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
Perspective Agents: Unleashing Strategic Innovation with Boyd's OODA Loop & McLuhan's Insights with Chris Perry
What if embracing intellectual innovation could transform your organization's strategic advantage? Get ready to uncover the complexities of John Boyd's OODA loop and its revolutionary impact on leadership and innovation. With the profound insights of Chris Perry and Andrew McLuhan, we challenge conventional interpretations and dive into Boyd's dynamic theories. Discover how intellectual curiosity and innovative thinking can transcend traditional approaches, offering critical insights for leaders navigating the tumultuous waters of modern business landscapes.
Join us as we explore the critical lessons from Boyd's work that are essential for today’s leaders. From the turbulence of technological disruptions in the advertising industry to navigating organizational boundaries, we uncover the need for adaptability and dynamic thinking. We discuss how reframing strategies can reduce confusion and help businesses manage misinformation amidst a rapidly evolving communication landscape. Hear firsthand how these military strategies can be applied to enhance business practices, moving from industrial-age hierarchies to open, networked systems that thrive on curiosity and responsibility.
In our conversation, we highlight the future of leadership in an unpredictable world. By integrating insights from historical military strategies and interdisciplinary methodologies, leaders can cultivate adaptable and information-rich cultures. The episode also emphasizes the importance of embracing strategic frameworks and embedded advisors to internalize these principles effectively. With a focus on curiosity, drive, and responsibility, discover how mastering Boyd and McLuhan's insights can offer a strategic edge, enabling organizations to navigate complex challenges with agility and foresight.
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So, chris, as Ponch was saying, you know, ai does not always have the best take on John Boyd. It is not how.
Ponch Rivera:Neuroscience, physics, quantum physics, the Akashic field, all the weird shit we've been talking about on this podcast what it actually tells us, but that's what AI continues to push out to folks when people look up OODA loop. So sorry about that. It's just a rant that I had over the last 24 hours where a bunch of AI professionals are adding different components to the OODA loop because they haven't read a damn thing about John Boyd's work.
Mark McGrath:Anyway, and they certainly haven't read Chris Perry's book Perspective Agents, which we want to dive into as well. So I guess we should start to say that. You know it's because that Ponch and I are not into those. We completely reject the linear interpretation and reduction of Boyd's work, specifically the OODA loop and really everything else that he did. It's how we wind up building a network with people like Andrew McLuhan, who introduces me to you, chris, and then we start having discussions and it's awesome because we always are interacting with others that realize that there's so much more going on and so many layers of complexity, and it's thrivable, it's actually. You can do this and you don't have to have been in the military like me and Brian. You could be never spent one minute in the military and do well with it, and that's what we want to dive into. So why don't we, why don't we set the stage to last Friday when I handed you the book Science Strategy in War by Franzo Singa about the strategy of John Boyd?
Chris Perry:Yeah, well, I guess, to start right, so we get hooked up through. Andrew McClellan yeah, we've had a number of conversations. Clearly, you guys are running pretty deep with Boyd and, honestly again, given I've been in call it research mode for probably a decade all around, how do we make sense of this turning point that we're all going through? I felt pretty foolish. I didn't really know who Boyd was and hadn't studied him as a part of my journey. So when you sent the book my way, I basically devoured half of it over the weekend and it was one of the clearest distillations of evolutionary thinking that I've come across, and it just hit on so many, I guess, rabbit holes that I've been going down Again in my journey. Journey perspective is a foundation of strategy, right one territory. You know.
Chris Perry:I live, uh, at the intersection of communications and tech, and when people talk about innovation, it's typically, uh, technological innovation, not intellectual innovation, and I really believe that the most important innovation we all need to be focused on right now is here, not here, and I think to be extraordinary in detecting patterns, you know you have to have determination and willpower, and I just find again in my circles that you know it's not only again thinking about things like OODA loop, but it's also some of the like inner drive that people have to be on the right side of transitions versus get displaced or wiped out by them. And, as we'll get into, I've dealt with some of this stuff on a deeply personal level and so I do have you know, motivation to again, for example, get this book. Do have you know, motivation to again, for example, get this book, and you know, spend a half a weekend kind of chewing on boyd and some other things you've sent me.
Mark McGrath:So I appreciate the connection yeah, go ahead paint that picture for us as you, as you'd like. You know about your background and and some of the things that have led you to the research that you've been doing, and then we'll bring the intersections together.
Chris Perry:Yeah, so I guess to simplify the story, so the household that I grew up in outside of Detroit, you know we were pretty fortunate in that my father ran a graphic art studio in the heyday of call it the advertising age, if you will, and the business that he ran it was a group of rough and tumble crafts people, artists and illustrators and designers, and I mean the place is just a total madhouse, but you made stuff by hand, right and uh, it was both an interesting place, a creative place, but a hard place, because producing commercial grade anything you know, requires extraordinary effort. When I got out of school, my dad invited me in to essentially join his business, and that was a few years after the Mac came out and then people started building software for Macs, including PageMaker and Photoshop, and so what that software represented and it's very relevant to what we're all thinking about today is that you start encoding expertise and knowledge into the software. And what happens when you encode that knowledge into the software, the software, and what happens when you encode that knowledge into the software? If you are not evolving how you think and what you do, you get wiped out. And his business got wiped out. You know, this guy was my idol, he was my mentor, he was someone who you know seemed pretty invincible and I watched him personally deteriorate and saw the business go sideways by not having vision to look around the corner and adapt.
Chris Perry:And when something is that personal, informative, right out of school, it stays with you for a very long time.
Chris Perry:And what I tell people when I'm running around talking about the book is that was a very uh, call it um emotional experience on the downside, but 20 new doors open, because I got into tech pretty early, um, with a couple of startups, with some friends and again, if you know the tech, if you have the sensibilities and again, you have some of the practices that you guys talk about and research around Boyd, like you can thrive, but you kind of have to go through the fire and I don't mean the kind of fires, clearly, that you guys have been through, but it's emotional when it's family, and so that was a foundational experience. That now today I see it all over the place with AI and the idea of automation and a lot of people and they're thinking we'll get automated. But that's stuff that we know today, not stuff that we're going to need to know in terms of innovative thinking and problem solving and some of the things that new worlds open up.
Chris Perry:So their perspectives stay static, not dynamic then Correct, yeah, and I can't think of a more dangerous thing across any vector you want to look at today, where static thinking is um, uh is going to be a positive thing when you advise leaders, when you identify that and you advise leaders on that, how do you, how do you position that?
Mark McGrath:well, how do you, how do you help them? In other words, how do you, how do you position?
Chris Perry:that. Well, how do you, how do you help?
Mark McGrath:them. In other words, how do you, how do you help them? See the, you know we had general betray us on. We're talking about kodak. We'll just use them, because they're imagine being in that boardroom telling kodak in the early 90s and they had just discovered digital photography. And you know, how would you, knowing what you know now, how would you counsel?
Chris Perry:them. So this is a hard question to answer because there's different parts of a prism in getting an organization versus an individual to expand their you know, call it, you know range of perspectives and, more than that, act on it. We've spent, you know, with my team at our shop the last couple of years inside of boardrooms working with leaders on call it, the AI moment. We don't go in with PowerPoint slides, we don't go in with know-it-all perspectives. We go in and have conversations and ask them questions. How do they feel personally about it, how do they feel professionally about it? How do they feel the power of these things will impact their role as leaders?
Chris Perry:We try to meet people where they are and then determine what are those entry points to not only, again, kind of expand their field of vision but act. And so it tends to be both bottom up, if you will education, piloting, learning, I call it at the organizational level, and then at the executive level, since those conversations tend to be strategic. You talk about forces of change, you talk about competitors, you talk about, um, you know, white space for growth, but you also talk about risk, and again, we can get into it. You know, as we talk, but the pileup of unforced errors at the executive level is growing, and it's in part because they're inside managing hard businesses and don't always have that again field of vision of what's happening on the outside to move as quickly as they need to, and again, I think, as we're going to get into some of Boyd's thinking I think is extraordinarily relevant for anyone in a leadership position right now to understand and embrace.
Mark McGrath:So you say you see errors piling up, you know, unravel that a little more, tell us more about, like, how you identify that and maybe how those conversations sometimes go. You're trying to reframe how they think about something that's right in front of them, right? You're trying to get them to something that's very difficult for them to see inside the system and anything that they would try to address within the system, as Boyd teaches us, all that's going to do is create more confusion and more disorder.
Chris Perry:Correct. So that's again if you think about it. I would love your guys' perspective on this as well. You know, given the halls that you walk, it's very, very hard running anything Right, and what you need to focus on inside of an organization tends to be pretty codified.
Chris Perry:You have to run the business. You are looking at P&Ls every day. You are thinking about customers and spending time with customers. You are dealing with increasing complexity around the workforce, and that is a very, very hard job that tends to overwhelm anyone's attention. So you have hard inside and then you have increasing complexity and novelty on the outside, and so the unforced errors tend to be, you know, omissions of or oversights and orientation, and so if you think about some of the biggest kind of corporate you know big corporations you think about the challenges that a company like Starbucks has gone through over the last couple of years.
Chris Perry:You look at some of the unforced errors around introducing new technologies from Apple and Google, around new hardware or AIs. You know Allstate CEO. You know during the Sugar Bowl, as a title sponsor, you know ran a spot that backfired tremendously. You know, not only in terms of just again like social media backlash, but people boycotting. You know threatening boycotts risk tends to have environmental oversight, actually inflicting some pretty significant forced reaction inside based on the novelty and the changing environment that I cover pretty deeply in in the book that I wrote well then, you talk a lot about perception too.
Mark McGrath:So when those, when those sorts of things happen, perception is reality. The people that are either boycotting or blowing up on social media, their perception is their perception, whether we like it or not. And then, given the nature of the sort of the information war, the guerrilla information war, you're dealing with things on multiple fronts. It's not like it was in the old days, with just print media, tv and radio.
Chris Perry:Right, there's so much there's so many more levels, so many more directions. No, there's public reaction to anything, and the more controversial, the more noise tends to gather around it.
Chris Perry:So, for example, if you look, at the LA fires you know we're dealing with a pretty catastrophic human tragedy right now, but you can start to see the layers of meaning that people are putting on the human tragedy in terms of blame, in terms of cause, in terms of motivations, in terms of politics and the stuff that we have to monitor with our intelligence. Any any call it highly charged moment tends to have so much bullshit around it that you have to have the sensibilities, judgment and technologies to make sense of stuff in ways you didn't have to think about before. So the environmental change is extraordinary and institutions are lagging the market in a huge way. Market in a huge way. And if we think about the ascendance of AI and how rapidly that's going to continue to push the environment, if you will, into novel directions, it just suggests that there's a need for other kinds of people like you, you both and what you do, to help people make sense of it and respond accordingly. And again, when I talk about environment, again, you and I met through mcluhan yeah this.
Chris Perry:This is like like what we base our uh thinking strategy and and intelligence operations around.
Mark McGrath:It very much has a lot of mcluhan-esque um influences behind it well, when you start with, when you say environment, I mean that's that's one of the biggest misunderstandings of McLuhan. Is that media and medium is he's just talking about communications and he's talking about. He's talking about environment and uh, and technology. Environment is part of OODA loop sketch, where our our interaction with it. It's our, our, our cognitive understanding and perception of how we interact with what's unfolding. That has a pretty deep impact. I know Ponch wants to jump in here.
Ponch Rivera:Yeah, there's a downside to just talking about environment without absolutely putting a blanket around the in this case a noodle loop or anything. So you got to separate the internal system from the external system, whatever that may be. And I think what happens a lot is people talk past each other when they talk about environment. We had an instance where somebody was not arguing with us but just saying hey, in NATO, if we run a simulation, that's an external environment. I'm like well, that depends where you put the boundary. If you put the boundary around the team that's running the simulation, then it's an internal simulation. If you run that external to the team, then everything on the internal states matter, because then you get to see how that impacts the quote unquote external environment. So I think one of the and I don't think Boyd meant to do this, but we saw Chuck Finney start to put a boundary around it. I like having a boundary around an OODA loop, because if it's in a fractal nature of the OODA loop, we can put the OODA loop on a cell, on a neuron, on a person, body part, a team, an organization, on on a person, body part, a team, an organization. So when we talk about that, I think it's critical that we have a defined boundary. In this case, let's pick Allstate. Allstate, the company has a OODA loop. It's a collective OODA loop of many, many, many OODA loops, but then they push. They, being their CEO, pushed an orientation, the internal view of the external world onto the environment and the environment pushed back right. And that's what the beauty of John Boyd's OODA loop, with a boundary around it, can allow us to do.
Ponch Rivera:And the latest and greatest that's moving into AI is the free energy principle. We talk about that quite a bit where we have variational free energy and I want to touch back. This connects back to your perspectives point. Variational free energy is just that. How do we minimize that free energy in the environment? By updating our perspective of the external world, kind of passive. And then you have an active part of the OODA loop where you have an active pathway that is your planning or your policy pathway, and what you're trying to do there is minimize risks through minimizing expected free energy.
Ponch Rivera:And this is the key here is we build these processes and a better orientation internal to a system, internal to an all state, to make sure that when we run that simulation internally we get some feedback that says, hey, this might end up looking like that once it goes to the real environment. Right, so you can run that red team, that red teaming technique, if you will, internally to the system, before it goes outside. And once it's outside, there's nothing you can do about it. Right, it's out there.
Ponch Rivera:So a lot of overlap with what you have in your book and what Mark brought up. But the key behind all that I just brought up is to make sure when you're talking to anybody I'm not talking to just Chris here, but anybody, sure, when you're talking to anybody I'm not talking to just Chris here, but anybody when we look at separating something from an external state or the environment, you have to put a boundary around and go these are the things on the inside, everything else is on the outside. And once you do that, we have a yeah, we have a shared model of what we're talking about.
Chris Perry:Yeah, so Panch. Let's just stay on this for a second with an example that we have evolved within our place, the boundary stuff. Just to clarify even further AIs allow you to simulate a lot of decisions before you put them out into the world. What is interesting about how we use simulation is a call it an organizational change device is in hierarchies. The simulations tend to go from call it the front line and then it works its way slowly up to the executive ranks, right With distillation that isn't always constructive. There's politics and self-preservation and all the all, the you, all the human attributes that you tend to see in any large organization.
Chris Perry:And before anything goes out into the world, we are not only again simulating single strategies or policies or campaigns or whatever. We are designing simulations against different call them cohorts or stakeholders, because no one's reality is. Call it mono or consistent. Once you get out into the world once, then whatever it is that has to be kind of launched over the fence. Then there's the feedback loop and then everyone has to sit around the table again, especially around high stakes situations that occasionally we find ourselves in. So I think that notion of boundaries if I am responding to the way that you described it correctly and I don't know if I am. That's just again how the strategy game is changing very, very quickly, not only with the tech that we can use, but how it brings people around the table together in a way that's faster, more dynamic and, frankly, better than people pushing PowerPoints around an organization.
Ponch Rivera:This is interesting and I want to ask you, and I'll ask this right now why are you flattening the organization? And before you answer that, I want to share something. So, within that boundary, within that organization, we'll put a boundary around it. There's systems that drive behaviors and you brought up a few things like if you have a hierarchy, you have a reward system. People are playing politics, the game of telephone is going on. You know that information is important to my boss, but I'm not going to share that with them because information is power. All these things are happening. So my question to you on this is I think I just answered it why are you, why are you flattening out the organization when you do the simulation or do simulations?
Chris Perry:For two reasons. One, the obvious, is speed, and second is, if you come back to perspective and telephone, things can get very distorted very quickly as you move across organizations and up and down organizations. If you have speed, if you have perspective and you are testing different scenarios, odds are you're going to reduce risk as you go external and again are you're going to reduce risk as you go external. And again, like this isn't all, it's not all risk. There's also opportunity in being agile and nimble and opportunistic, and so we find, at times, unexpected territories that we wouldn't have seen without going through this and having everybody around the table to discuss novel options at the same time. This is great because there is a creative element to this that is huge in the nature of the work that we do.
Ponch Rivera:So Boyd was early adapter or thinker when it came to complex adaptive systems theory and what we've learned over time over the last several years is that we take a direction of travel, we probe and that's how you probe what you just described within that organization, multiple perspectives, which John Boyd talked about and then we don't go with a defined goal, and the reason for that we don't like and John Boyd never used the term alignment, he used harmony to talk about that. But the reason we want to do that is to make sure when we engage the external environment, we see and sense what's happening, because that novelty may force us to go in a different direction and we have to adapt to that Okay.
Ponch Rivera:So this is, I think this is, where the alignment is, and your experience with what you've been doing is spot on the harmony Ponch the harmony. Yeah, yeah, it's spot on. It's spot on to what yeah?
Mark McGrath:yeah, yeah, yeah, oh, this is great, this is a conceptual spiral. Oh, this is great, this is a conceptual spiral.
Chris Perry:I mean you talk about in your book Chris mismatches.
Mark McGrath:I mean the whole first third of the book is on mismatches and the unfortunate outcomes. If you don't see the mismatches and try to close the gap Punch. We have another guest that knows everything about John Boyd he knows nothing about him.
Ponch Rivera:This is great. I've been diving more and more into the language.
Mark McGrath:Can I qualify that, chris? Yeah, we run into this all the time, where we interact with our network and everybody we're saying the same thing and we always like to joke. Hey, we have another guest that knows nothing about John Boyd, yet knows everything about John Boyd.
Ponch Rivera:Yeah, so it's interesting to you know, mark and I've been looking at guerrilla warfare lately. We're looking at what's going on online thanks to John Robb and Andrew McLuhan and others. Here's what I'm kind of sensing is Mark brought up mismatches and you brought up mismatches. So John Boyd talked about creating mismatches, generating mismatches, right, and basically that means getting inside your opponent's mind space-time, right, three-dimensional space, fourth dimension of time, their mind it's, you know, same thing, very similar to their external environment. So where I'm going with this is there's a connection to entropy information, which I think is essential in what you just brought up about the organization, but the overlap is or, excuse me, the connection here is what an organism needs to do, like a business, they need to get in the mind space-time of their clients, their customers, as well as their opponents, their competitors.
Ponch Rivera:At the same time, they have to minimize surprise, minimize that entropy in the environment and the process. You can't have one without the other. You can't minimize, I'm sorry. You can't generate mismatches unless you know what's going on in the environment which they and they process the it's. You can't have one without the other. You can't minimize, I'm sorry, you can't generate mismatches unless you know what's going on in the environment right. So they're dependent on each other.
Ponch Rivera:And the way to do this and this goes back to one of your first points about advancing and thought is more important than technology. We have to look at the human system and figure out how do we leverage the multiple perspectives of the diverse people in our organization, the cognitively diverse people in our organization. Once we know how to do that, then you can really compete. And there's a lot of other connections that I think are in your book and to things that we talk about. But the point there is an organism needs to do two things it needs to minimize the surprise, which is, understand the external environment, and then needs to create processes or practices that help generate mismatches if they're going to survive and thrive on their own terms. So I don't know. A lot of things are thrown around at this conversation connect to a lot of things we're looking at from the world of neuroscience. Actually, yeah.
Chris Perry:So let's now take what you just shared and be more specific on competitive challenges that any organization has given the diversity, range, novelty of how people communicate, interact, wield influence, persuade and ultimately attain power in this environment. And all that sounded jargony. But now let's get specific on something. I know where you're going. I like it. I think the mismatch right now that organizations face is the asymmetry between institutional thinking, logic, communications, engagement and call it insurgent yeah, we would agree.
Chris Perry:Misinformation thing, conspiracy theories, lies, there are a lot of monikers that people use, but what you're talking about in the language that we use is narrative conflict, and we have orientation in systems to identify how asymmetrical actors are in using narratives to inflict harm, whether it's for political reasons, ideological reasons, grifting just straight competition. That you would never see unless you had a network orientation. You had technologies to show the network maps. You understand the actors, the logic, if the actors are bots, if they're people, and so that's where when I mentioned again a pileup of risk that's happening with organizations, it's not because individuals running these places are dumb people or out of touch, it's just you're talking about two systems that now share the same space and if you don't close that mismatch again. You're on your heels the entire time you walk into the office to the time you put your head on the pillow.
Mark McGrath:That's the institutional insurgency mismatch that you're talking about.
Chris Perry:Yeah, yeah, and so obviously it's something that has been, you know, integral to what you guys do and the military's had to think about for a while now. But that same conflict model has definitely hit the shores of corporate and institutional challenges that again don't necessarily have system structures and even understanding of technologies to help bridge that gap.
Mark McGrath:What about maybe an over-reliance on technology, even?
Chris Perry:Yeah well, we could talk on a separate podcast about that, but you just see that error over and over that. If you buy and install software, you have your problem solved and all it's doing is aiding in the judgment and intuition and thinking of people that have to run different parts of businesses. So when we talk about narrative conflict, yes, we need to have the technologies, network mapping, the ability to bring it to life. But unless you have a really great analyst and really great synthesizers that can again deliver again call it the net assessment to leaders that have to make decisions it's just a bunch of dots on a page that no one understands.
Mark McGrath:Yeah, and this is how Boyd I mean, it's really how we know, boyd, because, like a lot of guys after the Vietnam War, boyd was certainly one of the ones leading the, you know, asking the question. You know we just got our asses kicked, you know, and it goes back to the institutional versus the insurgent. The institutional military was all powerful, all funded, all capitalized, everything you could think of. They had all the weapons and all the bombs and everything, all the sensors. They lost to insurgents with bicycles and AK-47s, insurgents with bicycles and AK-47s.
Mark McGrath:And how the Marines came into, why the Marine Corps was so open to John Boyd whereas the Air Force rejected him, was right around this line is that we had to change the way we think. If we think like we do, we're going to that's going to happen again and we can't have that. And what Ponch and I talk about all the time from a guerr, guerrilla warfare or surgeon standpoint, is that this stuff happens in business too. These same concepts, these same principles, and if you're not aware of them, if you don't understand them and if you can't look at how it worked in certain scenarios not all military, um, you're going to repeat history, likely unwittingly. Uh, you, you might be blockbuster or kodak, you realizing that it's all over. You never knew it would hit you and the insurgents off and running.
Ponch Rivera:Chris, I got an idea here. In an environment where information just flows freely and we're talking about narrative conflict, given the opportunity to combat narrative conflict with one of two ways and there may be others I'm just going to throw two at you. One is to help people with their I guess their orientation, you know, their pre-school experience, learning, teaching, all that type of thing, the second being suppression of information. To me, and I'll give you my answer. First, I want to see your thoughts on this. If I want to control anything.
Chris Perry:The energy requirement by me to control that information. The lower energy approach is to suppress it rather than try to educate people on how to think and do things in a different way. What are your thoughts on? In that free flow again what Steve Bannon's been talking about for a long time you flood the zone with shit, you distract.
Ponch Rivera:So that's just free flow of information and you flood it with shit. That's another approach right.
Chris Perry:I think interesting about how call it. A parallel ecosystem was created over the last decade to kind of counter what you would call incumbent or left-leaning media institutions. The right-wing ecosystem runs completely differently than the left networked, personality-based, distributed and yet somehow there's as much or more alignment at times through that distributed right-wing ecosystem than there is through the call it the more structured liberal left. And those two worlds are interesting in their silos but, based on some of the research that was done out of Harvard that I talked about in the book is if you go back to 2016, and you probably saw it with the of information, let the market work out what's real, what's not, what's believable, what people identify with. It tends to just looking at winning and losing, just looking at winning and losing. It tends to benefit open systems thinking versus closed systems thinking, which is again obviously something I chewed on in the Boyd stuff over the weekend.
Mark McGrath:Okay, yeah, john talks, john Robb talks about this a lot. The way the, you know, the red tribe operates versus the way the blue tribe operates, the dynamics are very, very different, you know, very different. And the red tribe is.
Chris Perry:The dynamics are very, uh, very different but you know very different and in in the, in the red tribe is native to the environment that we are now in and if anything, with ai and gen ai and you know algorithmic stuff, you know both propagating what we see but propagating more stuff I think there's a reason why red tribe thinking has changed culture and society and power structures the way it has. It's native to the again, the media environment that we inhabit, versus 20th century orientation that is losing its juice.
Ponch Rivera:We do have a lot of listeners that are overseas and they don't like us getting into politics red and blue. But you did bring up something very important, and that is the open system versus the closed system. Now we started off. I talked about the way a lot of people look at the OODA loop. They actually describe it as a closed system. What we're saying is it is an open system. It's far from equilibrium and that's important. So that open system in an organization. Do you have any more thoughts on what that looks like for business leaders when, if they're listening to this, going, hey, how do I apply this to creating that open system to engage with the environment?
Chris Perry:What, what, what does it look and feel like when you're inside an organization? So, um and again, mark, I shared some, you know, some reference before you know, before we got on. I think when we talk to our clients, they're still operating on an industrial age construct Organizations are still largely they have hierarchy. There's still command and control, there's still silos, and when then you get into market engagement, there's still call it, a broadcast orientation and a channel mentality, and broadcast and channel tend to support a advertising mindset. And when you think again about open systems, they aren't. They don't have hierarchy, they aren't command and control. They're based on engagement around ideas, regardless of how flawed or not those ideas are, and you kind of earn your reputation, your favor, your power, your influence, in some cases supported by advertising, but in more cases earned through ideas and the ability to transmit them.
Chris Perry:And so what we try to do and we've done it in our own place, and this is what I do in my day job is you need a lab, you need labs to experiment with something that is categorically different than how things run inside the business, because it's something that has to be. It requires an educational base to change your sensibilities, it requires different technologies and what's procured from the center, and it requires a lot of testing, learning, refining, updating, codifying based on what's happening out in the world versus what's being presented in a PowerPoint. And so, again, trying to straddle the kind of closed system orientation of industrial era thinking and more networked open system thinking with where we're going. The bridge has to be new constructs inside of organizations versus trying to put like new icing on an old cake. That was great.
Ponch Rivera:So, looking at those notes you gave us and we have them in front of us we'll try to share them here in a second. I want to try to build a snowmobile with you and I think it's something that you may have seen or it builds on a lot of the things you just brought up. So I'm going to share this with you. And this is not from us, this is from Dave Snowden and it's the Apex Predator Theory. So paradigm shifts over time for a little while and then we get a new paradigm that kind of overlaps with it, and I think if we were to take what you just described and put it on this, it will actually have a pretty cool snowmobile that we can communicate with folks on what we mean by apex predator. But within this thinking, you have a moment of choice. No-transcript shorter. So what does this look like? I'll build this up real fast.
Ponch Rivera:If we were to take what you just described, I think it would fit very nicely into this right. So scientific management, systems, thinking, and here we are in this cognitive complexity. Again, we can use the language that you have to explain that hey, this is how the new apex predator emerges and what it means. It really tells us that those things on the left are still valuable. But you got to know those things on the right and fortunately with complexity theory and Boyd and the things you're talking about in your book social computing and intelligence. So I think it would overlap very nicely with that and I'll try to get that brought up here in one second. But have you seen that apex predator theory I went through?
Chris Perry:it pretty fast, by the way I haven't.
Chris Perry:I haven't.
Chris Perry:But again, like I mentioned at the open, again not seeing things like this, intuiting them, but once you see it on a slide like that, again, you can't unsee it because that's how things work.
Chris Perry:And again, on the left side of that slide, again the idea of Taylorism and scientific management, and Mark and I talked about this a bit over lunch last week. Again, what's the new management school? To develop the new Taylorism that's based on, you know, new practices, new theories, new ways of not just again deploying technology but improving processes, improving thinking, improving you know ways of working, in the same way that Taylor, you know, in the early 1900s, started to think about industry in a very novel new way, like when we talk about intellectual innovation. That's the kind of stuff that we probably need more of, and my sense is that there will be new leaders and new schools of thought and even new institutions that will probably create the new Taylors that will help create call it management sensibilities in science in a very new way around. That will help create call it management sensibilities in science in a very new way around.
Mark McGrath:That, that right part of the chart hey, think of uh things that can apex predator themselves. You know, constantly that's what boyd's saying through destruction and creation, that you keep destroying your model, rebuilding it, destroying, you, rebuild it. So when, uh, when general petraeus joined us, he talked about, he brought up netflix, but he also reminded us that, hey, netflix doesn't mail dvds anymore. You know, netflix has gone through several reiterations of itself to where they're at now, to when they firstly, you know they initially had knocked, uh, knocked blockbuster out.
Mark McGrath:One thing that the marine corps has always been really good at and punch and I have discussions with the leaders around what's called force design, which we won't delve into here but the marine corps, historically, was always really good at apex predatoring itself, if that's, if we could use that term of like basically going to war with itself, to destroying old models, to create new models, to stay relevant, to stay in demand, to stay, to stay effective. And that's why boyd, by the way, that's how he got in there and that's how it all kind of kind of worked maybe this is interesting.
Ponch Rivera:A couple connections here. You can almost take destruction and creation and build it on the paradigm. So we just went over the apex predator thinking question yeah and then I think the only downside to internal disruption is if your orientation is off, your ability to predict the future, which none of us can right, um, it's, that's that you could actually kill yourself. You could destroy your own company from within.
Mark McGrath:You could and, at the same time, if you have effective red teaming and if you're an effective learning organization, you have the right people around you to hey, we're probably at a moment where we're hitting the apex. We need to reinvent ourselves quick.
Ponch Rivera:Going all in is dangerous because you still want to run the probes right. You got to get repeatability, you got to challenge it, you got to get feedback from the environment to say this is the right path. And I think the danger of going all in on something is you could have the wrong decision to have a fantastic outcome and then you write books about follow me because I'm a smart leader, yeah, you got lucky right. Or you could have great decision-making internally to your organization and just have bad luck because something changed in the environment.
Mark McGrath:And then you could reorient and you could destroy.
Ponch Rivera:But that's the danger of going all in, that's the idea of probing.
Mark McGrath:Well, again, that's OODA loop sketch. If I understand OODA loop sketch effectively, I'm leaning more towards that way. Right, I'm able to challenge myself, I'm able to identify that things are, are. I'm open let's put it this way, I'm open to the perspectives that would help bring me to the understanding that we need to make changes, that that that I'm not going to be comfortable, I'm not going to get complacent, I'm not going to get uh, you know, get lazy, because they're then then the vulnerability. Then, you know, then talk about friction and mismatches, then that's's going to be a giant bullseye for a wily competitor.
Chris Perry:Yeah, hey guys, hey guys, For those that are listening beyond the military establishment, what would be the parallel in the military for lab-type organizational change? That kind of fits between running things as they do, trying to drop new practices on top and kind of destroying the way.
Ponch Rivera:I got two.
Chris Perry:I got two.
Ponch Rivera:We have a weapon school, our Top Gun. It's a pretty good place for that and you can go back in the history and kind of get the same idea that the lean startup approach, gunk Works approach kind of led to the development of Top Gun. And then you get into our development group. We have a few of those type of capabilities where you reduce the hierarchy, the bureaucracy, you rapidly get procurement putting almost like an agile approach to software development. Those would be two in the Navy that I'm aware of. Mark, do you have anything?
Mark McGrath:I mean, I just wrote down six different things to think of for the Marine Corps, because this is really it's almost endemic to being a Marine. But the Marine Corps has what's called Marine Corps Combat Development Command, and I think that the way it's evolved over the years is it's still generally where they test these ideas, and there's been some very famous generals, famous future commandants, that have been commanders of Marine Corps Combat Development Command. But that's how the Marine Corps always would try to stay fresh and innovate, create new ideas. And one of the things I could say as a Marine, specifically as a Marine officer, and even I think enlisted Marines would agree with this too ideas and innovation come from wherever in the Marine Corps. There's no limit on where it can come from. So if I used to tell my troops, like, if it's in a peacetime scenario, hey, don't break any laws and don't kill anybody, but this has to get done by this time, and they were free to do it however they wanted to, and Marines are famous for innovating. They have things too, like Marine Corps Warfighting Lab. There's a School of Advanced Warfighting.
Mark McGrath:Expeditionary warfare school is sort of the career level school that Marine captains would go to, which, by the way it used to be called amphibious warfare school. This is where Boyd was introduced into the Marines, because all these officers were there to debate, to learn, to challenge, to read. And that's really how the Marine Corps has survived. To get where it's at now is because it's always had that kind of a learning culture. So it's always been a culture. Yeah, punch will laugh, but it's true, and even even punch can't dispute this because he's been to the marine corps university. We like to, we like to take credit. It might be since boyd or, you know, since after vietnam, but we are the most intellectual branch.
Ponch Rivera:I mean, if you're not, if you're not reading and debating and arguing, something's wrong well, you know, the smartest people I met in the military were marines and the dumbest people I met in the military were marines.
Mark McGrath:So okay, I'll give you that that's. That's that's fair. Sorry, yeah, but I think.
Chris Perry:I think, going back to what started this, you know, this part of the conversation is this view that you have to destroy yourself from from within or protect the status quo. There are bridging strategies from an organizational standpoint. Some of them could be again.
Chris Perry:call them probably more educational-based, like Mark you just talked through, but some of them can be call it operating-based, where you're creating new units, new labs, new teams to actually deploy the thinking in a way that bridges you from call it new teams to actually deploy the thinking, in a way that bridges you from call it game A to game B, and I just see a lack of that organizational call it transition in the corporate world that maybe corporate leaders could learn from the military.
Ponch Rivera:Let me try this with you, Chris. Here's another thought.
Mark McGrath:Can I add one thing to what Chris just said? I tried that in corporate world for a long time and I call them the SQDs, you know the status quo defenders. They come out in force and, you know, a lot of times ideas that had their genesis in the military are dismissed because it didn't come from Harvard, you know, or it didn't come from Oxford or whatever. Didn't come from Harvard, you know, or it didn't come from Oxford or whatever. What I always tried to impart and you know, not everybody dismissed it, but a lot did, but not everybody, and those that didn't, I think, do really well with it is that the military is actually one of the best places to have a professional schooling in complexity and how to thrive in complexity, and that's ultimately what you know, what Punch and I do, you know professionally and this is what we, you know, study and collaborate on literally with every waking moment in the military was a really good, uh, was a really good background for that, and that's that's what I think that the corporate world could really learn.
Ponch Rivera:All right, I'm going to. I'm going to fit on this one Cause I don't agree with you. You're ready for this? The number one this is I missed this and I kind of touched on it between the connection between Top Gun and Dev Group, and it's really simple Team science, mission command, yeah, yeah, the key lesson to take away from the military is how do you build teams right? And the place you look is aviation. The SEALs look there. Our weapons school came up with plan brief, execute, debrief. You plan the plan. You brief the plan. You execute the plan. You debrief right. It's a learning model.
Mark McGrath:That's what I'm saying, though. Those are the types of lessons that should Well you don't have to go to school for that.
Ponch Rivera:You can be an 18-year-old going to an aircraft carrier and understand that you get 100% turnover there every four years on a flight deck of an aircraft carrier, absolutely.
Ponch Rivera:How do you do that? Setting for it? But it's not secret, it's not a secret. These are well-known things. The problem is, industry doesn't want to learn like that. They don't want to put the time in to learn how to communicate, to learn how to plan as a team. They don't want to learn the red teaming techniques. They don't want to do this because it's beneath them to learn. They went to Harvard, for God's sakes. They have an MBA, right, they know they've been on a high-performing team once in their life. The truth is, how do you create this type of environment and organization? And this is my view, my bias view. You build teams and leaders through an apprentice model, like we had with our weapons school. You know mission command and all that, and then you build teams, and the way you do that is through the team science, which we know has origins in aviation crew resource management. That's where we get psychological safety, that's where we get scrum, that's where we get all these other things. But people don't want to do this. So punch that Sorry.
Mark McGrath:Mark, we completely agree and that's exactly. Yeah, that's exactly it they don't want. The desire is not there.
Ponch Rivera:Yeah, so teaching people about the yeah, go ahead. Sorry, Chris Guys. Okay, Liar is not there, yeah.
Chris Perry:So teaching people about the? Yeah, go ahead, sorry, chris, it's guys, okay. So so if we're going to bang on each other, I'm going to. I'm going to bang on you for a sec punch. Yeah, yeah, please. Part of it could be in the um again, the I don't know what you book, and again I sent you a chart.
Chris Perry:A punch that may or may not be worth sharing with the listeners is that you have a lot of people trained call it in case culture, running organizations. It's based on Harvard case method. That Harvard case method and best practices permeates pretty much every organization I've traversed over the last 20 years. But now you have change and novelty. Where having best practices is emergent, it's not studied and codified, studied in Codify.
Chris Perry:So in the chart that I sent, if you have just four models of thought to start, you've got the Harvard case method for management.
Chris Perry:You've got the Y Combinator call it method for starting and incubating new companies. You have got situational awareness and forecasting and planning into that through something emblematic, through RAND, and then you have new schools of thought, like the one that I did a little research on for the book at Carnegie Mellon, where it's not just using inventive thinking to invent new products but actually invent new social practices based on needs in the market. So what you guys were just talking about in terms of we'll call it institutional thinking is because a lot of the people leading companies are on the lower left and there's still value in that, in running core, predictable businesses. But we're now an environment that is increasingly unpredictable. So we should borrow different schools of thought to. You know both run the core but also find areas for growth and then the obviously the RAND stuff you know straddles both opportunity and risk. So again I kind of come back to the Boyd thesis that without that orientation and a wide range of perspectives you probably don't know what you need to know, regardless of what school you went to.
Mark McGrath:I mean there's actually a sentence in the Boyd biography by Robert Corum that was saying how officers after Vietnam were starving for something like, particularly on the warfighting side so say, like the Marine Corps or like Army Combat Arms or some fighter aviation that there were too many people studying management at Harvard and not enough people discussing how decisions are made in chaotic, nonlinear, asymmetric environments. They weren't studying patterns of conflict, which was one of his more famous briefs. They weren't studying that. This stuff, this chaos, this vuca of warfare, it, it, the. The weapons change, the, the vehicles change, but the, the concepts don't really ever change. Oftentimes you know um and all. It's there to learn um and it's there to challenge and it's there to debate and it's there to debate and it's there to argue.
Mark McGrath:We had what was his name, punch chris from google, that came on to talk about and we've had bruce guttmannson on that does uh, decision cases. Why? Why they train business leaders actually to study war, fighting and warfare history, to put them in this situation. We've taken punch and I both led what we call a staff ride or a battlefield walkthrough with executives that never been in the military before and you put them in the battle at Gettysburg. You immerse them in it and they're forced to come up with decisions, and then they start to identify things that they can do next week when they're back in the office.
Ponch Rivera:I think a good point that Chris brought up is exacting practices from other domains. Right yeah, so learning from others. Yeah, the interdisciplinary nature of it.
Mark McGrath:Yeah.
Ponch Rivera:Yeah, and this is what we're talking about the shift from agile to whatever's next, and just thinking in the business world. Business management should be reduced hierarchies, increased information flow, build teams.
Mark McGrath:Right, we talked yesterday with someone about being a radical generalist yeah, with someone about being a radical generalist. You know like that were. And, chris, you know Marshall McLuhan, um, talked about specialist specialist getting replaced by automation, like that. That was the. That was the target audience to get uh. Replaced by automation would be those that specialize, that didn't have any knowledge outside of uh. You know one specific area, but Buckminster Fuller talks about that too.
Chris Perry:I don't know if I agree with that, though.
Mark McGrath:What's that About spec no?
Chris Perry:When you think about call it increasing use of work. You still have to judge what comes out the other side of the AI, what comes out the other side of the AI, and in order to do that, you have to have a depth of understanding of what to feed into the machine and what to judge coming out and again bringing Boyd back into it again. If the AIs are analysts, who's the creative synthesizer to figure out?
Mark McGrath:That's the generalist. Yeah, that's the generalist specialist argument.
Chris Perry:That's what I was saying just saying that the that the future is going to belong to generalists.
Mark McGrath:I don't believe in that, because the inputs determine the outputs the future will belong to generalists that know how to use ai no, I think I'll see what you're saying, chris.
Ponch Rivera:Humans lose capability as technology goes up. Right, we still want to make sure we have those experts. I remember when we talk about Kenevan. So the multiple domains of, just to say, the world one is complicated and that complicated domain is full of subject matter experts. One of the things that Mark and I talked about is you need to have a nice balance with the generalists and the subject matter experts. In fact, I don't think in academia you want to have, you really want deep expertise, right, but you also want people that can cut across those multiple disciplines to synthesize new things to make new snowmobiles right, particularly to enhance judgment.
Ponch Rivera:I would say no-transcript.
Chris Perry:So let's break it down a bit more and again, there's probably a pretty robust debate you can have around this. But again, doing research for the book, like, let's take generalists down to maybe or put it in a different context you probably need humanists, right? So if you have people who have subject matter expertise, which is critically important to both input the right stuff into machines and judge what's coming out, ultimately we still have to make an impact with our fellow humans, and what becomes pretty interesting in the research or journey that I've been on is a lot of the best leaders come from liberal art schools. They're not STEM.
Mark McGrath:Yep, yeah, I'm strongly biased. I have a BA and an MA.
Chris Perry:Yeah, and so this idea of you know cramming more and more you know of our talent into STEM education I think there's, you know, a degree of benefit to that, but a massive degree of oversight, as universities cut back on liberal arts programs and, you know, I'll call it retrieving what it actually means to be a human. Yes, right.
Chris Perry:I'm with you on this In all the you know the corpus of great philosophers and thinkers and historians that have been grappling with similar problems that we're grappling with today. That we think is new and novel, but actually, you know, we should appreciate more. So, like generalist is probably too general of a term, right as we really think about, like what it means to work alongside machines. And again, you know, dealing with complexity requires you know human-centric thinking as much as you know how to you know manage a P&L or build a you know a tech system. No, I agree.
Ponch Rivera:So the human factors side in the. So the subject matter expertise in the complicated domain. Something else fits in there and that is the team science right, the human factors. How do you work together as a team is a complicated thing. A team is complex. There's emergent properties from that. In order to be on a team, you need some subject matter expertise. Um, you know let's think about sports and things like that but really good teams, it's the interactions between the agents that make that team um greater than the sum of parts.
Ponch Rivera:But what I'm saying is that complicated thing that I brought up from aviation is how you become a force multiplier is you can use that for human machine teaming, human-human teaming, socio-technical system syncing. We know that to work, but we also know organizations don't like doing that and, like I said, I've been doing this for 13 years. People push back on it and go. That's beneath me. I don't need to know how to talk to my fellow geologists in any other room. I'm like okay, one quick story, chris, you brought up Starbucks.
Ponch Rivera:Starbucks has an amazing manual when you walk in for all their baristas they have to use closed-loop communication, or they used to. I don't know if they do this now I don't go to Starbucks anymore or that often. But they had to learn how to repeat back things and as a customer generally customers learned how to order something I want a large coffee or whatever. There's a system inside Starbucks that gets the customers involved to order a specific way. The reason they did that is to reduce variation within the system. Right, you can make more money that way. The reason I bring this up I was in Seattle. I lived in Seattle and an executive there asked me how to improve their technologists, their teaming skills and their technologists. I said go get the manual from your baristas and bring it over and teach your software developers how to do that. And he looked at me like well, that sounds stupid. I'm like I can't help you. Then I just can't.
Chris Perry:Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think, and again, not to bang on Starbucks, I just think Starbucks is emblematic of again I'm going to come back to the environment where, whether it's labor policy decisions and again, the feedback loop that comes from that, the preparedness to deal with myths and disinformation and have intent, be you know, put, put, put you know, put back at you, like, there are a number of things that, if you really look at some of the challenges that an incredible brand like Starbucks has faced, it's all based on new variables, not necessarily a company that you know that unilaterally has lost its way.
Chris Perry:And, again, some of the best brands in the world are dealing with this, not because they're not great companies with great people, but because we're dealing with pretty great and enormous anomalies in the world where we're doing business, and so, again, there are little things, like you talked about, that might be blocked. There's also, again, coming back to this idea of orientation it's just foundational, it's absolutely foundational and that's why, you know, boyd studies to me again, in the brief time that I've been jamming on it, it just feels like it's foundational stuff that anybody who wants to not go crazy needs to get familiar with.
Mark McGrath:Yeah.
Chris Perry:That's a great endorsement.
Mark McGrath:And it's how you drive your competitors crazy is by understanding it well, so that you can overcome your own friction and create that friction, send that friction over to your competition, back to like. We talked at the beginning about rejecting the linear model. I mean, that's what you want people to operate on. You want people to use linear, formulaic templates, especially in competitive situations. You want them to stick to that because it's just a massive vulnerability. It doesn't account for the complex nature of literally everything yeah, so so mark on that.
Chris Perry:What's kind of interesting. Going back to what ill's institutions right, a lot of call it communications, thinking inside of institutions is based on the claude shannon information theory. Yeah, which is, and what it was born in. Like what the 90s or 90s? There's nothing about the communications environment that's linear anymore.
Ponch Rivera:Hey, chris, this is important. Can you talk a little bit more about that? And the reason for that is, shannon information theory fed into some of the early thinking of John Boyd, so I've never heard this perspective before. Why is?
Chris Perry:it linear. Well, again, it's kind of creator, encoder, receiver, and again, I'm greatly simplifying it Again, when you're dealing with linear organization, command and control institution, it was the foundation, was math, right, it worked, that theory worked for that period of time. But you don't have to be a mathematician to look at how information travels, like the sender receiver mode is just completely distorted and networked and sloppy, and it is more of a cybernetic model. It's all feeding on itself in a way where the best ideas kind of cycle their way up and linear-based, like broadcast, sender, receiver, game over, move on to the next thing. It's almost nonsensical, right, and that's just based on a paradigm change. That's not based on, again, a theory that clearly is substantiated and a lot of organizations still run on based on being in an old paradigm versus a new paradigm.
Ponch Rivera:Yeah, no, I like how you brought in cybernetics in there and you know the Sturman model is really having a good model of the external environment and that influenced John Boyd quite a bit.
Mark McGrath:The structure and creation. Source was psychocybernetics.
Ponch Rivera:So I don't know if you come across that in Asinga's book yet, but the cybernetic connection is phenomenal.
Mark McGrath:We have to take you down to the archives.
Chris Perry:Chris, I'm there yeah, it's, you want to go this weekend, let's do it.
Mark McGrath:This might be closed it's a long, yeah, a long weekend a federal holiday yeah, you, you get, you get better too.
Chris Perry:But yeah, I, you know this is again, I would imagine, people that you have on your show. I mean, they they kind of feed off of this stuff. And, mark, you and I talked a bit about call it characteristics of people that can succeed regardless of frameworks, theories, you know working modes, which is kind of the inner drive. Yeah, it a relentlessness to understand or to try to understand. That probably is holding a lot of people back and pushing call it a relentless few forward. Again, like you guys deal in extraordinarily high stakes situations like that. Inner drive is really important and curiosity is really important. What we're talking about, because if you don't have that, none of important. What we're talking about because if you don't have that, none of the stuff we're talking about, frankly, matters.
Mark McGrath:No, and it's back to you know, my own corporate experience. I mean, that's the lack of curiosity is alarming. Um, and understanding wasn't even a word anybody would spell, because knowledge was all you needed. Information was more than enough in most cases. Maybe knowledge nobody cared, nobody cared about it, you just would make money and move on. He's bringing in new ideas. Get rid of them. Oh, that's going to double our profits next year. We got to get that guy out of here. We can't have that. But yeah, that kind of curiosity though, too.
Mark McGrath:Joe Petraeus brought that up, talking about what made organizations successful as being a learning organization, and if you don't have that, if it's not driven by curiosity, you're going to have a lot of problems adapting. Like, if you can't learn, you can't adapt. Also, too, ponch brought up some of the team science things like you know that we've learned from the military, like psychological safety, or I mentioned how you know any Marine can bring anything up. I mean, there's a there's a psychologically safe ability to do that, because everybody owns the mission, everybody, from the highest down to the lowest and everything in between. Everybody has ownership of the mission.
Ponch Rivera:That's the intent, mark. Just because we know about it doesn't mean it actually happens, right? Here's the interesting thing is, a lot of good books have come out in the last 10, 15 years about lessons from the military. And look at how brilliant I am. I did this in Afghanistan and I did this over here. All they did was take the lessons that all of us were taught and actually implement them. That's it.
Chris Perry:That's it, they didn't do anything unique.
Ponch Rivera:All of these things are known. They just had an opportunity and a leadership position to use them. You look at, david Marquet turned the ship around or took whatever it is. Is it turn the ship around? Is Turn the ship around or whatever it is? Is it turn the ship around? Is that right? Yeah, yeah, okay. And we had Doc McCabe on here ask us the other day about a Dunbar number 150 people. How many people were on a submarine? Less than 150. Your span of control, all these things. He had Mission command, great talent on a environment and he did it, but he didn't come up with this stuff.
Mark McGrath:No, it's not magic.
Ponch Rivera:We've all been taught these things. It's a matter of implementing them. That matters, right? It's not like it doesn't change. It's knowing, doing gap. We know that we need to do this, but we just don't do it. Those that do it seem to succeed, and then they write books about it, telling everybody how awesome they are about. You got to learn from me. No, I don't need to learn from you. I already learned this stuff.
Mark McGrath:And I would add that the difference between what we do, what Ponch and I do with our colleagues, is we help people build an internal component, so that after the speech and after the book has been autographed and all the selfies are taken, what happens next? Well, that's why you have to have these sort of embedded liaison officers like us, like embedded advisors, that can help people do this from the inside out and then bring it back to the outside in.
Chris Perry:Yeah, mark, I want to come back again. So you talked about, you know, a curiosity mandate or deficit. Yeah, when people say, be curious to me, it tends to, it feels soft to me. Yeah, what you're talking about, whether it's curiosity or implementation in novel situations, it does come down to drive, it comes down to perseverance, it does come down to responsibility in order to move from I should do something to actually doing it. And I think those characteristics, if you move out of the military and the high stakes situations that you have been involved in, if you then transfer that into the corporate world drive, relentlessness, responsibility I think those are intangibles that are a big liability right now.
Chris Perry:Oh, this I, I punch you. You talked about again, like, um, you know, ooda loops being dimensional, like this stuff starts with us and so I had the fortune, or or or lack of fortune, to actually get seared pretty good by being complacent right out of school and there's a degree of complacency in the face of what we can see if we're paying attention to the outside world. That transcends curiosity into.
Chris Perry:are you taking responsibility right now when you know that things are are radically changing and what is the, the, the saying uh, change happens gradually and then suddenly, yeah my sense is, over the next, like year, two years there's going to be a lot of sudden changes that people intellectualize but don't necessarily emotionalize to the point where they do punch the things you talked about yeah, they still think it's going to go back to the east or whatever I don't know, or just hope it goes away. Yeah, you like, hey like.
Mark McGrath:This is another like we take the ostrich strategy, we're just going to stick our head in the sand and we don't have to deal with it. You know, and I, when I worked with investment advisors, that was that nobody wanted to hear about the industry changing, whether it was 07 and 08, whether it was, nobody wanted to hear it at all. Like nope, we're going to go back to the good old days, when I came in the industry and it was the 80s and this and now and what happens?
Mark McGrath:the messenger gets shot the messenger gets shot and ultimately, the pride fall, though the or the proud rather fall. I mean, like the people that would take a lot of arrogance and uh, um, that they still, they were so sold on. Uh, you know, looking in the rearview mirror and and doing what, what it always worked um, and all of a sudden it didn't work anymore and then they didn't have the capacity to. I think really, what we're saying is like curiosity or whatever, like it's really reorienting. It's the world of reorientation.
Ponch Rivera:I wonder, I wonder this guys, going back to something Chris brought up and something that we've heard in other episodes, and that is is it possible that your better leaders are the ones that have a stressor early in their lives that drive kind of like you? Chris, you had that event that you talked about, which made you curious, so I'm wondering if there's a connection there. Can you use early stressors to identify potential strong leaders?
Chris Perry:from backgrounds where there is trauma, either relationships with parents, loss of a parent, hardships, early. There are a lot of winners out there who have the drive based on kind of that like searing, formative experiences, and I think the question is is my example of being automated 30 years ago? Will that ignite curiosity, responsibility, drive on and on the amount of turnover happening in leadership positions? I mean the windows are just closing into a matter of months, not necessarily years. The amount of companies that are turning over in the Fortune 500 are moving much more quickly, much more quickly Like. There's a lot of evidence that that, the, the, the, the, the change is theory in the changes reality. Like. Like it's coming closer to shore and people will probably deal with some searing events and hopefully the optimist in me hopes that more people will take advantage of podcasts like this. Take advantage of you, this, take advantage of you know other frameworks, ways of thinking, um, and do stuff with them, not just talk about them or blow them off.
Mark McGrath:That's a good place to put a pin in this for now, because I know that we're running up on time. Chris, where would you send us to go learn more about your book? Is, uh, perspectiveagentscom correct?
Chris Perry:yeah perspective yeah, and just real quick on the book. In a way it is um if, if the center of the ooda loop is on orientation yeah there.
Chris Perry:There are 13 different chapters in this book to help expand your orientation. Whether you're a creative, a leader, a a curious one, what have you I mean? Again, as I said up front, I probably should have read Boyd before McLuhan, because it's foundational to then understand some of the media theory that we've talked about and then start to see not theoretical examples but all the tangible examples that are happening around us right now that if you don't have the framework, the orientation, you actually don't see them. And they're huge forces. And there's so many examples in the book for the primary reason of just pushing your perspective outward, so you aren't surprised when some of these forces ultimately impact your life. So encourage people to read it, not because I wrote it, but because I think it'll be helpful as a build on all the things you guys talk about and promote.
Mark McGrath:Well, we recommend it. To your point about Boyd and McLuhan, knowing either one gives you an edge, knowing both makes you unstoppable. That's my thought. Not even just knowing, understanding, understanding both makes you unstoppable.
Chris Perry:Yeah, the range of surprises around the corner becomes far less surprising if you know how to look.
Mark McGrath:Yeah, Well, Chris Perry, thank you so much for joining us and we will definitely have you back to continue. The world there's no way out of the world of reorientation there's no way out. I think we did a pretty good job today. So reorienting.
Chris Perry:Thanks, guys, stick with us. Great spending time with you.
Mark McGrath:Yeah, stick with us. Thank you, Chris.
