA loop is connected to decision making in the cockpit. Essentially and this is, of course, sort of a misdirection of what the ODA loop is all about it's much more about you know strategic thinking, strategic what the Oda loop is all about. It's much more about you know strategic thinking, strategic level thinking and understanding the necessity of having you know cognitive sophistication to deal with Fractal at every level.
Annette Nolan:So I think it's interesting. I think that the perpetuation of that myth is a you know, a continuous thing in military communities.
Mark McGrath :Yeah, it's exactly what you want your enemy to think that the OODA loop is. You want your enemy to run on that system so that you can get them every time.
Johan :I just read the Coram's book about Boyd and the EM theory. That's about the airplane towards airplane. But then, as I understand, when Boyd realized, how did he as a pilot come up with this mathematical formula instead of an engineer? Then the OODA loop came out from him. And so the OODA loop is how you learn, how you break patterns, how you see things anew, how you create a generative field culture. That's how I see it after reading Karam's book. You have you created a general field culture. That's how I see it after reading Karam's book, and that's for me it's much more interesting than comparing two aircrafts in the air.
Mark McGrath :So here's another Americanism. You just hit a home run grand slam with that one, johan, because what Boyd set out in talking to Chet directly and some of Boyd's other acolytes, was that Boyd started with the premise how did I, a major in the Air Force with a full-time job teaching pilots with five children, one of whom has special needs, how did I in my free time, come up with energy maneuverability theory and other ones didn't. And that was his starting point. It wasn't fighting in Korea or flying in Korea, because he never fought in Korea. He flew, but he didn't fight.
Mark McGrath :And it's that question that came up with destruction and creation. And my biggest criticism when I read an article, like we saw in the Wall Street Journal, is, I guarantee it, that if they've read destruction and creation, they forgot about it or they didn't really read it. Because when you read destruction and creation, that's the starting point for everything, including what I gather from your papers. That's the starting point. I could trace it all back to that type of thinking when we incorporate Boyd, because we're incorporating entropy and uncertainty and incompleteness. That's why we have to have him and that's why we have to have these other things, because it's not so simple, it's not a linear speed model.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:And where we're going with this is if you understand Boyd's OODA loop in the way we're talking about it, we've been talking about on the show. It leads to things like assemblage theory, free energy principle, active inference you brought up constraints participative sensemaking. I want to walk into those or talk about those things that you have in this paper and make some connections there. You have Einheit in here. Can you walk us through the connections of assemblage theory, what you're trying to bring out with that, and make the connection back to Boyd Zoodaloo?
Annette Nolan:Well, I think perhaps we have to consider, you know, I mean, you know sort of when we talk about organizational culture and even work cultures, know sort of when we talk about organizational culture and even work cultures, any sort of culture we put it.
Annette Nolan:You know sort of any, um, let's say, a brand, would you say a sort of a planning cell in the military, or you know an educational group planning a course you sort of have.
Annette Nolan:Then you have don't necessarily have a team initially and you may not have a team at the end, but assemblages mean that you kind of focus, my view, sort of small groups come together who have kind of shared conceptual frameworks, even if they have different backgrounds, that they can come together and that they can produce something effectively together, be it, of course, in my case, working with other educators, because we'd have a common understanding of, for example, like what as I've been working a lot with language teaching, I mean I think about my students in terms of the way I can profile them, how I can understand them and how I can try to address what their needs might be. And I need people who share that orientation, conceptual framework in order to be able to, to share and participate in some kind of sense making process with them to produce something yeah, and that's also what to try it in the article.
Johan :Nowadays we talk a lot about multi-domain operations and that's cross-organizational, and so assemblage in the article was a way of us to make a clear distinction between we talk about team or teams within an organization, but cross-organization, we talk about assemblages.
Johan :And in order to understand that huge amount of perspectives that the multi-domain operations adhere, to understand, then you need to go out from your organizations and be very open to the other contributions. And that's about the new kind of leadership that we want to try to look at. It's more about the skill of organizing for sense-making, meaning-making, than leading the actual planning, and that's also how we see the command and control in the future. That's about modulating and catalyzing collaboration in order to co-create that kind of meaning. And I'm also happy to see in the new NATO doctrines AGP-1 and AGP-10, they talk about narrative-led execution. It's all about the narrative and the narrative should be very cohesive, that what we's all about, the narrative and the narrative should be very cohesive, that what we do, what we say and the feedback from the environment needs to be very homogeneous. Otherwise we need to adapt in order to not leave those kind of cracks open to our opponent to exploit.
Annette Nolan:I think it's interesting, this narrative-led execution, because it brings us into one of the things we explore, and this is participatory, sense-making and languaging. And I think we have to be careful with narrative-led execution personally, because when we talk about the narrative, do we really have consensus within that narrative? And that's where PSM. I think there's an understanding in the concept of narrative-led execution or narrative-led operations that we have to be in agreement to a certain extent about what the narrative actually is. But it's very important that that doesn't become something that's just a product in itself and that we should always be re-evaluating the narrative. And I think that this is about providing the affordances for people to come together and have influence in the context of developing the narrative and influencing the narrative and changing the narrative, Because the narratives it's like any kind of linguistic engagement. A narrative is a product in itself, so it shouldn't be, you know, a permanent kind of narrative. It should evolve with the situation.
Johan :And that's the most strenuous thing there are, because, as I understand John Boyd, our orientation, that's the center of gravity and that, as we see it, a narrative-led execution is about the common orientation, the meaning, what is going on, and we need to co-create that from all the levels, use the whole system as sensors in order to be adaptive and instead of our initial frames, we need to be able to throw them away to creative destruction, to see it anew.
Mark McGrath :I also think it goes back to Boyd's definition of strategy, which we had on the show one of your countrymen, Eric Shun, talking about. That strategy is a mental tapestry of changing intentions versus something that's solidified or ossified, that could become stale as it never changes. That strategy is a tapestry of changing intents that occur within our orientation.
Annette Nolan:Exactly, and I think this is PSM. I think we used Elena Kofari and Hannah Deager's model to talk about languaging and participatory sensemaking, and this is like I mean. We have to think about the language and our communication and the narrative as a way of organizing our existence, of perpetuating. We're producing our own identity and that should never be own identity and that should never be static. It should always be a process.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:As such, Annette, I'm kind of curious on languaging and narrative from a perspective of fifth generation warfare, cognitive warfare. I think we're seeing narrative used quite a bit today to attack our orientation. Can you comment on that? Am I often seeing this connection?
Annette Nolan:I think it's challenging this problem. I think you hit the nail on the head there with this problem. Of course there's competition in the media. We see, for example, this weekend, the terrorist attack in Moscow and we can see that there's so many competing narratives in the media about it and political narratives that are being generated about it. So, and there's all sorts of connection to using this narrative to perpetuate your own interests.
Annette Nolan:So I think we always have to be sceptical to the narrative and that's why I sort of I think it's important that we talk about narrative led execution and we're critical of it, because we have to see that the narrative should not be static. The narrative will be questioned. People are questioning, you know, the truth or the reality of the information they receive, with much more critical cultures and audiences. So it's very difficult to create some kind of congruent shared meaning at such a global level and that when we look at our sort of theories with the harmonization emergence model, you have to see that emergence in itself is not stable and that it has, it's going to be open to critique and we have to review, go back, use the feedback we get, to develop our orientation and then to act again.
Johan :I think yeah, and that's also why we use the entropy arrow in the model as well, to show that time, as well as the opponent, as well as your misconception that that kind of entropy that works against your way of stimish character, that that's things come together as a as a wholeness, and that's what we're aiming for. The story is really cohesive, like that's what we're aiming for for the really tight story. But but the entropy always works this so you need to be adaptive, otherwise it becomes like you're often referred to, it becomes a dogma and then it's useless.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Johan, you used a word there that I don't think many of our listeners are familiar with, and I might get this wrong Stimmigkeit. Did I say that correctly?
Johan :Yeah, that's a German term, and we start to use Einheit term and we start to use einheit for us. I I took it from chet richards his explanation of, as boyd saw, a team really great team is, he said, like an alien seat from space and don't understand. There are several people, so like one organism. So so that's einheit what we're striving to. But then we thought, okay, how do you become like that kind of team? What does it take to go there? And then we need, okay, there's something else.
Johan :You need to have some kind of benefit that you see, for me and Annette to cooperate. We need to get a better article than if I wrote it myself or Annette wrote it by herself. Then we see, okay, there is an opportunity, cost here that's worth the effort in order for us to synchronize. And then when you see that benefit to work together, then it becomes better. The stimishkeit it's more, it resonates, it becomes better. And you can connect it back to the narrative-led execution what we say, what we do, what we think and the feedback from it. It's really tight, it's no cracks in it.
Johan :And when we see that effort, then we become more as one than two persons.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Is there a connection to situational awareness or sense-making in that?
Johan :Yeah, but we're a bit cautious of using those kind of words, because we are aiming for what are we after, and stymischkeit is when it all resonates yeah a situational picture. It's just a means to that end, or sense making those means to that end.
Annette Nolan:But stymischkeit, that that's the, that's the goal, that's what we're after maybe we could say that it's, it's close to act if you look at it in boidian terms, because when we talk about unity, we talk about shared appreciation of each other within the team, shared, perhaps, orientation, but then congruence would be perhaps our congruent, shared meaning would be perhaps what you're going to do with that unity, um, and that brings you into the towards the act phase that you have a, you know, a shared understanding of what the next right thing to do is. If we're going back to channeling dave snowden again, and we have the orchestra as well.
Mark McGrath :Yeah, yeah, that's another great word, that's another great boyd word that you used appreciation. So when we move away from command and control, we're using an organic design. We come up with leadership and appreciation, that we can come together and recognize the worth or value of something yeah, yeah.
Johan :And appreciation that that's a good leadership skill when you try to foster generative culture. Appreciation for the odd views on their perspectives.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:So and that I have a question about language here. Uh, we're providing a lot of new words to folks, uh ideas. How important is language in changing culture? Or can you give me more background on why, uh somebody with your background is interested in this type of thinking?
Annette Nolan:well, I think, I think, um, I think essentially, you know, I think languaging, I think, as I've used this quote in in the article that we wrote about, it's the regulation and coupling of our existence in different environmental domains and that's, I think, what languaging is all about. But there's nothing new. I think One of the things we explored in our discussion about you know, when we came from our different backgrounds, like I think Johan, came up, he explored a lot of Herbert Simon's work and we saw a lot of like resonance. When I look back at like the history of language philosophy, for example, which sort of started with, I think modern linguistic philosophy goes back to the Swiss linguist, ferdinand de Saussure, who wrote I don't think he wrote the book himself, I think, like many greats you know, the books were all written about his work. I don't think he wrote the book himself. I think, like many greats, you know, the books were all written about his work.
Annette Nolan:But one of his key issues with language is that language is not static. It is. You know, terms, concepts, they change meaning over time and it's a bit like the analogy you use about once you know the plan makes contact with the environment, something changes about it. And it's the same about language and culture. And of course, there's strong um.
Annette Nolan:I wouldn't say there's a one-to-one identity between language and culture, but I think at the same time, like the evolution of thinking about what happens with language, cognition and sophistication. They're so fascinatingly inseparable um that I think you can really see, like when, when I think about educational culture, for example, you can see the parallel between the adaptation, the evolution of our cognitive abilities and language development. There's so many different facets. When it comes to languaging itself, it's our means, our way of mediating the world. We mightn't be, you know, you don't have to be. You'll be languaging from the minute you begin to produce sounds. You'll be trying to work out what the effect that sound has, what it's going to look like on paper. It's a constant interaction with the linguistic environment and with others, of course.
Mark McGrath :More importantly, Does the medium become the message?
Annette Nolan:I don't think there's a one-to-one relationship between the form and what you do with it, and I think, when I look at dave snowden's quote about interpretation, you know the plan. I think that's that I could. That resonates so much in language philosophy. John searle, for example, who talks about like once you say, what you say and how another person perceives it are not the same thing you can't mock them in that way go back to your example of the terror attack in moscow.
Mark McGrath :You say there's so many competing narratives is. Is that? Is that accelerated or distorted by the fact that the medium is so people get can get so many different narratives instantaneously? Does that, does that have any effect on that?
Annette Nolan:yeah, but I don't think that. I think that's that's media and communication. I don't think that's media and communication. I don't think that's quite languaging, because languaging means that there is an interlocutor, there's an involvement, there's an engagement in the process, when you're trying to, you know, sort of map your ideas into a manageable form for the other person to listen to.
Annette Nolan:The most obvious examples, I think, are based in a way in intercultural communication or interlanguage communication, more to the point. So, for example, when you're working in I think it's particularly relevant in NATO context when you work in multinational staffs or organisations that don't necessarily have people from the same linguistic background, then this is really a very observable and active process where people are trying to determine exactly what's meant by a particular term and I think, in military discourse of course, is very heavy from that perspective. Myself and my colleague Carolina Carlstrom, we have constant conversation about this notion of heavy concepts and terminology because they encode things that the general public just wouldn't understand. Media plays with that, I think. But what happens between languaging is more about what happens between individuals, a kind of self-realization between them to engage in a discourse which they find understandable with each other.
Johan :I think it's a bit different if you look at the news and if you take it back to operational planning. If you take it back to operational planning, we would understand. Okay, let's just start IS, just start Russia. And trying to think in several abstraction levels. What would it be for me as a Russian military strategist? What would I benefit from this deception if it was? If I was from IS, how would that benefit me?
Johan :And try to cross-correlate those perspectives and I think that's best done out of the media, out of the news, in a closed room, and be very open to acknowledge that there are some perspectives. Acknowledge that there are some perspectives, if I was a military Russian strategist, that I could logically understand but that I wouldn't express in an official, like in the news or something like that. So, empathize with your enemy or adversary. That's the key to understand him or her in order to understand and to find key to understand him or her in order to understand, to find this kind of zone of acceptance, in order to to see what, after we have fought how to come across our differences, in order to be able to coexist on this little planet that we call earth and we not need to go there in our planning or second order of strategies at least.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:I want to thank Annette for the insights on languaging. That's fantastic. I was not familiar with that and that's something we need to dive into. I want to shift gears slightly. Back in 2003, maybe 2004, power to the Edge came out command and control in the information age you reference it, your background. You had some agile coaching experience as well. When I read these books by Professor Alberts I was network-centric warfare, things like that, trying to understand how do we thrive in this information age. Can you talk a little bit about the connection back to Power to the Edge in your paper and give us some insights to what you see the purpose of command control being?
Johan :yeah, as I understand albert's cube, it's more about understanding how things work. You study a company, you study a mission or something, and then you try to understand what's going on here, and then the Albert cube is useful to understand. Okay, this is the patterns of interaction, this is the distribution, allocation of mandates or distribution of information, those three axes, and understand this kind of entity. It fits there and there in the cube. What me and annette try to do with our hem model is okay if you go the other way understand what is harmony, what is interoperability, and what kind of catalyzers and modulators can we use at the c2 level in order to get some kind of sensor network, meaning, co-creating, meaning in this cross collaboration. So it's more about how to do it than describe it in retrospectives.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:So so that that, would I say, is the difference okay, and and the purpose of command and control from your perspective? Yeah, Just curious. I think you did something at Johns Hopkins not too long ago.
Annette Nolan:Can you give us some insights on what you shared with the folks there? Yeah, we talked about this. I mean, from the perspective, we'd use the joint concept note, the British Armed Forces joint concept note, or Ministry of Defense Defence. It was about the future of command and control and we broke down the definition of this future of command and control and we said that the purpose of command and control is to provide focus so that participants in a particular activity could integrate and to maximise their differences perhaps, or similarities, differences and similarities, in order to achieve desired outcomes. Um, so I mean, we see, I think was boyd, wasn't it just separated? You know, he was very instrumental in separating the notions of command and control. Um, so I think we're really, when we talk about this, this definition of command and control, I would say, is very much centered on the command element rather than the control element. Would you agree?
Johan :Yeah, so just that definition. The purpose of command and control from GCN 2-17 is the first sentence is to provide focus, because our scarcest resource is our attention, because our scarcest resource is our attention, and to understand where is the window that we want to do, and not to make that window too tight, to make it open enough to see what you can figure out. So to provide focus is the key element, but also in order to say, okay, just put teams together from different organizations, we will have a very good perspective taking. But that's not. It's as they say in the definition, so they may integrate. So there is humility there as well, that it is for command and control to see does the team work as it supposed to be, or are the differences too big? So there is no synergy to put the people together, there are the opposite. So that's a skill for command and control in understanding how to design for heterogeneity still harmony.
Johan :So, that's a trade-off, to use the Toyota language, to understand that, to have that finger-spits-and-give-heal as a command and control catalyzer and modulator in order to get that. And that's, in the end, to maximize the resources utilized in order to achieve the desired outcome.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Okay, I want to bounce something off of both of you. So I've been doing a lot of work in my background in the Flow system. I've been doing some work with the Flow Collective to understand group triggers. And when you read the purpose of C2, command and control, providing focus it overlaps quite well with what are known as group triggers. So how do we achieve peak performance? I'll just read off some of these for you.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Complete concentration. To me, when you say provide focus, that's what we're trying to do. Compartmentalize, focus on something, get it done. You want shared goals. You have desired outcomes up there as point number four, that's what we want A direction of travel, some proximal goals, some distal goals, understanding that the integration piece, and maybe even more on the providing focus side, sense of control, is another flow trigger Blending egos, taking that rank off, which we talked about earlier in this conversation. Equal participation how do we create that? Maximize that participation? This conversation equal participation how do we create that? Maximize that participation? So as you're walking through this, I see an easy connection between what is emerging from the flow collective and that connects quite well to what we have in the flow system, what we're talking about with mission command, jamboy doodle loop and what you're putting out here. So I just wanted to throw that as a comment to see if that resonates with you, if you're trying to get to peak performance with some type of command control, or if there's something that you can add to that point.
Annette Nolan:Yeah, I think there is something we talked a lot about Herbert Simon's zone of acceptance as a very important element in exercising command understanding what's acceptable to those who are leading in terms of what you can ask them to do, and so on and so forth.
Annette Nolan:But one thing that emerged in the reading was this also the zone of indifference? I think that's also Herbert Simon's concept about understanding the capabilities and the competences of the people that you work with and respecting them, and to know when to you know to which areas you get them to focus on what you need to draw their attention to what might be sort of within their zone. I use another zone word here now because I'm very influenced by Lev Vygotsky's Mind and Society work, in which he talks about the zone of proximal development, and that's understanding you know, people who are you're educating or subordinate to you, what they know and the distance between what they can enact, what is within their capabilities. So I think the zone of indifference is also very resonant from Herbert Simons. No, it's not Herbert Simons, sorry, it's the Nobel Prize winner.
Johan :It's Herbert Simons. It's.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Herbert.
Annette Nolan:Simons yeah, thanks, and it's interesting to think about these because these concepts come from the 1920s and 30s. So I think it's you know, when we think about providing focus and working with people, you have to, I suppose, understand where they are and what they're capable of going, I think.
Johan :And I would like to connect it because I think it resonates a lot with flow, because flow is so. That's what the OOLA loop is about, If we connect. There are two feedback signals from ACT. One is the first feedback signal Is there an intervention? Did the company or battalion get to the place that they needed? But the effect on the opponent or enemy, that's the other and the difference between that, that's kind of the prediction error and we want to minimize that prediction error in order to have the speed, the flow, and the bigger it gets, that's for the opponent to induce friction in the opponent. We want to minimize that to zero so we have super flow.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:So it resonates very much with our thing, you must be reading the same things. We are Love it Amazing. Speaking of reading, we have had Alicia Herrero on the podcast to talk about constraints and in the Agile community and again, I'm not here to throw any rocks at anybody like that but a lot of folks look at constraints and they look at Goldratt's work in Theory of Constraints and look at it only from that perspective that we have to eliminate constraints. That's not what you're talking about in your paper when you reference Alicia's work about in your paper. When you reference Alicia's work.
Annette Nolan:Can you walk us through some of the why you brought up the constraints from Alicia's work in your paper. Yeah, I think it's again. It's a little bit about understanding. I mean, I think I was thinking about, you know, when we discussed our first paper earlier.
Annette Nolan:We talked about the product process notion and the function of guidelines, doctrines, other types of governing constraints in order to make organizations effective. It's about those who are, you know, working up through the ranks or through the from the bottom, bottom up perspectives, and what they can actually do with this kind of, with the competences they have, um. So I think that these things are usually and I think, a lot of the time what alicia says about, you know, attending to the emergent properties, um resonates with us as well, because if you think about it, if you just follow the plan, you don't necessarily have a great deal of success because you're too rigid in your approach. I think, in my mind, what she says about like attending to the emergent properties and observing what's happening within assemblages and groups in order to be more creative, essentially, and to be more effective, I think that resonated with us a lot in terms of being more agile, more flexible.
Johan :Yeah, yeah, and if we go back to the definition of command and control, to to provide focus, without any constraints, you don't have any focus.
Johan :It 360 energy and I think that that's one of the thing that's enabling constraint in order to provide focus. But but also when she was a complexityity Lounge, I guess to promote her new book, context Changes Everything, and then she connected to Sartre's the awaited bus and the delayed bus at the bus stop and when she explained when the bus is delayed, people are coming up from their newspaper phones today and starting to look at each other. There's something starts to build there and for us to understand interoperability and harmony. That was a key concept. And then that kind of bottom up constituted a constraint regime that she's described what we were trying to understand in teams how, and that's when they have something in common, when they collaborate in order to disregard of how delayed the bus is, can they help each other in order to overcome that problem. And that's if they see the solution. That's kind of Stimishkite they fix together, they see how they can solve this problem and if they do that, they have that in common and they become connected as they were before the delayed bus.
Mark McGrath :And you illustrate in your paper. It's fractal. That can happen, as you say, bottom up. It can happen at every level.
Johan :Yeah, yeah, so we took it from the bottom up to start with it. I think we use Mrs Black and and mr green in the paper, just to understand the double continuously between two people.
Johan :But, as we said, in paper it's fractal, it's even up to the states between two states and it could be friendly or opposing forces, it doesn't matter, because what you do in one ooda loop affects the other loop and vice versa. So that kind of double continuously that we try to show with two connected OODA loops it's completely recursive from the personal level up to the state level.
Annette Nolan:It's interesting. I think that there's this, because we're back to the issue of attention and I think that's what she's talking about is attending to what's emergent in a situation, and I think we see so many examples of of in international relations, for example, when we haven't really attended to what was right in front of our nose, for example, the annexation of Crimea. I mean, in the international community, that was right in front of the international community's nose, but we chose to see the see the status quo, rather than the emergent properties in the situation.
Johan :So I think that these things this is something that's really interesting in terms of particularly in military situations, very important to attend to what is emergent, not what's static, yeah, and that's why you need unity rather than uniformity. You needed a divergent, degenerative culture, as Westrom is talking about, in order to see those kind of cues to be able to speak up to them and that's saying under your nose.
Mark McGrath :it's amazing how many things can just hide in plain sight.
Annette Nolan:Well, I don't know if they're hiding. I think they're not hiding. They're there, we're just not paying attention to them.
Mark McGrath :That's what I mean, it'siding it in plain sight, that they don't have to be vaulted or hidden away. They can be right in front of our face. And because people, their orientations, are static and they're not scanning and sense making effectively, Maybe our orientation yeah, I think our orientation isn't.
Annette Nolan:I mean, I think in the case of the annexation of Crimea, perhaps the European orientation at least wasn't attentive enough, I think in Northern Europe, I think the discourse was one of concern already, I would say, but in the rest of the European Union, I think it wasn't. There was a you know. I would say Well, it was a matter of deception really.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:I think we saw Russia as something it wasn't quite there's a saying you only see what you expect to see. All warfare is based on deception right.
Annette Nolan:Yeah.
Mark McGrath :As Sun Tzu said, all warfare is based on deception right.
Annette Nolan:Yeah, as Sun Tzu said, all warfare is based on deception.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Yeah, yeah, so you had some help. It looks like Chet gave you some comments on your paper. What was it like reaching out to Chet, by the way?
Johan :Well, we were fortunate enough to have established a collaboration with him prior to the article, where we used him to educate our students about the OO-Loop and the real thinking about the OO-Loop, and we first come across him with this article that we did together with a Norwegian defense university and, as it happens, my professor that I shared my room with was the one that had connected in Norway with Chet.
Johan :I didn't know that at the time, so then it was easy because he's really generous with his time and any question he responds, not directly, and I think that's really credit to him. Everything you ask him he considered it. Maybe he talked to Jacques Spini before he answered, and that's the timing to take it in to see is there other dimensions that I need to respond here? And so I think he lives and breathes the ooda loop and are very humble towards new interpretations and understanding of the ooda loop and curious that it could be otherwise. And and I think that's uh, showing him, showing him as big as he are, doctorate and colonel and everything With his legacy, he could be very up on an ivory tower, but he is down here with us, the Gemba, and try to take it further.
Annette Nolan:Yeah.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:All right. So hey, we've taken up quite a bit of your time. Just going to open it up for any questions you may have to Mark or myself about anything. We really appreciate your insight today. I've been looking forward to this for a while. Sorry, we couldn't help you get into Quantico, but anytime in the future you're out here we can get on base and go spend some time in the archives with you on base and go spend some time in the archives with you. Any comments, questions, concerns? So, by the ways, anything you have for us about what you're hearing coming out of the podcast or what you heard from us today.
Annette Nolan:Oh, I think we've been really delighted to be invited to come on the podcast. I've been following it with interest, so it's been really great. It's been a real pleasure, I think, from our perspective. I think just to say that it's a really brilliant podcast. We love to listen to it. There's so many different elements to it and so many. It's great that you've got such diversity on the podcast. You know so many people from different backgrounds, ways of thinking, and it's always such an engaging conversation you have with people you interview, so we're feeling really privileged, actually.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Oh, this is great, thank you. We're going to dive into some neurodivergent work here soon, some stuff on the brain. Mental health is coming. I think next month is mental health month, so I think Boyd's work allows us to go into just any place we want, and that's what's amazing about Boyd. Thanks for your comments, annette. I really appreciate that.
Johan :Yeah, yeah, I would add to annette, you struck it like from nowhere. You came up with all this fantastic intro with the sample, john boyd's voice and also in that amount that you produced the first maybe 15 episodes. I mean you were inside all the other podcasts with the loop and I I think you leveled up to the level that you are now. That was really that. You put all that effort in. That was great and benefits to enhance and acknowledge the legacy that John Boyd has left us all with, to take it further and to really understand what he was trying to convey to, to make us tea. So grateful for that and grateful to be a part of this, thank you.
Mark McGrath :You're on the mission on us, Cause we take it very seriously to develop his work and and stand on his shoulders and do what he wanted us to do is to keep keep working at this hard, and so we'll continue to do that.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:All right. Well, let's go ahead and wrap up today's episode. Really appreciate both of you being here today. Thank you, and is there anything that you're working on you'd like our listeners to learn about and how can they reach out to you and connect with you?
Johan :Well, it would be nice if you could put the articles or references to Research Gates so they could read it, not just to digest it and make it dogma, rather to criticize it and reach back to us. I think we are both on LinkedIn and our emails are on the paper, so we're really looking forward to feedback and, like the correction signal. We want to make it better and advance from here.
Annette Nolan:And I think we're working on another article at the moment, and it's more to do with the language dimension. We've got some research that we're going to analyze, where we've investigated our own students, those students on the advanced course who are captains of majors, and their impressions of their own ability to engage in languaging activities in, uh, in an international setting. So I think that's going to be, but as I, as I come back to boyd every time, especially coming in preparation for the podcast, I see that there's a contribution there, um, in terms of orientation as well. I just, it's just so. I think he's certainly, you know, a man of his time that's resonant of all the other thinkers when it comes to philosophy and cognition about language in that period.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Fantastic. Well, we'll go ahead and wrap it up there. Again, we appreciate you being on here. We'll put links to those articles on our platforms for everybody. But thanks again and we'll see you. We'll have you back, for sure, maybe in 2024. I know things are going to change quite a bit here in the next six months, maybe, maybe for the better, hopefully for the better All around, but we'll see things unfold and attend to those things that unfold in front of us. So, again, thank you for being here today and we'll talk to you soon.
