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
Transformative Team Dynamics: From Battlefield Strategies to Boardroom Success with Martin Murphy
Unlock the secrets of military precision and organizational brilliance as we take you on a journey from the battlefield to the boardroom. Are traditional hierarchies holding your team back? Discover how dynamic teaming structures inspired by Navy SEALs and aviation experts can propel your business to new heights. Martin Murphy unravels the transformative power of psychological safety and challenges the age-old competitive mindset, urging businesses to embrace collaboration as their evolutionary advantage.
Navigate the intricacies of the OODA loop with us, as we move beyond its linear confines into a realm where empathy and social intelligence reign supreme. Learn how trauma and individual experiences can shape orientation and perception, offering a deeper understanding of decision-making processes. We highlight the importance of aligning with reality rather than just acting quickly, drawing inspiration from John Boyd's revolutionary ideas. This episode equips you with the tools to rethink leadership, fostering transformation and collaboration through strategic orientation and exercises like red teaming.
Join our exploration of cultural shifts and their impact on professional methodologies, emphasizing the power of unity in diverse environments. From General McChrystal's "Team of Teams" to Buckminster Fuller's "trim tab," we examine how small adjustments can lead to significant outcomes. Our conversation concludes with a tribute to the pivotal role of veterans in societal change, urging a shift from competition to collaboration. Let this enlightening discussion inspire you to embrace change, build community, and harness innovation in your leadership journey.
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Recent podcasts where you’ll also find Mark and Ponch:
But we could all say the same.
Ponch Rivera:Having a face for radio. All of us have it Right.
Martin "Muph" Murphy:So, yeah, it was just. I mean, from my perspective it's just. I mean I've taught OODA, loop and stuff like that, but I just think I've got this fascination about why we stick to things for such a long period of time. Listen to some of the stuff you've been talking about with Sonia. I can't pronounce her surname, is it Blinor?
Ponch Rivera:Blinor, yeah, from South Africa, yeah.
Martin "Muph" Murphy:Yeah, yeah, and I know of Dave Snowden from Kinevin and stuff like that. So, yeah, I kind of created some other models and I looked at different therapies and stuff, and this is kind of an overlap.
Ponch Rivera:Yeah, so building teams. I think there's a natural progression or evolution for military folks to step out of their world and try to bring some of those elements to organizations. And I was told this by Jeff Sutherland, the co-creator of Scrum, and he said what people like us like to do is help others get to that flow state, and I know you're familiar with flow. But how do you put teams in flow? How do you do that? How do you help others achieve that level of high performance? And that's what a lot of us are trying to do by bringing lessons from the military over to business. And not all lessons we bring over are valuable.
Ponch Rivera:Right, there's some bureaucratic things that you and I have experienced and Mark's experienced. There's some bad things that happen in the military, but there's also some really good science, if you want to call it that. For us it'd be the science of teamwork. What we saw here in the U S is, about 20 years ago, our Navy Naval weapons school started teaching a lot of Navy SEALs how to plan, brief, execute, debrief the basics of team science. So we saw the evolution of aviation crew resource management, which today we see as foundational to team science, and that's what a lot of people are researching. That's where Amy Edmondson gets the idea of psychological safety, or borrows from that, seeing how aviators taught surgical teams how to create that or remove fear in that organization or remove fear within that type of environment. So I just want to get your thoughts on what are the things that you're bringing over to help organizations really thrive in this challenging time.
Martin "Muph" Murphy:Well, I mean, I call it dynamic teaming and it's this idea of you know, as you've obviously alluded to and stuff talked about. It's like mission command and that kind of thing. But I challenge the idea that we need to have, yes, dynamic teams and we need to have empowered and I can talk about fourth aligned. They have agency, they have autonomy and they're mutually accountable, and if you can build that in a team, you've got a pretty much a good team. But I think the challenges that we face and you've talked a bit about complexity or some of this stuff is the fact that we're, when we look at history, we tend to look at it just in the last few hundred years, whereas if you look further back than that but for the research that's coming out now is that for 200 000 years we were egalitarian hunter-gatherers and as a result of that um, it's quite a normal thing to be, you know, like hunting parties. Sometimes females will go out with them there was a lot more equality and egalitarianism, um, and I think that's a really important thing and I don't I think there's going to be a challenge moving into the complex, you know, whether you call it tuna or food and stuff like that by hanging on to the old systems. I think it's like, for, you know, hierarchy came about about 10, 000, 11, 000 years ago with the onset of agriculture. And I think the challenge you've got is the fact that, uh, with hierarchy you start talking about have you have you come across, uh, dr ian mcgillchrist's work? Yes, left and right brain thinking, right. So as soon as you start bringing any hierarchy and you start doing more of left brain thinking, and as a result of that, uh, you then have your motivated article at the inner chunk, you're, you're competitive and controlling, you're harm, harmful to the ecosystem, because you're, you're unkind, because you're motivated, motivated by fear and greed and as a result of that, your paradigm fixated.
Martin "Muph" Murphy:And I think you know, when you talk about o OODA loop is a very kind of left brain thing, which is that emphasizes certain things. We assume that everything's got to be quick, everything's, but you know, the seals say, don't they? I think it's the seals that say slow is smooth, smooth is fast, type of thing. And so there's this idea that we've got competition, which I'm not sure we collaborate our way to the top of the tree and I see ourselves competing on the way down the other side, or OODA looping to oblivion, type of thing. So I'm just wondering that's my challenge is the fact that we don't? You also mentioned the fact that you do empathy in OODA loop. Is that right?
Ponch Rivera:You also mentioned the fact that you do empathy in Udalloop. Is that right you can? I mean the whole idea of orientation is to look outside the own system and to understand what's going on in the external environment, and not all humans are capable of that. We've had folks in the autism world come in and help us understand that, understand that. And the whole idea is connecting to things like the latest neuroscience, the stuff that John Boyle was looking at through cybernetics and physics and quantum mechanics and all that.
Ponch Rivera:What happens, or what we're discovering now, is how important that orientation is the genetics, the culture, our experiences, where we went to school, what we ate for breakfast, how much sleep we got last night, how that colors how we experience the world. And the same thing with trauma, right, when we experience something in the military that others would not ever experience, whatever it may be, that colors the way we sense the external world. So there is some research out there that says when others have trauma, we can vicariously gain that trauma too. That's an empathy, if you will. And the same thing with the customer. If you want to empathize with the customer, you have to go outside the OODA loop, outside the boundary, if you will.
Ponch Rivera:So control of the OODA loop in this case is outside and bottom up. It's customer driven, it's externally driven and that's where we see organizations kind of go wrong today, as they don't understand that and they try to project their orientation, say that's how the world needs to be, without any feedback from the external world. Right, yeah, it's a give and take, so you have to empathize with what's happening and you know there's the the mirror neuron concept and all that um, that we could. We don't have to dive into. But but yeah, empathy. I think we added empathy to the human factor side of things because it wasn't on there from aviation crew resource management, it wasn't part of the system, the way it was designed. Empathy is critical because, again, within the OODA loop, it's the external environment that drives everything.
Martin "Muph" Murphy:I would argue against the fact that it's empathy. I think it's social intelligence and it's actually perception. So you can. You know empathy. People who are good at empathy tend to be introverted and quite sensitive, and if you were, they usually have just a few friends that they know for a long period of time. They build up a lot of trust with them. If you put them in a social situation, they soon get worn out because they're feeling everything that other people are feeling yeah, yeah, and that, yeah, that is a, that is.
Ponch Rivera:so you go beyond the five senses and all that. Yeah, the observation includes all the external um, what do you want to call it? Uh, let's use the term, which is, which is sensory observations, right, those things, yeah, they can tax the body, the internal body and all that. We get that. So perception inside the OODA loop is just, you know our orientation, minimizing surprise between what we expect and what our sensory inputs are telling us, our sensory organs are telling us. So there's a whole, you know the whole diagram.
Ponch Rivera:The OODA loop represents, in our view, what we're getting out of the free energy principle now, which is a mathematical way to express that humans do not actively observe, orient, decide and act. That's not how it ever was. That is a perception action loop. It's a passive, linear, reductionist approach to understanding how the OODA loop works and that's not the way John Boyd ever drew the OODA loop and that's not what the research he did on it, in fact, the majority of military officers. There is no OODA loop school. There is no. This is the OODA loop. That's where we go wrong with it and we agree with your article 100% Observe, orient, decide, act is a passive, linear, reductionist way.
Mark McGrath :It's a perception action and Boyd's own thinking evolved. On that too, we might be able to say at the very beginning that his thinking would have been more linear than what it evolved to over the course of 20 or so years. Originally it was from his experience with sense-making tools in the black ops base that he commanded during the Vietnam War. It was ODA, I think it was Orient to Side Act or Observe to Side Act. And then, even when I know in the article he had one void reference, he had patterns of conflict that could be misconstrued as a linear understanding, because he does talk about operating inside of one's loops, but it disregards everything else that he did around the other briefings like organic design for command and control, conceptual spiral, essence of winning and losing, and that's the only time where he actually drew the loop to suggest that this is not a linear process.
Mark McGrath :The orientation for anything else is our cognition, our understanding, our operating system, and that is what in turn implicitly guides and controls what we see, how we decide, how we act, how we learn from that. It's not a linear, reductionist model. And so that's what Bunch is saying. We agree with your article and you can go on a sub stack. I write on this like it seems like every week. But the linear interpretation of OODA is actually the pervasive one that most are familiar with. That are correct to call it reductionist and linear, to call it reductionist and linear. But what ends up happening is they miss 99% of what John Boyd was actually trying to say and what he was actually trying to do, and they don't think of things like evolutionary biology and they don't think of the things that he studied, like cybernetics and other stuff. I mean, there's a lot more to it.
Martin "Muph" Murphy:How about this, then, as a different viewpoint then? So I've taught O ooda loop to intelligence agents, how in other countries who are operating in war zones, and I would actually say that the good thing about um, the ooda loop is actually when you use it for, not as a linear model, but as it's a, as it's as it sounds, uh, in a combat situation. Once you're in that situation high risk, high pressure, and also you know fire service people when they're in a situation I've worked with the fire service on their leadership and teamwork using the OODA loopers just like observe, orientate, decide and act, and to do that really quickly, quickly to get inside the enemy's inner combat situation, inner situation where the poo-poo hits the fan is actually a good thing and that perhaps we need a different model for when we're actually talking about the fact that we need to in an OODA loop situation. You're a complex adaptive system. You're trying to adapt in the system, aren't you?
Martin "Muph" Murphy:You often describe people as being complex adaptive systems. What we are actually doing is what we need to do in the situation that we're in now is that be a complex, evolving system, and the OODA loop doesn't do that. Ooda loop is just purely based or focused on adapting, and that you're trying to get people to think of a wider thing. Why not just why not? Ooda loop's good for in the fire service we worked out it's good for about five percent of the time that you that they're working there. The rest of the time they'd be better off using other things.
Ponch Rivera:Yeah, so we've looked at, you know, recognition, prime decision making with gary klein and we compared it to the ooda loop loop and that whole thing there, right, the simulation that's actually run in RPD is no different than the simulation or counterfactual what-if scenario that's already built into John Boyd's OODA loop. That's the bottom pathway that is internal to a boundary right and that is a simulation. The conversation we're having now we're making predictions about what's coming next. We're making predictions about the conversation we're having now. We're making predictions about what's coming next. Uh, we're making predictions about the rooms we're in.
Ponch Rivera:Um, the reason for that is because it reduces the energy our bodies spend. You know, cause? Our brain is a very expensive organism. Um, it uses a lot of energy 20% of our energy, 25% of our energy, whatever it may be. So the idea there is we have to make internal predictions of what's coming next.
Ponch Rivera:It's easier to do and this is where the connection to artificial intelligence comes into play is if you go back to a reductionist OODA loop. That's your large language model. That is a closed system that has a good understanding of a certain environment and I agree with you, it's probably not a complicated environment. It's not a complex environment. It's a very ordered system where the relationship between cause and effect is known. So, going back to your fire service example there and the use of the OODA, that is to me is something you may use in a chaotic situation, using Kenevan framework.
Ponch Rivera:We act sense, respond. Right, that's what we want to do. Use an example from fighter aviation or the military. You do not want to have a conversation about breaking left because you have a muzzle flash coming from the right side of your aircraft. Right, you go, break left, muzzle flash right three o'clock. Right, act sense, respond. Now we'll get back into it, get back to an environment, same thing, and so that's the ooda loop in a complex of our I agree with you 100. It's make a decision based off of an observation. As opposed to my wife when we're driving and she's probably gonna hear this and get mad at me for saying this again oh, look, look, look, look over there and I'm, you know, I'm stepping on my brakes, I'm looking all over the place and it's a sale at a store, right, that is not what you want to do in the environment. So, yeah, there's a lot of interesting connections here and we, you know, having that connection to Kenevan and I think you're somewhat familiar with it.
Martin "Muph" Murphy:Yeah, kenevan, again, it's. So I tend to look at things like this just as we're all thinking, doing, feeling, sensing, communicating animals. When I learned therapies, I could always judge what they were using in that sense. So if I say neuro-linguistic programming, neuro-linguistic programming, cognitive behavioral therapy, and if I look at OODA loop, it's observe, orientate, decide, act. And what happens if you get onto this side? This is egocentric left brain and this is egocentric right brain.
Martin "Muph" Murphy:If you go on Dr Milgiel Chris, if you go a la Dr Milgiel Chris, is that once, if you think about these as being, he's found that the corpus callosum has an inhibitory effect, which means that once you get into one side and it feels comfortable and, as you said before, we want to stick to, we want to go down the path of least resistance. I think, as Sonia said, you know, go down the mental pathways. Once you get into that stage, it becomes very easy to very difficult to get out of that mental rut of using it, and that's a challenge that you've got in the complex environment. Now, when you talk about Dave's Dave Snowden's thing, what does he call it, dave Snowden's?
Ponch Rivera:thing. What does he call it? It's simple, complicated, complex, chaotic, is it? Yeah, so you got clear, complicated complex and you got chaos.
Martin "Muph" Murphy:So it's more of an integral model.
Ponch Rivera:Yeah, it's based off of the basically ecology, right. So you have three types of systems ordered, complex and chaotic systems. It's not I can't remember the name we're using. It's more anthropology-driven, what natural science tells us, and I like it, I mean, we're big fans of it. We've worked with Dave quite a bit. We've also brought Dave to, uh, or met dave up in quantico to look at the connection between his work and what john boyd was working on, and the overlap was pretty amazing. Um, so the, the or, if I'm hearing you correctly, orientation. Um, there's that paradigm shift, right, that we need to have in the complex environment. Can you amplify that a little bit more, I think? I think there's some great overlap here what I think.
Martin "Muph" Murphy:Well, you know, if we look at Dave's thing, I just call it tactical, technical, tenacious and transitional challenges. Just to make it simple, just try to simplify it, because if you say complex to someone, what don't quite, what does that actually mean? But if you say it's a tenacious problem, it's like a whack-a-mole thing, you kind of like trying to solve different, I think it keeps popping up, and so when you've got that situation so like say poverty for instance, let's say we'll solve that one first, poverty. It's very difficult. You solve one person's problem and then it pops up somewhere else and that's what you talk about complex problems, isn't it? The same solution won't apply to that other person. So you can't bring a very local yeah, a centralized solution to something, yeah, so we get into local optimization doesn't optimize the whole system.
Ponch Rivera:So yeah, yeah yeah, yeah.
Martin "Muph" Murphy:So, um, the kind of challenges that you've got at the moment if you're, you know we're talking about chaotic it's because we need to go through a transition and the problem we've been going through a transition is that you hit what I call the seven, seven fears. Uh, letting others be put other, letting other people be right this just comes across when coaching leaders and they're trying to transform, letting others be right, accepting reality because if we accept reality, we've got to do something about it. We're then going to stop doing what we're doing. Have you ever started watching a movie that was rubbish in the first five minutes but carried on hoping it might get better?
Martin "Muph" Murphy:So humans are crap at stopping. They just don't like stopping. They don't like letting go because most of the time that triggers the inner chum. They don't like being vulnerable. So when we're talking about leaders don't like being vulnerable, they don't like stepping into the unknown, because it takes us out of our left brain and we're in this chaotic bit and we say that we don't like. You know, we're afraid of change. That's not true. We change all the time to stay in the same place.
Martin "Muph" Murphy:What we don't like is transformation, because then all bets are off, and so the, the stuff that comes out from the, you know, the military, the mission command. That's great, because what we need to do is empower communities. What we don't need to do for them to do, um, there's certain assumptions that we make. I've it the crap filter like what the consequences of this decision? What are the real costs that you're not talking about? What the assumptions that you're making? What, and is it really, you know? Does it lead to prosperity of people and planet? And if you, um, if you, if you transform something, it means that you've got to come up, create whole new systems. And also, you need to push the power down to the people. And I think that's where you know, the military is really good at that the mission command idea, that sort of thing. But there's always a there's always a challenge, isn't there? I remember when uh oh, have I gone off?
Ponch Rivera:I'll just pause. I'll just hit a clip there. I can't see what your whole screen say. I like to say we can clip this out.
Martin "Muph" Murphy:Movie recording has been stopped automatically. The maximum recording time has been reached. Ah, I've never seen that before.
Mark McGrath :Yeah, we've never had that before.
Martin "Muph" Murphy:Is that on my side? Is it or?
Ponch Rivera:Nah, let's take a look at it. I don't see any issues. I mean, we're still recording, is this?
Martin "Muph" Murphy:of any use, recording, by the way. I mean, you know, I'm just like spitballing with you guys really, but um, yeah, I think, like what?
Mark McGrath :what? We're still recording audio. So I think what, as you're explaining and understanding all those things that you're describing, everything that you're describing is inside of one's orientation and and what your understanding of uda and how you discuss it in the article what it's missing is implicit guidance and control and, as Boyd drew the OODA loop sketch in his final brief before he passed away, implicit guidance and control is the two most important parts, because that, in turn, is what shapes how we see things that make sense of the world, which, in turn, processes us to reorient, and it also, too, shapes how we can act. And that goes back to what Ponch was saying if we're going to break left, you know we can do these things because we've trained for them so many times that we can act without thinking. And that's, quite frankly, that's one of the biggest things that we see.
Mark McGrath :When people critique or they bump up in situations where they'll say, well, I would use ooda loop or I don't use ooda loop, is that they don't understand implicit guidance and control, and that's goes back to not understanding the primacy of orientation, the orientation, the cognitive operating system, the uh, that what it is. That is speaking from me to you hearing where we're constantly reorienting to try to align perception. Okay, and let me just finish.
Mark McGrath :That is not a question of speed, and I'll use your fire service example. So if you read the book Young Men on Fire by Norman MacLean and you talk about the I forget the name of the gulch that the fire was in, but the guys that died were going through fast OODA loops. Right, they're trying to see whose OODA loops the fastest escape the fire. The one guy that was able to shatter his orientation and revise it quickly was the one that lit an escape fire and he survived the fire when everybody else died. And it goes with what John Robb says to us several times is that OODA loop is not necessarily about speed, it's about direction, because you can have fast OODA loops that if they're misdirected and they're not aligned with reality, it doesn't matter how fast you go. I think that when OODA is reduced or even critiqued as merely a reduced thing, it's not really addressing what Boyd actually discussed.
Martin "Muph" Murphy:I get that. He expanded on the thing. But, as you said, it's about guidance and the challenge that you've got. In a competitive environment, for instance, there are certain assumptions that it's based on. So you talk about Sun Tzu, the art of war, for instance. Well, actually that's a misinterpretation. It was actually the art of diplomacy. So the direction is it's competition. Well, actually that's a mispronunciation. It was actually the art of diplomacy. So the direction is it's competition.
Martin "Muph" Murphy:And the problem that we've got is that you're talking about orientation and the inner guidance system. The inner guidance system is competition, when actually our evolutionary competitive advantage is actually collaboration. If you're talking to companies all the time, partly, uh, if you look at hunter-gatherer sorry companies, for instance, they're always trying to. If you look at the ai situation now, they're going into this competitively. It's a multipolar trap. They can't stop, because if they stop, someone else is going to carry on doing it, whereas if you, um, if you're in a guidance, it's always based on false assumptions in the first place, then you've got a challenge and I think that's the thing.
Mark McGrath :That's Because it misshapes how you sense and it misshapes how you act. And the one thing I would put, the one thing I challenge you on, I wouldn't say competition, I would say conflict. And in all humanity, all living organisms are in a state of conflict. And we've had James Gimion come on who talks about the Denmark translation of the sun, soothes as he calls it is that we're all in conflict. I'm in conflict with the weather today is why I'm wearing a hooded sweatshirt. I mean, you know, the hunter gatherers were in conflict.
Ponch Rivera:Your neurons are in conflict. Your cells are in conflict.
Mark McGrath :We're constantly in conflict, you know. So that's, I think, what Boyd's not even his model, what Boyd's work and the theories that he left open for us to keep developing and talking about as we're doing. It's all about conflict, which is the state of human existence.
Martin "Muph" Murphy:Hey, I think the conflict that we've got now is the fact that we're actually in conflict with what would actually help us to uh, evolve in, you know, on the global stage, if you like, because because we've got this idea that we need to be in conflict with things. So I would challenge this guy that says that we're always in conflict because the human race has evolved to where it has, where it has, through collaboration. It's at times of highest collaboration that we're….
Mark McGrath :I'm not disputing that, I agree with that and I think that collaboration comes from the fact that we're actually in conflict. So we work together because we're in conflict with the weather, or we work together because we're competing against another team. We collaborate for any number of reasons, as a man and a wife to breed the species or whatever but conflict doesn't go away.
Ponch Rivera:Remember this, mark control is outside and bottom up, meaning the external environment. And we talk about systems driving behaviors, right? So if our governments or regulations or whatever, even democracies, the way we set up a marketplace will drive the internal behavior, and that's the same thing, that's true in an organization that the reward system is such, it will drive the behaviors within the organization, right.
Mark McGrath :Yeah, and two, just sticking with Boyd and going back to fundamental Boyd, which is destruction and creation. We're trying to improve our capacity for free and independent and independent action. The very reason that we do that is because we're constantly in a state of conflict. Everything is, and I don't see being conflicted. You know pugilistic terms. I'm saying conflict in the sense of you know, dogs have fur because it's cold out and they've evolved to have fur to keep them warm because they're in conflict with the elements, that sort of thing.
Martin "Muph" Murphy:The challenge with hierarchical systems and when we talk about if it's talked as a thing of conflict, one other thing to put in here is the fact that hierarchies actually promote the dark tetrad. So you've got psychopathy, you know sociopathies, narcissism, uh, sadism and, um, uh, what's the word? Machiavellianism? If you look at the world leaders at the moment. Yeah, and that's the problem is, I think that the challenge is that you in organizations where there's any kind of hierarchy, and that people are trying to do this OODA loop with other companies and other AI, and everyone's competing with each other to get to some sort of end game. The end game is actually well, what is the end game? And do you not think that we need to challenge this OODA loop thinking or this kind of competitive thinking, and be more collaborative about it? And would would we be better off starting again with a, with a, with a new uh one that isn't so easily misunderstood and brought down to a reductionist thing, as you've said, which is what you've argued again?
Ponch Rivera:Yeah, so I mean we are social creatures, we, we want to work together. I get that. I mean we have to do in the hierarchy thing. I agree with you that you know. Anything above I think it's three levels of hierarchy. Is is unnatural, I mean we, we impose that in systems. You've been in the military, I've. They have many layers of a hierarchy. There are hierarchies in nature too, right. There's a hierarchical system in your brain. If you're looking at the free energy principle, there's many OODA loops going on. There's a hierarchy. It's a nested fractal system, right. So I agree.
Mark McGrath :We prioritize.
Ponch Rivera:We prioritize because our choices are as humans. Our choices are subjective and we rank things in order of how we want them, so we're constantly categorizing things that way because of scarcity. Going through that, it reminded me of the? Um unintended consequences, right, so the military we've been taught first, second, third order, um effects, right, what? What? What my actions will lead to? I don't think enough business leaders, enough leaders think like that, right, is that where you're going with the crap?
Martin "Muph" Murphy:uh, model yeah, so in the in themaking model, rather than have two models of like Kenevin and Ooder or whatever I just call it, this thing called a juice which is evaluate, decide, understand, commit and then evaluate straight away. So the first time you go around it it's more of a evaluate the situation, which you'd call orientate, and there I might use something like is it a tactical, technical?
Ponch Rivera:No, so I want to pause there. We wouldn't call that orientation. That's not how orientation is used. Orientation determines how we perceive reality. It determines how we sense, how we create situational awareness, Things like going back to the biases, inattentional blindness. I only see what I expect to see. Orientation will drive what you expect to see, right. So, it's not about creating. It's not a. What do you call it? Mark a noun.
Mark McGrath :Yeah, this is the fundamental thing. Where most of this derails is that there's orientation, the noun, which is the prime thing, what John Boyd's describing, and then there's the orientation, the noun, which is the prime thing, what John Boyd's describing, and then there's the orientation, the verb, which exists, but to some that only exists, and I think where the noun is misunderstood, the verb, that's where we get the linear argument. If I don't understand that orientation is the cognitive operating system of me as a living organism, as a living complex, adaptive system. If I don't understand that, there's no way I can understand Boyd, and then I would reduce it, I would make it a linear model.
Martin "Muph" Murphy:In a coaching situation, you're always looking to increase self-awareness, increase situational awareness, increase possibility awareness.
Mark McGrath :So Boyd would say with orientation, if I don't have self-awareness, there's no way I can have any of those things. I can't have situational awareness if I have no self-awareness.
Martin "Muph" Murphy:Yeah.
Mark McGrath :And that means that my orientation has been revised and updated such that my perception is trying its best to constantly update and revise itself to align itself with reality in the environment yeah, if so, going back to yes, I totally get that.
Martin "Muph" Murphy:So, in the, how you're going to evaluate the situation, as you say, depends on your orientation. So, again, evaluation, then decide what that actually means. So that's, you talk about divergent thinking, convergent thinking, and then what normally happens then is that we go straight into emergent thinking or emergent behavior. And what I think that we should do is go from divergent to convergent, to coherent, where you'd actually bring empathy into it, as opposed to an orientation thing, which is social intelligence, where you're perceiving what's going on, you can read, you can understand how people are thinking and feeling, because you perceive it through, through cues, visual cues and things like that. Empathy is something quite different and it slows the whole process down because in that point, which, if you're in um, if you're in the evaluate stage, you observe and orientate stage, you'd be just discussing ideas, you're divergent, discussing options. If you're in the, uh, convergence stage, you're it's dialectic, you're synthesizing the ideas into trying to make sense of it. When you're in coherence, you you engage in dialogue and that slows the whole thing down.
Mark McGrath :Well, let's pause there, because this is a fundamental distinction. What you say we have to synthesize because of incompleteness, entropy and uncertainty. That's the state of the universe. That's ultimately what Boyd is trying to say. Because of those three things, we have to constantly be breaking things down analytically in order to rebuild them synthetically into something that didn't previously exist, because of entropy, uncertainty and incompleteness yeah, so I'm what I'm saying.
Martin "Muph" Murphy:is that to really understand that you need to take more time and dialogue it as opposed to okay, because I'm in a competitive situation, I've gone into left brain thinking bang, I've got to come up with something quickly, otherwise someone else is going to do something.
Ponch Rivera:So individually and as a team. So I think what you're talking about is more of a team orientation, like if we're going to A community.
Martin "Muph" Murphy:yeah, yeah, so a community.
Ponch Rivera:So with that we can look at it and say we can inject red teaming techniques, complex facilitation techniques, slow that thinking down, right, make sure voices are heard, so that divergent approach to looking at the world, that analysis, if you will, and then that convergence would be the synthesis. You know, what can we do with this? What can we do with this? That is part of orientation, is analysis and synthesis. It's not one of the three key factors in individual orientation and this is important too. I think this is where John Boyd's work is incomplete, and that is if you look at orientation the way he sketched it out, it's really for an individual biological system.
Ponch Rivera:But, we're now taking it to and say, hey, our genetics for our team are such. That's not true, and I think that's where he went into IOHAI, right Mark?
Mark McGrath :Yeah, iohai yeah.
Ponch Rivera:Yeah, forgive me for not remembering all its agility, insight orientation.
Mark McGrath :Harmony. Harmony, adaptability and initiative, yeah.
Ponch Rivera:So that would be the and. Again, we don't necessarily think that's perfect. That's where he was going before he died, and I think that's what he was talking about in his deathbed too. Is that right?
Mark McGrath :Yeah, evolutionary biology.
Mark McGrath :I mean this is all an evolved, because, remember, it's a conceptual spiral no-transcript because I always ask people this martin, I always say, like, where do humans not uda? That there's no place. Let's say I'm going to use udaloop here but not there. I was like, well, explain that to me. Well, even where you think you're not using udaloop, you're still orienting, you're still observing, you're still making a decision, you're still acting. You think you're not using OODA loop, you're still orienting, you're still observing, you're still making a decision, you're still acting on that and you're still learning from that. You're so constantly adjusting that you can't, you can't get out of it. And that's that's. That's the point, that's the name of this podcast. Is there's no way out, like there's no way out of constantly reorienting, because we're always doing this inherently, always doing this inherently.
Martin "Muph" Murphy:yeah, I totally get that, um, but you're, I would say that you're missing a stage, which is coherence.
Mark McGrath :But coherence is our orientation and that's going to depend on who I am, what's my psychological, capacity my educational interest, my, my willingness? Um, you know, that's all going to depend. And, by the way, orientation is unique to each individual. They might intersect, there might be some complimentary complementarity or something like that, but ultimately these things are completely, completely different so orientation is when you would I mean you.
Martin "Muph" Murphy:You often use red teaming and blue team, that kind of red teaming idea of how to get other people's orientation, so you can bring more of it in.
Mark McGrath :Yeah more perspectives.
Martin "Muph" Murphy:More perspectives.
Mark McGrath :Yeah, One of the things that did do to me. Well, why are we doing that? Let me hold you there. Why are we trying to gather more perspectives? Because of entropy and completeness and uncertainty. We have to gain more perspectives because we have no way of actually knowing what it is that we're encountering. So we constantly have to get more and more perspective so that we can better sense make and revise and update that orientation.
Ponch Rivera:And we say this to our clients too that no one person in an organization can have complete understanding of the external environment. You can't do that right, so you need a community and you need people that are working for you to provide the perspective Collaboration as Martin says Collaboration yeah, people that are working for you to provide collaboration.
Martin "Muph" Murphy:as martin says collaboration yeah, one of the things I did over um when teaching these people that are operating in, uh, conflict zones as intelligence agents um a bit like red teaming. Have you heard of the idea of non-violent communication?
Martin "Muph" Murphy:yeah yeah, so what I got as opposed to. So this is in a coherent stage. I think that there's a stage missing here, which is to go deeper and actually do empathy, Because so far, what I've heard you say is that you're doing social intelligence, cognitive intelligence and behavioral intelligence, and I think the actual emotional intelligence is the bit that's missing out of it. And I think the actual emotional intelligence is the bit that's missing out of it, Just as if you have NLP, CBT they use social, cognitive, behavioral.
Mark McGrath :All of that would be inside of my orientation. All of that is inside, or, by the way, not just its presence but also its absence, my willingness to exclude certain things or whatever, um, you know, my, my emotional, uh, state, my emotional health, whatever, all of that is still part of my orientation yeah, and do you think that, um, do you think you're fully aware of that? You can't be. No, you can't be because of what?
Martin "Muph" Murphy:you need to go out, entropy and completeness and uncertainty. You can't you need to go outside your system to to find that. Oh man, there it is. We agree with everything. Yeah, yeah, I'm agreeing with you. Well, what I'm saying? No, no, we don't, we don't think you're.
Mark McGrath :We don't think you're wrong, we're just. This is the. This is the whole point of this. So what boyd says is that one cannot determine the character or nature of a system within itself. You have to go outside of the system. That's the whole point of it. Because our orientations are unique to us. They're ours If we're all three Marines or we're all three special operators, whatever it is. We have to come outside the system sometimes and look for that. That's the whole thing of the gaining more perspectives. That's the reason why we read team, that's the reason why we challenge assumptions, et cetera, because we can't determine that nature of that system within itself. Otherwise we're doing groupthink. Otherwise, as Boyd would say, it's accessious amplification.
Martin "Muph" Murphy:I would say the value of a communication or the behavior is the response you get. I would say the value of a communication or the behavior is a response you get. And if you were doing truly, if we were doing OODA at this kind of level that you're talking about, and you do say orientation, I would think that we would be getting different results in the outside world.
Mark McGrath :Yeah, that's why there's a Netflix and a Blockbuster. That's why Netflix is different than a Blockbuster.
Martin "Muph" Murphy:But that's an adaptive system. What we need to be doing is evolving.
Mark McGrath :It's an adaptive system that couldn't reorient to the reality, and they couldn't do that because of those things like empathy and understanding and actually knowing their environment. That's why, yeah.
Martin "Muph" Murphy:But again, that again is is that transformational or is that just adapting? So what I'm saying is that, if you want to, you know, as I heard Poncho talking to Sonia and Nigel is it Nigel Thurlow? You were on stage you were talking about, well, how are we going to deal with all this sort of thing? And I think that the challenge we've got is that we don't do the emotional intelligence bit of this. We don't actually. We're not actually trying to transform reality, we're just trying to change it.
Mark McGrath :So that's a judgment, in that what you're describing, the lack of, would have to occur inside the orientation of the individuals, of the teams. And judgment flows from orientation, would have to occur inside the orientation of the individuals or the teams, and judgment flows from orientation.
Martin "Muph" Murphy:Right Judgment flows from your orientation. So what I'm saying is that we don't truly understand. We don't bring empathy into this as much as we should be doing.
Mark McGrath :Yeah, I wouldn't disagree with that, and I would say that that's a judgment and that's something that if we were coaching and leading others and we're pointing that out as a deficiency what we're trying to do is we're trying to influence their orientation. I mean, that's ultimately what leadership is. We're trying to influence them, inspire them to, as you say, transform or change their way of thinking.
Ponch Rivera:Hey, Mark, don't forget, manipulation is the same thing as leadership right.
Mark McGrath :It is.
Ponch Rivera:Yeah, I mean yeah, hey, martin, I want to learn more about the empathy piece, because this really resonates with you. I mean, how do you help leaders or organizations, or when you're doing your walks, how do you help build that orientation towards empathy, or however you want to phrase it?
Martin "Muph" Murphy:that orientation towards empathy or however you want to phrase it um. Well, one of the exercises that I've used in the past, as I say, is um, as opposed to just, you know, getting it. Um, say you've got to defend, we'll talk about the this particular job. You've got to defend, uh, this oil refinery or or whatever you know. So, therefore, you've got one, one team, the blue team, that defending there, and the red team. So that's how you, how often that we used to do, uh, red teaming, blue teaming.
Martin "Muph" Murphy:But what one of the things I did was go okay, and I used it under the um thing of sun zoos, the art of war, because I knew I'd get in trouble for doing this. Uh, you know, know your enemy, know yourself. You need not fear the result of a hundred battles. Well, what I was actually trying to get him to do was actually feel what the other side were doing. So what I said was what I want you to do is listen to their argument as to why they're this particular country. You are one country, you're another country, and I want you to argue why you're doing what you're doing and and the reasons for it, and then, and this side will do, you know you're your own country and you're doing what you're doing for whatever reason, and get them to actually understand, really empathize and really understand at a feeling level about what, what the um, the outcome of this behavior would be, and get the other people on that side, on the opposite side, to then sort of replay, you know, take it in, think about it or feel it and then explain it just like you would in non-violent communication and, as a result of that, seeing actually both sides have got more in common than they haven't, sort of thing. But what I don't think that we see enough of in the world is the fact that this, you know, if we're talking about the AI and the fact that we're racing ahead and we're in this competitive thing, I don't think there's enough of that.
Martin "Muph" Murphy:You know the crap filter. What are the emotional side? What people who are good at empathy tend to do is not move so quickly, not change so quickly. We're evolving, but do we need to move In man-made, human-made changes? Do we need to actually compete? Do we need to stop and pull? You know, hold on and the consequence, and the crap filter is a way of doing that. Well, what are the real consequences of this if we think about it and try to understand it by being empathic. You know, uh, what are the the real costs that you know with most, most of capitalism, for instance you know where they call it. Capitalism, or business world has so many external costs that are poured onto society and to the ecology if we do a pestle thing. So, uh, did you know the pestle? Do you the? I think you have a political, yeah, yeah, yeah kind of like let me see yeah yeah, yeah, you look at the environmental thing on that business.
Martin "Muph" Murphy:Been using pestle for ages, apparently. But the the environmental thing, it's just cut off it. They don't, it's not, yeah.
Ponch Rivera:So I just want to make sure our listeners understand this and I've heard pestle from the five eye community, um, from our friends in australia, new zealand. I never used that. Here we use pamesi and I hope I get it right political, military, economic, social, um, information, law, um, there's, there's more to that. We also use dime fill, which is diplomatic information, military, economic, financial, uh, information, I forget what else so can do you have the whole acronym of? That's what it's called the L Legal. I think it's legal. Yeah, pestle Okay.
Martin "Muph" Murphy:So what is it again? Political, economic, social, technological, legal and environmental.
Ponch Rivera:So I think this is something that is missing from organizations and I think it connects directly to CRAP. Right, and again, that's your acronym for what I'm calling unattended consequences for a second, third order. And, mark, remind me to come back to unrestricted warfare a little bit later on We've been talking about, because there's a connection here. Yeah, so what organizations don't do? And if you take this, if this is part of your orientation, to go look at these things from different lenses, right, I think this is critical in strategy, it's critical in product, it's critical in safety and everything. How does this look from these different lenses? And I think that's where you're going with that. Right, it's absolutely critical to do that. But my experience is in the military, we did this. Organizations do not. Can you expand on that a little bit more? Do the military do it? No, no, we're taught to do it. Not, we don't do it.
Martin "Muph" Murphy:Well, yeah, yeah so, so there's a key point for you we're taught to do things, but we don't do it, and that's that's a well, I mean I I'll, I'll. I would be motivation overrides.
Ponch Rivera:Well, you know, sometimes when we're working with like State Department and USAID and other organizations, I'm trained on this, I have a team that's trained on this, but my State Department counterpart is not right. So we have different orientations and their world is hey, I have a Harvard MBA and I don't know what the hell you're talking about. Lieutenant or Lieutenant Commander, we're going to do it my way and I'm like well, this is the way I was trained in the military, right? So those different orientations, they don't work. I mean, what we talk about when teamwork comes in the concept of teamwork is you need one good, shared mental model of how to do something. There are many practices out there, but you need a shared across the group to how you do effective planning, how you develop effective strategies, how you do effective debriefing.
Mark McGrath :That's collaboration, like Martin's been saying. Yeah.
Ponch Rivera:But once those are different orientations, are in conflict with each other. And going back to the point about, hey, we're taught this in the military but we don't do it, well, I'm subordinate to. In my world, it's the state department state's telling us we need to do this, we need to sell arms to these folks, we need to do that. And you're like, well, geez, you guys went to harvard, you know this stuff, you went to yale, you guys are brilliant. Well, they're absolutely fucking idiots, if you ask me right.
Mark McGrath :Okay, I'm sorry terrorists don't care where you go to college. I mean like, like emergent situations. We'll just use an accessible New York Times bestseller example. Right, Read McChrystal's Team of Teams. He talks about how he had the best of the world. I've got SEALs, I've got Green Berets, I've got Ranger Regiment, I've got everything. And we're getting beat by guys that are using Twitter and Facebook and we're going around looking for us, for us, but we're not finding us. They don't have an S3, and they don't have an S2. They don't have that. It's a completely different system, but we have to get out. It goes back to what we started with. You have to shatter that model so that you can make better observations to reorient to the reality of what's going on.
Ponch Rivera:So we went off. So we have Pestle looking at, empathizing, understanding the unintended consequences, consequences what you call crap, and I'm sorry I didn't have I didn't write the whole acronym down what each one means consequences, real costs, assumptions that need to be challenged.
Martin "Muph" Murphy:uh, is this really a positive for the? You know, prosperity of the people in the planet is the way I put it. Um, and I, yeah, my main contention is that the fact that if we're you know, people aren't going to stop doing what they're doing. They're not going to let go. They don't like being vulnerable, they don't like stepping into the unknown and, as I say, they don't mind changing to stay in the same place. What they don't like doing is transforming, because all bets are off. It's kind of like, and the challenges that you get, I think, if you go into this thing, where it's a competition, and I agree with everything you said about conflict, but I think we need to rise above that. A leader, our committee said give me a lever long enough for a place to stand that can move the world.
Ponch Rivera:We're in history.
Martin "Muph" Murphy:The place to stand is humility. I agree.
Mark McGrath :Oh yeah, that's a very void thing.
Ponch Rivera:How do we get there, martin? How do we create this social orientation? I'll use an example from the United States. When we went to the moon, that was a defining objective, a goal. It's something that got the nation moving in that direction Our nation, right. But what I think you're talking about is collectively, holistically. How do we change this? I don't know if we'd call it human behavior, but how do we do that? And I'm curious where have you seen this work and how might it work in an organization?
Martin "Muph" Murphy:Yeah, so I was actually out with a leader yesterday who is doing amazing things and he kind of really is challenging. He can't get, even though, a successful business. They can't get funding to expand because they are doing things differently. They are helping charity. They've done a four-day week and they don't like that. You know all more people are turning against that. But they've got an app, they've developed an app and it tells them how happy their team are and what they've realized is that in a four-day week they've actually become more productive and happier at the same time, sort of thing. So there are people doing it. There's another group in Birmingham, the UK, and it's all localized and that's, you know, to me and I'm sure to you guys, that's really about mission command, it's about giving communities. But the way the communities would do it is it isn't they would do more empathy because they can have a relationship. So therefore, you know, centralized governments can't have empathy. So their orientation is.
Mark McGrath :I think that's when people start throwing tea into the Boston Harbor, and you know.
Martin "Muph" Murphy:Yeah, yeah, so maybe.
Mark McGrath :No offense, I couldn't pass up on that. Well done.
Martin "Muph" Murphy:I was not on duty that day. I think that you know. We talk about the assumptions, the fact that Sun Tzu the Art of War. Is it about competition? It needs to be more collaboration. Does the business model, does the business world actually warrant that kind of thing? Do we have to do something else? And there are people out there, the local community of us. Say in Birmingham there's a group called civic square, check them out and they're they're doing more localized energy community, that kind of thing. But I think it's because they're making different decisions that they're they're not basing everything on us, on competition per se or trying to get anywhere. It's more about resilience.
Ponch Rivera:So I brought up unrestricted warfare from the Chinese. This connects to a lot of things, I believe. In our Western view, we're very competitive, we're short-sighted, we're looking at the next couple of weeks, years or whatever it may be. So when you ask me to go empathize with somebody that I don't have the same orientation, I'm not going to see the world from their lens, right? So maybe right now, the way I understand the Chinese at the moment is they're looking at a long-term I hate to say warfare, but they're in for the long run. That's not the way we're designed in the West. When I talk about the United States of America, it's the next four years, it's the next four weeks, it's what can I get out of this for me, right? What can I? You know I'm going to rise to power because I want something.
Ponch Rivera:And they have a different and, to add to punch what he's saying, they have a broader, deeper understanding of history of the last several centuries. And you started there earlier. You brought this up. You got to look further back than the last 200 years. So I want to get your thoughts on the different, because I think you're looking at different cultures too, how they view the world and, by the way, culture is part of orientation. Absolutely there you go Right, walk us through your thoughts on that. Let's say hey, let's put Ponch into empathizing with a long-term, uh, view of the chinese?
Martin "Muph" Murphy:how? How can I do that with my western mind? Well, I don't think that you're trying to empathize. I think empathy is something that you, um, do one-to-one or face-to-face, and you've got to sit down and talk with them. What I think you're doing is trying to perceive what they're doing.
Martin "Muph" Murphy:And again, I think Ray Dalio has got some good stuff around this where he talks about the fact, the rise and fall of empires, doesn't he? And he talks about the Dutch, starting with the tulip mania and stuff they did really well. And then the Brits came in and and copied their navy, their boat building, because they just used labor, cheaper labor, and did it. And then they became the next one, and then, of course, america overtook. The next one, uh, took over.
Martin "Muph" Murphy:Um is that is the empire, and at the moment he puts the Chinese rising and that the American one is declining as an empire. And I think that you know, I suppose what he says is that you've got to be nicer to the Chinese. I'm not sure that's going to work somehow, but I, like Buckminster Fuller's idea is that, you know, don't try and fight the existing reality. Instead, create a new one that makes the old one obsolete, and I think that's the main thing for transformation is that we've got to in order for people to. You can tell people to behave and act in a different way. You can tell people to behave and act in a different way, but you hit those seven fears that were talked about earlier. What you need to do is show them a working model of it.
Mark McGrath :And I think that's it. Yeah, buckminster Fuller. If you know, for our listeners that have enjoyed hearing Ponchai talk about John Boyd, you know Boyd read Buckminster Fuller. Buckminster Fuller's first ever client was the Marine Corps. He also too is. He was a Naval officer and and his, his work is I can't think of the name of the thing that he used to call- it.
Mark McGrath :Well, synergy, that's where. That's where the term synergy comes from. Synergetics is his treatise, that whole bottom-up reality of of what you're talking about. It seems to me you're saying that, like buckminster fuller said, this is all provided for us, this is all here. This is how it flows organically. We're using force and artificial things to prevent what normally otherwise would have been happening between people and organisms, et cetera. Is that what I'm hearing you say? Because when you look at the things that he was doing, like creating geodesic domes, he's harnessing what was existed in the universe and tension and things like that, not something synthetic.
Martin "Muph" Murphy:Yeah.
Mark McGrath :Or not synthetic, but not with force, you know. So like, for example, if the world could provide energy, like free energy, for everybody, why would it have to be metered? Who would have to meter that? Why would it have to be regulated? It would be part of the part of the system.
Martin "Muph" Murphy:Yeah, and I just wonder is do we need to change our decision-making model and explain it in a different way?
Mark McGrath :Well, if we follow Buckminster Fuller and Boyd. I've actually been at Buckminster Fuller's grave, boyd's too. But Buckminster Fuller and his grave, his epitaph is called the trim tab, and a trim tab on a sailing ship or a plane is to make very small corrections, very small adjustments. And if you read his work, I mean he's talking about like the very smaller adjustments that we can make, the broader the outcomes could be, or the larger the outcomes could be in the long run.
Martin "Muph" Murphy:Yeah, and I think that that goes back to the point I was making about the fact that if you go to, we need to go to smaller communities who are engaging more dialogue as opposed to you know, and I think that if you were to look, you know I showed you earlier the model of like cognitive behaviorals, social, emotional, with your orientation, things like that. You actually don't get enough of this emotional intelligence being evolved there. I think that you can only do that.
Mark McGrath :Well, yeah, and I would add this, martin. Well, yeah, and I would add this, martin. I mean, we've talked a lot lately about, and with Andrew McLuhan, the grandson of Marshall McLuhan this is what he called this global village, and it's not a good thing. But we lose those senses of things that you're talking about. We lose community, we lose our, our, our sovereignty, we lose our empowerment, we lose our connection to the environment.
Martin "Muph" Murphy:We're de-skilling by outsourcing thinking and yeah and uh, well yeah, robotics and and their eyes. We're just de-skilling the. I mean I always look at technologies, taps, tools to accumulate power of a resource. Just think about a tap. It takes water from a wide range and funnels it through a small tap and someone has control of it.
Mark McGrath :Yeah, that's what Buckminster Fuller would criticize, because he would say who decides, who meters that, who decides, who regulates that? Yeah, regulates.
Martin "Muph" Murphy:That, yeah, and the it's. I know that, whatever I say, you could come up with something to explain how that might fit into it. Uh, in the oodle loop.
Mark McGrath :But if you think we're not saying the oodle loop, we're not. We're saying that the oodle member, the oodle loop as boyd described it, is not a is not a formulaic linear process. The the OODA loop sketch is something completely different. That's what we're talking about. The OODA loop sketch is an illustrative abstraction of how our cognition functions and makes sense of the reality that we encounter.
Martin "Muph" Murphy:I just think that it doesn't have that kind of true emotional dialogue type thing, because it goes from convergent to divergent to emergent, and I think the bits that's missing is a coherence, which is the holistic bit to it. That'd be my main challenge, I think, on that one and the fact that tech bros love it and they use yeah, but they use the wrong.
Ponch Rivera:They use a linear reductions approach.
Mark McGrath :I understand that but I mean like, but see, I think with with boyd, I I think that boyd would generally trend to what you're saying, martin. I mean, if there's a story about when he was the commander of that base in Thailand, he was writing letters to his wife and these letters are in the archives where Ponch and I have been several times and he's saying that what it is that he was pursuing was actually more like what you're talking about, how we as a species. That's something that he's thinking and he can see and he's trying to get it out. That's going to benefit everybody. That's going to make everybody better off. I think that there's probably a lot more in common with what you're saying with Boyd than we're addressing.
Martin "Muph" Murphy:Yeah, I certainly agree.
Mark McGrath :It was obviously evolving towards that way of thinking, wasn't it, and I just wondered if it was, if there isn't something that we could do to and and here's another important point, now I think of it he and chuck spinney were going to classify the oodle loop sketch top secret because they didn't kind of what you're saying, how it could be misused for you know, or whatever, or unfair, or whatever. The idea was. They didn't want the Soviets to get a hold of understanding how.
Ponch Rivera:The interesting thing about that is cybernetics came from the Soviets, right, so that I mean we dismissed that a long time ago. Hey, martin, I want to go back to the the shape and reality piece that you brought up. I agree with you. We need to be able to shape that. That that's part of the, you know, adapt to it and shape it. Um, a couple of things that popped up on our scan in the last couple of years is, uh, the idea of affordances, right, the external environment can dictate what you can make. More and more things.
Ponch Rivera:When we try to shape that reality, you have to realize, or people have to realize, that the environment has a vote. You can't just Absolutely yeah, yeah. And I think a lot of people push too far and they go instead of probe, you know, probe sensor respond in a complex environment, they go for it. We're going to go all and this is what we're going to do All about light here in the US, right, they kind of push that too far.
Ponch Rivera:The environment, external environment or, excuse me, control again, is outside and bottom up. It's coming from the outside, right, and I think bodes well with your idea that, hey, if we're going to change, not change who we are as humans, but build a social approach to things that has to come from the outside, meaning governments, meaning education, right, I think you're pursuing a noble cause, which is, I mean, if you want to call call it enlightenment, if you want to call it a greater consciousness, whatever we don't disagree with you, right? But yeah, you got a lot of headwinds out there in the external environment that we got to overcome, right? Yeah?
Martin "Muph" Murphy:yeah, I just, I mean, and there are people doing, uh, this, they are doing the work, you know they are doing the work. You know they are doing localised powers, community energy, things over here. And there was a particular video that I saw not long ago where they had this guy and they were interviewing him and he was explaining what happened and it was a really kind of it was a lot of trouble in that village or that town or whatever. And, as I find, if we do, if we take young people out into nature, the ones that aren't thriving well in their system of school, and what have you, when you take them out in nature, they suddenly become the leaders and they start helping and supporting other people. And that's the thing about so that goes back to your point about the environment shapes the behavior you're going to get. I think that thing about-.
Mark McGrath :That's the medium, is the message yeah, right.
Ponch Rivera:And one of the challenges we have in our current world, if you will, is we don't get outside enough, right? The first thing we should do in the morning is walk outside or, bare feet, touch ground right, touch the room, be part of the external environment. So, getting in the flow states, how do we get to? And I think that's what's happening when you take your foot, when you're doing this work is you're getting people to clear that mind, become one with the environment, which is exactly what needs to happen. Technology, unfortunately, is forcing us into our homes. We don't get enough sunlight, we're not doing these things. So what you're doing is spot on, by getting leaders out in the environment to experience what we know as humans, and that is, be connected to not just the world but to each other. So you're finding success with this, correct?
Martin "Muph" Murphy:Yeah, I talk a lot about the neurotransmitters that come from flow states and what I've found is that in the research, that one of the best neurotransmitters that you get when you take so if you take a leader out or just anyone and they start communicating, one of the things that happens is that they build up, they release oxytocin, higher levels of oxytocin, because it's walking side by side on the trail it's difficult to walk more than two as a group. People then release oxytocin because they're out in nature and so therefore, they develop bigger, stronger bonds, there's more cohesion in the group. But also they release something called anand anandamide, which is comes from the sanskrit word anand, meaning bliss, but it's, it's actually attaches to your thc receptors and it also means that you start using disparate parts of your brains. Now, how's that effective? Well, when, when I'm doing, uh, coaching with leaders on online and they're talking about oh, we're doing some well-being with our team, okay, so how does that go? Well, what happens is we say right, how are you doing? You know, when they first start a one-to-one sort of thing, you know, at the end of the month, how are you doing? I'm fine, good, right, let's talk numbers. And they switch over to the left side of the brain. They don't even get to the right side of the brain, which is more creative and collaborative, and the left side of the brain is more competitive and controlling and so they talk in those linear states.
Martin "Muph" Murphy:When you take them outside of that situation, when you say, well, actually you can't do that because the brain one the things that in mcgill chris says is the fact that there's quite a an inhibitory factor by the corpus callosum, so it stops once it gets into one side of the brain and you start using a particular kind of pathway. It's very difficult to then to go back into complexity because it's really predictable. You know, if you look, go back to the kenevan thing, tactical and technical, say, is predictable, we can solve them and we feel, we feel comfortable there. And the idea of getting people out outside is that they engage more in dialogue. They'll understand each other a lot more because of combining exercise, nature, the outdoors, more fresh air and as a result of that, their clarity of thought is is, it is heightened, right and that kind of thing, and they're not rushed to make a decision, which is the kind of point I'm making.
Martin "Muph" Murphy:Is that we need to. I often use a seal thing with lights. Slow is smooth, smooth is fast. We need to slow down the thinking that we're doing. We need to slow down this. We need to stop competing and finding more ways of collaborating and push that further down to people so that they can have agency and that kind of thing. It's bringing coherence in, which is, I think, that a lot of you know we've got divergence. As you said, you can't not OODA loop. You're doing divergent, you're doing convergent, you're doing emergent, but the thing that we've lost, I think, is the coherence. Uh to to better understand, each other, I agree.
Mark McGrath :Yeah, I think what's awesome is like we're, we're, we're directly in the same camp, that that you are. Um, once again we find another example of the linear ooda clowns. Uh, they, they've poisoned the. Well. But when people dig deeper on what Boyd actually said, with a really sound reading of, I would just say, like destruction and creation, and then using Chuck Spinney's evolutionary epistemology to help understand destruction and creation, or read the transcript of conceptual spiral that that we put out, um, then they start to realize they're like well, wait a minute, it's not just about going in a circle as fast as you can, faster than the other guy.
Martin "Muph" Murphy:There's, there's more to it yeah, it's an evolution sort of thing. So, those four things, those four intelligences, we go through them, um, in in different ways. We use them as as I've done on on the diagram that you saw earlier. But there's also this figure of eight is the juice model I use, which then also it's the spiral dynamics, if you like. It's that kind of thing, isn't it? We go from founder, entrepreneur, manager, coach, and then back down to founder again, and those people, those archetypes, suit different elements. Okay. So that's why, um, hierarchies is not such a great thing, because you start using that, you start focusing and, as I said before, the, I call them the four riders of the four horses of the apocalypse, this sociopath, psychopaths, narcissists and all that sort of thing they start to rise to the top of the top of the pile.
Martin "Muph" Murphy:And they're all in control, aren't they?
Mark McGrath :another one I would add to the reading list would be quorum's biography of boyd, because this is what boyd fought against the entire time exactly those four horsemen that you talk about, and, and, and he also. Uh, somebody wrote a book about him and the title was a vision. So noble, because a lot of the things that john boyd was talking about there'd be less people killed, there would be less ordnance dropped, there would be less wars started and a lot of his enemies couldn't handle that.
Martin "Muph" Murphy:Totally agree, and that's exactly the idea. That was the actual original idea behind Sons of the Art of Disability.
Mark McGrath :Yeah, that's what James Gimien came on to tell us about, and I also think that that's why Boyd is either dismissed or mischaracterized, because he still has very, very severe and extreme enemies in that respect, because he thought we could do a lot more with a hell of a lot less.
Ponch Rivera:Yeah, yeah, I want to leave, uh, end it here. This has been awesome, but there's a key point to this and I don't have the quote in front of me and maybe you understand. You, you're familiar with it uh, Martin, or or moose, and that's the veterans lead the way right. Um, we certainly don't want more war. Um, you know, we want to. We want to move society in a direction that is uh, uh, uh, it just improves future survival. Uh, whatever that may be. Um, we don't like hierarchies, we don't like a lot of things. We've seen it, Um, but again, veterans are leading the way in quite a few things, and I want to thank Martin for uh stepping up and being on here today. It's, uh, it's, it's, it's how we learn right. So, Mark, do you have any parting thoughts before I turn over to Martin?
Mark McGrath :No, I always love making new friends and I always love when we realize that, hey, we're basically saying the same thing. We just did a perfect example of the world of reorientation. We reoriented and we have a better understanding, and I would encourage others to do the same thing. It goes back to what Martin was saying, like if you're you know, we're designed to collaborate, we're we're designed to cooperate, we're designed to make them. And this is back to yeah, I love that you brought up Buckminster Fuller. We've been given all of this and it's us to put it to the best use possible, and we're stewards of it while we, while we have it. So yeah.
Martin "Muph" Murphy:Well, thanks guys.
Mark McGrath :Great Well, we'll close the. We'll close the recording out. Martin. We want to thank you for for coming on no way out, and we'll look forward to speaking again soon.
Martin "Muph" Murphy:Okay, see you later, cheers.
