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
From Battlefield to Pen: Military Insights, Strategy, and Creative Transformation with Austin Caroe
Ever wondered how an officer's journey from the battlefield to the world of writing could unfold? Our guest Austin Caroe unravels his transition from military service to becoming a writer during the intellectually vibrant times of COVID-19, drawing inspiration from profound thinkers like Nassim Taleb. Join us as he reflects on the emotional withdrawal from Afghanistan, an experience he skillfully encapsulated in a widely resonant essay. With a humorous nod to the unofficial nature of military podcasts, he also shares intriguing insights about the complexities of military strategy, enriched by personal accounts from his time in Afghanistan.
We dive deep into the unexpected world of Kriegspiel, a chess variant filled with uncertainty, illustrating its parallels to real-world military scenarios. This unusual game challenges players to strategize without full visibility, much like navigating the unpredictable terrains of military command structures. Our guest connects these insights with the broader theme of strategy, emphasizing the necessity of adaptability in both military and business contexts. Through these anecdotes, we explore how mapping and stakeholder planning play pivotal roles in achieving strategic success, shedding light on his experiences from platoon leader to company commander.
In a fascinating twist, we discuss the virtue of "laziness" in leadership, inspired by a provocative article. Highlighting how doing less can often lead to more, our guest shares how intelligent inaction may prevent unintended ripple effects. With engaging stories and reflections, he advocates for empowering ground-level leaders to make impactful decisions. As we wrap up this enriching conversation, we tease future discussions and invite listeners to explore additional content on our guest's YouTube channel, promising more insights and stories that traverse the realms of military and strategy.
Subscribe to Austin's Subtack, The Distro, here: https://thedistro.substack.com/
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So we'll have a lot of fun with this conversation, but I guess we should get started by saying the views of our guests do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of the United States Army. Is that fair?
Austin Caroe:That is fair and that is correct. I am here speaking for myself, not speaking for the Army. The Army does not officially endorse no Way Out, although they should, but they don't.
Mark McGrath:Well, we haven't been invited yet to be on the Army's podcast, the official Army podcast.
Ponch Rivera:Well, the Air Force is talking to us. That's true, the Air Force is talking to us. Do they have an official?
Mark McGrath:Army podcast. I mean they must. It's probably, I don't know, do they? I don't know? I mean there's certainly plenty of Army veterans.
Austin Caroe:I know JRTC has their own official podcast and NTC has their own official podcast where they talk about lessons learned through different rotations and things like that. But again, I don't even. I think those are official and units have podcasts too, and so it is what it is. I don't know if there's an official Army podcast.
Mark McGrath:Well, if they're out there, have punch and I put a word for us to get uh punch and I on the talk about oodle loop, so the army could restore itself with uh the theories of john boyd, there's a soldier for life podcast.
Ponch Rivera:It looks like it's done by the army okay I don't know what that's about?
Austin Caroe:well, it's probably about transitioning soldiers to the private sector out of the Army.
Ponch Rivera:That's what the Soldier for.
Austin Caroe:Life program is yeah.
Ponch Rivera:My Army benefits, how to transition out, how to pay your taxes, because you're going to have to pay taxes when you leave for a lot more.
Mark McGrath:I should tell.
Ponch Rivera:No, your retirement's not worth a million dollars.
Mark McGrath:I should disclose Austin. I am the son of a retired Army officer. I was born at Fort Knox, lived at Fort Benning, lived in Grafenwoehr. So I've done the uh. It chased me right into the Marine Corps. So yeah, but um you do know, I was a government employee for the army?
Ponch Rivera:right, I was a government employee for the army, oh.
Austin Caroe:I didn't know that. I knew you were a pilot. I didn't know you were an. I was the army.
Ponch Rivera:So I, I, I was a GS uh army guy in um cool Institute cart for 16 months. Yeah, I had to get out.
Austin Caroe:Okay, that's as long as you can stand it.
Mark McGrath:They had to bring in some Navy and say it's my army story. Yeah, so now I'm minding my own business one day and I'm thumbing through sub stack I don't know, maybe over a year ago and there's this great Substack called the Distro and we're speaking with the author. Here we are all these months later. I love your stuff. What started it all for you? How do you figure out? One day I'm like I'm in the army and I'm just going to start writing about stuff.
Austin Caroe:So with a lot of things it was kind of a COVID project. So you know, with a lot of things it was kind of a COVID project. So we were kind of opening myself up intellectually. I was reading a lot of Nassim Taleb he was very influential in my thinking. I came across John Boyd, of course, Yanir Bar-Yam, some of the other complexity writers, that book Chaos who wrote that Anyway, that's the main book on chaos that everybody reads, just sort of the popular book. So I was kind of immersing myself intellectually in these different types of things. And then, as I was reading, I was like man, we kind of did a lot of this stuff while I was in command. This describes a lot of sort of my philosophy about things and how we went about stuff, and so I was just writing a lot of different essays and ideas and jotting things down. I didn't publish them, I didn't really do anything with them, but I had dozens of Google documents of started essays, half-finished essays, completed essays.
Austin Caroe:And then we withdrew from Afghanistan and I was very upset. I deployed there three times. I had lost friends there, A lot of soldiers I knew had gotten hurt, and so for a lot of service members it was a very emotional time for me and I sat down and wrote a really long essay about not really long I mean, it was maybe 5,000 words or so about Afghanistan and why I thought it had collapsed and the things that had gone wrong. And I was researching different newsletter things. I had one newsletter service that I was using but I wasn't really sending out very much stuff. So I found Substack and I was like, oh, this sounds great. So I brought over my email list from the other newsletter I had and I added a bunch of people. I texted people hey, do you want to get on this? And so I added a bunch of people.
Austin Caroe:And then I sent out this essay on Afghanistan and it went relatively viral, Like you know. It got shared a lot. It got shared so much that it made it to my I had just gotten to ILE, to intermediate level education, to the command and general staff college, and this essay had made it to my instructors, and which was which was good and bad, because some people I had some instructors reach out to me being like, hey, this is amazing, I want you to do a, get a second master's, a master's in military arts and science, where you have to write a thesis. I want to be your thesis advisor. I had other people basically being like, well, this is a crock of crap and this is nonsense. So it was pretty polarizing, Even though I didn't lay blame on any specific person.
Austin Caroe:I tried to talk about structures and what I thought had gone wrong. And you can still find that essay. It's still up. I've actually published one or two, I think one follow-up where I went through the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction. I went through their report and basically copied and pasted from their report, inter top, inter interwoven, with what I had written, basically being like see, I told you so, like this is. This wasn't me just shooting my mouth off like the inspector general said the exact same thing.
Mark McGrath:So that went relatively viral and I was like man, I I think I have like a platform, I think I can do this writing thing pretty well, give us a taste of, give us, give us some of the patterns that you were observing, that they ended up affirming in that report. What are some of the things that you were seeing and tuned in on?
Austin Caroe:So the two main things are nobody was in charge and there was no strategy. You know people tried to disagree with that.
Ponch Rivera:That sounds like every business in America right now, every Fortune 20.
Austin Caroe:And so at the end of the essay I had, I was like, hey, look, if you want to do these types of things again, if you want to fight a small conflict like this, there's probably different ways that you could go about it. But one thing is put one person in charge and be like, hey, you are the czar, you get to make all the decisions and success or failure is on your shoulders alone. You don't get to do this. Hey, you come in for 18 months high five. The next guy. That guy comes in, blames all the last guy for all the things that are wrong, but says, oh, but I can do it differently. And then when they leave they play with all the metrics and say, oh, we did such a good job, look at me, I'm amazing. And then you just repeat that cycle for 20 years. But again, you can't lay the blame on any one individual if you do that and the SIGAR report basically says the same thing where it's like, hey, this constant turnover seriously hampered the effort, and then the lack of strategy.
Austin Caroe:One of the stories I tell in my essay is on my second deployment. I was at Headquarters Resolute Support, which is the four-star NATO headquarters, and I was a liaison there, and I had a colonel sit me down and be like, well, you see, captain there, and I had a colonel sit me down and be like, well, you see, captain, here in Afghanistan we've only been fighting nine to 12 months at a time, just fighting season after fighting season, and that's really what we've been doing. But we have now decided that we need a five to 10 year plan for Afghanistan and, mind you, this is in 2016. And it's like oh, so now you guys have decided that we need a five to 10 year plan, and that was what the sustainable security strategy was, if anybody wants to. So I was like are you guys kidding me?
Austin Caroe:And then the SIGAR report said the same thing. It said the United States continually struggled to redefine what it was actually doing, what its strategic objectives were, who its enemies were, who its allies were. It's all in there. I mean, it's not. I would say if you get too far into the details of Afghanistan, you are missing the point. The big strokes, the big, simple explanations are the best explanations, like the New York Times sorry, I'm really going off on a rant. The New York Times is going off on this, like well, the real reason we lost is because they supported people like General Rozek, who was really bad, and people, people hated him and they didn't win the hearts and minds and blah, blah, blah. I'm like guys, I'm not saying that's wrong, but that's not why we lost. We beat ourselves. That's what it comes down to.
Mark McGrath:So anyway, there you go. Which one, so that one, what's the title of that one? So we want to make sure that we link to that.
Austin Caroe:So there's one that's called Afghanistanghanistan, which is the first one, and then the second one is called. I'll send it to you. I have to look it up, I think it's. Yeah, it's like looking back or retrospective or something like that.
Mark McGrath:So I'll send those to you, that way you can link it. So punch and I, being gen xers from the knees, you know, were in in, at least in my high school days. Everybody wanted to live, live in Seattle and go follow, like Alice in Chains and Pearl Jam. So I look at your titles and, like those albums, they all have one word, like you, just have like a one word title.
Austin Caroe:One word yeah.
Mark McGrath:Which is great.
Austin Caroe:That's right.
Mark McGrath:It's like a lot of grunge bands.
Austin Caroe:Yeah, you know I did that as a forcing function to stay away from, to prevent myself from doing any clickbait, because you know I could make a whole bunch of different. I can't stand the clickbaity things like here's five ways to improve your leadership and so I tried to stay away from that by just sticking to the single word. I will usually, if I have a guest post, I'll work with the, the, the author on the guest post, what the title is going to be, and usually it's multi-words, so if it's not just me writing, then sometimes there'll be a. It'll be a little bit more explanatory in what the title is.
Ponch Rivera:Hey Austin, I'm curious as to how, yadir Bar-Yam you also had Nassim Taleb, his book on anti-fragile how the thinking on complexity influenced your thoughts on Afghanistan. Can you talk a little bit about that? Like entropy I know Tlaib talks about that sometimes Anti-fragile, which is nothing more than resilience under another name.
Austin Caroe:So let's see, do I have maybe I didn't bring it in here I have Bar-Yim's book Making Things Work, which is funny because that book is written, I think, in 2004. It's published in 2004, 2005. He goes over the US approach to Afghanistan in there. That's one of the very first chapters, if you remember. Have you guys read this book?
Ponch Rivera:No, but I met him. I'll make a connection here a little bit.
Austin Caroe:Oh sweet. So he writes about Afghanistan in there, but it's a 2004 perspective and, if you remember, in 2004, it's still very unclear as to what's happening. But our structure is very complex. Our command structure is very complex. One of the things he says in the book and it's been maybe a year or two since I've read it is that the complexity of the organism has to match the complexity of the environment, which I think is true.
Austin Caroe:But if you remember the, I would love to talk to him kind of about this, because something changed in our approach to Afghanistan. It became, I think, two, we started putting too many resources in. That's another thing. The Inspector General report goes over. A lot is we flooded it with resources, mostly with just money. We just throw money at things, and that wasn't something that we were doing in the early days. But there wasn't.
Austin Caroe:You know, I wasn't thinking a lot about complexity when I wrote. I was just thinking about kind of obvious things and I think and you don't want to be too, I don't know the right way to put it here it wasn't something that I was really thinking about was complexity. It was really like what I had seen because I had served at every echelon. I'd served at the platoon leader level fighting against the bad guys, going on patrol every day, hitting IEDs, recovering vehicles, seeing sort of the futility in that I had participated in big battalion movement to contact operations which were completely fruitless.
Austin Caroe:I felt like you know what I always tell people when I was a platoon leader is like it feels like we're an elephant in a hornet's nest, which is like we just can't, we're just not matched for this. You know, we're not equipped to do, we're not fighting the way that we need to be fighting to win. So I saw it at the tactical level. I saw it at the operational level when I was on the brigade staff, seeing all the different battalions working together. I saw it at the regional level, at the TAC South level when I was on that staff, and I saw it at the four-star level, at the highest level in the theater. I used all that experience and put that together to be like this is what I think happened Were you doing any?
Mark McGrath:tribal engagement, or was it more kinetic stuff with what you were doing?
Austin Caroe:It was mostly kinetic, it wasn't super, it's hard to explain. It wasn't really like tribal where we were. I mean it was right, but it was mostly dealing with individuals. I actually learned a lot about, because I'm just curious, naturally. So I learned a lot about the poppy trade when I was there. So I sat down and I would talk to different poppy farmers about how the poppy trade work, and I could go off on a whole thing about how the poppy trade works, but it you know, and those poppies those are only for bagels and cakes, right?
Mark McGrath:The poppy has no use for that, correct, it's just for bagels and everything bagels. Yeah, exactly Right, and we can't eat too many poppy seed bagels, otherwise we'll pop hot on a drug test. Well, tell I mean, unpack that a little more. So tell I mean tell us more about the interactions with the, with the poppy farmers, though, like what you know, what were the things that caught your attention to learn about the? Learn about that, give us, give us some more on that I was.
Austin Caroe:I've always been interested in economics and mark you and I have talked a little bit about austrian economics and was just very interested in, like, how does the supply chain work? You know, are these farmers like, are they bad guys? Obviously, you know they're not. They really just want to make their money. But basically I won't go into too many details, but the basic structure is the poppy farmer owns the field and grows the poppy and then people come in from outside, like people come in from the cities and from everywhere else and they buy a piece of the field from the farmer and then they are the ones that harvest the poppy for him, so he grows it. But other people come in, they pay for a part of the field, then they harvest it and then they take it and sell it to somebody else, who sells it to somebody else, who sells it to somebody else who eventually gets it across the border, gets it to a processing station and then it gets exported from there. So yeah, that's those those are. Those are pretty, but it was very interesting talking to them.
Austin Caroe:I really love I actually really loved the Afghan people. They were very hospitable, they were very accommodating, a lot like where I am right now, in El Paso and Las Cruces, where I was in Afghanistan. It looks very similar, so I really love the topography and you know I'm still optimistic about Afghanistan, believe it or not. You know Vietnam is a huge tourist destination for people from the United States. Today, People love going to Vietnam and you know we're not that far removed from the Vietnam War and I have similar hopes for Afghanistan and that I would love to go skiing in the Hindu Kush with my grandchildren someday and I I am optimistic. I think that there's a good chance that that's going to happen.
Mark McGrath:Interesting and you did. You did three trips like from basically was it like your platoon commander days to up all the way up through company command.
Austin Caroe:Yeah, I kind of bounced back and forth. So, yeah, I was there as a platoon leader and then I got to serve on the staff for a little bit there and then, uh, so I was in two different platoons. My second deployment is where I was at the four-star headquarters, um, and then my third deployment is when I came back as a company commander.
Mark McGrath:When you were in the four-star headquarters, were you in ops or plans where we would?
Austin Caroe:So I was a liaison officer from TAC South under General Agudo and then under General Henry, representing the TAC South staff, which was a division level staff or a one star or two, one two star level staff to a four star staff and that was an amazing experience. It was really great. You really learned a lot about staffing and how the Army works and how that war was being being run.
Mark McGrath:Yeah, it was great. It was a great experience. That's interesting, all right, well, let's uh, let's depart afghanistan and get to some of the uh, theoretical stuff that you, uh, that you work on. Uh, I'll cover, cover a couple of things, of course. The one that caught my attention was Kriegsspiel. You're doing Kriegsspiel chess and you used the term Fingerspitzengefühl in it. I did. I had not been familiar with Kriegsspiel chess. Conceptually, it sounds fascinating. Why don't you walk us through Kriegspiel Chess so?
Austin Caroe:Kriegspiel. Chess is a fascinating game. I've been playing this game since before I could remember. Chess has always been a big thing in my family. Some of my earliest memories are playing chess with my grandfather, who I loved and admired, and he was an amazing chess player and a great Kriegspiel player. So Kriegspiel is where you cannot see your opponent's pieces. Now it's not just blind chess necessarily, where you know if you watch videos of Grandmasters they'll do this thing where they'll be blindfolded and then they'll be playing against four people and they'll call out the moves. They'll be like all right, you know pawn to c4, and then the Grandmaster, who's blindfolded, will then call out his move. You know a pawn d4, or whatever it is, and it's not that you cannot see your opponent's pieces and you don't know what your opponent is doing. So usually the players are back-to-back and then there's a referee, and so white will just move. So white starts, right, so they'll move, and then the referee will simply announce white has moved, it's black's move. Black has no idea what piece white has moved, but black must now make a move, and so black then moves, seeing so the referee. There is that girl in the middle and she's going to walk back and move her master board. So the master board keeps track of the uh of the game and then she's going to walk over to the other person. This is a very inefficient way to play, if you ask me. Back to back is is far superior, and so the referee has to be very good and there's many different ways you can play creeksfield. There's probably there's at least 100 different variations and house rules and things like that. But the way that my family has always played is a super esoteric. But it's a variation on what are called the cincinnati rules and it's sort of for maximum uncertainty.
Austin Caroe:So, to give you an idea, it's like well, what happens if you make an illegal move? Well, illegal moves and errors are actually a huge part of the game because that's how you do reconnaissance. So if you can imagine that you put your bishop on one corner of the board and then move your bishop from that corner of the board to the other corner of the board, the referee is going to tell you that's no for three or no for two, and that means that there are two or so. Let's say he says no for three, that means there's three pieces between you and the square you want to move to. So now you're going back and like, well, what could? What? Three pieces could there be? You know what? What makes sense for there to be there? And then you might move back again. You'd be like, okay, well, there's no for three, where's the no for two? So you can find out where the different pieces are.
Austin Caroe:So there's a lot of reconnaissance involved in the game. So you want to make mistakes, you want to make illegal moves because it gives you more information. But with all that reconnaissance there's also risk, because what happens if you try to move your bishop to the other end of the board and the referee says white has moved, it's now black's move? Well, you've now put your bishop in a very precarious position. You've essentially wasted a move and you haven't gotten any information other than there's no pieces there. So I guess you have that piece of information. So it's this game of maximum as much uncertainty as you can put into the chessboard. It's very fun. It's a great spectator sport, because spectators can see the master board and so it's very fun for them to try to figure out. And you can be very good at figuring out where your opponent's pieces are.
Ponch Rivera:So, austin, on that, so are you trying to develop a mental map of where the pieces are? I mean, that's what you're doing, okay, but you can't physically move the pieces that are in front of you, right? You can't move the white pieces if you're on black in front of you to build that map, correct? Yeah, absolutely.
Austin Caroe:Oh, build that map correct. Yeah, absolutely. Oh, you can't Okay.
Ponch Rivera:Okay, so you're actually you're trying to map the external environment with your if you put a boundary around you and your board. It's kind of like the game of Battleship. You know when you play that when you're a kid, same thing type of thing where you can't see what's going on on that side, but essentially what you're trying to. So there's a lot of uncertainty in this game.
Austin Caroe:But where it gets interesting and that's sort of mildly interesting on its own. It's actually hard to get chess players to play Kriegspiel because it's just so different. It's like a completely different game. Moves that make sense in chess don't make sense in Kriegspiel, and vice versa. But what when you start talking about AI? Because AI, as we know, are chess engines. They're about a thousand ELO points better than the best humans. And to give you an idea of what a thousand ELO points looks like, that's about the difference between someone who's like pretty good at their chess club compared to Magnus Carlsen or one of the greatest chess players of all time. It's not even close. It would be like you know a guy who's a regional boxer going up against you know the greatest boxers of all time. I mean, it's just not, it's not close. So chess engines are unbeatable. No human can beat a chess engine, because the way chess engines work is they simple. I'm simplifying it hugely here, but the way chess engines work is, from any position that you give them, they will simulate something like a million games or 10 million games and they'll say, hey, out of simulating these 10 million games, this move leads most often to a victory or to a draw or to the least worst position. So it's just playing the probabilities. It's saying, hey, between the available moves, this one most often leads to a victory or to a draw or whatever the best outcome, all right. Well, how are you going to do that in Kriegspiel when you don't know where your opponent's pieces are, you don't know what pieces have been captured, and the moves that don't make sense, like weird bishop moves or weird rook moves, which make absolutely no sense, make perfect sense in Kriegswil because you're trying to get information about the battlefield.
Austin Caroe:Okay, so I went and did a bunch of research and I found this guy, Paolo Siancarini, who's at the University of Bologna, who probably has created the best Kriegswil programs, and it turns out that you can actually build a pretty good chess engine for Kriegspiel. But here's what's interesting about it In his paper he has three different approaches. The approach that turned out to be the best approach for the computer was not to simulate the game all the way to the end, was not to even try to guess where all the pieces was. It was just saying what is the next right move, for all the pieces was. It was just saying what is the next right move like what is the next move?
Austin Caroe:That's not gonna, that's not gonna cause catastrophe for me, or that's gonna protect my pieces which remind me a lot of you know, dave snowden has that. A lot in complexity and uncertainty do the next right thing? Um, and so the computer is essentially mimicking what it's trying to mimic what humans do under uncertainty. But it turns out that even the best creeksville engines can't beat the best humans at creeksville.
Ponch Rivera:Yeah, not yet, so I want to at least I want to pack this some more because you brought up this note and complicated and complex. When you so, we'll I'll uh, bring up some manny duke in here as well. So she wrote a book, several books actually. One of the things she talks about is the difference between, you know, complicated and complex, if you will. So when you're playing a game of chess, it contains no hidden pieces. Both players can see all the pieces all the time. They can't randomly appear or disappear.
Ponch Rivera:Outcomes correlate more tightly with decision quality. So if you're a subject matter you know, based on your expertise, so that outcome is very connected to the decision qualities. Right there, it's a well defined form of computation. And then the next thing is I think Kriegsfield, the way you're playing at chess is probably more like some people talk about Go I like poker as another analogy. But you have valuable information remains hidden, right, it's hidden. You have incomplete information and you're making decisions under conditions of uncertainty over time, right, so this is important.
Ponch Rivera:Now we talk about developing a strategy in a complex environment. Information and you're making decisions under conditions of uncertainty over time, right, so this is important. Now we talk about developing a strategy in a complex environment. It's an adaptive strategy, meaning it's changing based off the landscape. And that map that you're building, or that chessboard that you're building in front of you, has incomplete information, right. You don't know what piece is where. You just know that there's something in a spot, potentially, where you don't know. And this is that difference between the complicated and complex and what we're.
Ponch Rivera:I think the best thing you can take away from this conversation, if you're a business leader, is your strategy has to build with two things build around a map that you you know the map is not the terrain. You have to build a map of the external environment, and you do that from multiple perspectives, right. In this case, the game you're playing has one perspective. That's in perspective. You have to build a map of the external environment, and you do that from multiple perspectives, right. In this case, the game you're playing has one perspective and that's the perspective of the chess player, right? Or the creature-fueled chess player. The next thing you have to do. Your strategy is not a five-year strategy. It is an adaptive strategy based off information that's coming in and you have to build your next move, your next right move, based off the information you have right. So it goes back to that idea of probe sense respond. In the complex domain you probe, which you said earlier, is done through illegal moves, if I understand it correctly. Sometimes that's right.
Austin Caroe:Yeah, yeah, and we'll come back to this. But, yes, keep going. Yes, exactly right.
Ponch Rivera:So I think this is why this is very important in this whole conversation about no way out the world of reorientation, strategy, mapping, creating a mental model. When we do our simulations for teamwork, we want them to build a mental model, or a shared mental model, and I know some people don't like that term. Build a fucking map. That's what we're trying to ask you to do. Build a common map that you have, a common operational picture that you can all work on together and then you execute that over time. In industry, in businesses, they do not do this, they do not map, they refuse to map, and they hire McKinsey, they hire somebody in to give them a five-year plan or a five-year, 10-year strategy. That is just a bunch of word, a bunch of mumbo jumbo. This is the most important thing you should take away from this conversation up to this point is you have to build a map of the external environment, otherwise you're going to get your ass kicked. And that all maps are wrong.
Austin Caroe:Right, all maps are wrong, some are useful Exactly and see, and that's the see. That's the very most. One of the most important things in Creek Spill is when you're building your map, you are constantly adjusting it because you know it's wrong, it can't possibly be right, and so you're always updating where you think your opponent's pieces are based on new information. And one of the things that is a little bit different from Kriegspiel and you can actually remedy this but one of the things that's different from Kriegspiel, which keeps it technically from being chaotic is that it's not, it's not sensitive to, it's not that sensitive to initial conditions. I mean, I guess it kind of is. Well, actually, I guess it is, um, because you know exactly where your opponent's pieces are to start.
Austin Caroe:But what would do you know what? Uh, uh, have you heard of? Uh, fisher random chess or chess? I think it's called chess, maybe chess 360, is that what they call it? Yeah, I imagine you start with an unknown starting point, so the the pieces are arranged on the back row. The pieces are arranged randomly, I think it's called maybe Chess 360.
Ponch Rivera:Is that what they call it?
Austin Caroe:I imagine you start with an unknown starting point. So the pieces are arranged on the back row, the pieces are arranged randomly. So if you were to come by, if you really wanted to say, but kind of, the point of what I was saying about Kriegspiel is, people love to talk about AI and the importance of AI, and, yes, ai is going to be very important, but AI doesn't actually know the future man. Until you can show me that a computer can consistently beat the best humans at Kriegsville chess consistently and with the level of dominance that they have in regular chess, I'm not going to buy into AI dominance. Ai is our overlord type arguments. I think that AI and humans are going to be working together where we both do the things that we're good at.
Austin Caroe:And one of the thinkers I really like, whose book I have several books I have here is Gerd Gigerenzer, who's talked a lot about human intuition versus big data and how simple models that humans can use in many cases outperform complex models that require big data. So anyway, that's kind of the big takeaway. But if you really wanted to maximize uncertainty in Creekspiel, you'd play Creekspiel Fisher Random Chess, where the starting pieces are the back row, is completely different, so you don't even know where the starting pieces are. So that would be really neat. But I love what you said about business leaders and building a map of the environment, knowing that that map is wrong, but it's something that you can constantly adjust off of.
Ponch Rivera:Yeah, and your point about the AI being insufficient or not having the interoceptive or intuition or finger-spitzing of fuel that humans have is critical. So my view is and going back to the Kenevan framework, in a complex domain, that's really a good domain for humans. I mean, if you think about what's happening with AI right now, large language models probably are in the clear domain. Maybe the agentic AI is going to be a little bit in the complicated domain. Humans still do quite well there, but in the complex domain which you just pointed out, humans will continue to I hate to say, dominate, but that's going to be our strength and the reason for that is because we're updating our generative model of the external world, which LLMs cannot do at the moment. Right, and the current AI? When you think about it, it's a linear OODA loop approach. It's the bad OODA loop applied to the clear and complicated domain. It doesn't work in the complex domain.
Ponch Rivera:The only thing that works in the complex domain right now is an active approach to understanding, perception and action, which is really what the OODA loop does. It tells us how living systems defy entropy, and that's what you know when I brought up the connection back to Yanir Bar-Yam and to Nassim Taleb. You know, I think Taleb's writing a book about entropy right now and that whole thing is starting to merge. In fact, in a recent Joe Rogan podcast I think it was Thomas Campbell kind of out there, but he talked about the importance of avoiding entropy, which is exactly what you're trying to do in the complex domain which, when you're playing a game of critical chess is, you're trying to avoid that early demise, right. So I think there's tremendous. I love this conversation because you've given us a nice way to explain to organizations, using the way you play chess, to explain what the actual external world looks like, what they're dealing with. So thank you very much for bringing that up, that's awesome.
Mark McGrath:Yeah, the mapping is important. Like the, I was going to say that the mapping is important and the gaming is important too, because you start to go through scenarios and have those types of discussions and challenging your assumptions, right yeah?
Austin Caroe:So that segue is not, unless you guys have another. I have a good segue into another thing that I've written about. Unless you guys want to continue on this topic, do it. So I love what you said about the map there, because two of the my early essays, which are quite foundational, I think to kind of everything that I've written about Our pair of essays, one called Fredericksburg and one is called Stakeholder of essays one called Fredericksburg and one is called Stakeholder and remind me to bring it back to the map and the importance of maps and mapping the environment. Don't let me forget that part. Okay, so I'll kind of start out with a story.
Austin Caroe:There's a guy named Major Brian Eckhart. In World War II he's a British intelligence officer. They're getting ready to conduct Operation Market Garden where they're going to drop a bunch of paratroopers, essentially behind German lines, and then punch through with armor to link up with those paratroopers. So the paratroopers will seize bridges and then the armor will punch through and link up with them. Well, major Urquhart doesn't have a very good feeling about this operation and he uses some hole to get a special reconnaissance flight over the drop zones and hundreds of pictures come back and he comes through these pictures. And you know, this is this is something ai would have been great at. Hey, ai go through these pictures and find tanks for me, you know. But so he has to spend hours going through these, uh, these grainy black and white photos. But he finds five pictures which definitively show that there are Panzers on the drop zone. And he jumps in his Jeep, he runs to the headquarters where General Browning, the commander, is located, and he says Sir, there are Panzers on the drop zone. We have to stop, we have to cancel the operation. And General Browning looks through the pictures and he says well, I wouldn't trouble myself with these, they're probably not serviceable anyway. And so he was smoking the copium. But why did he do that? Why was General Browning so against this idea that there might be panzers on the drop zone that the entire operation has to be changed? Well, because that unit, the army at that time, was suffering from something I called the objective Fredericksburg problem, which is when you confuse the plan, the making of a plan, with what the plan is actually supposed to accomplish.
Austin Caroe:It became the case that the plan, operation Market Garden, was more important than the objectives the plan was supposed to achieve. They had to protect that plan. They had to keep it safe. They had to set up defenses around it. They had to repel invaders. They had to advance that plan forward, to take more terrain with just the plan. And other people knew this too. Eisenhower knew of that intelligence.
Austin Caroe:They tried to convince Monty not to do the operation. And they went ahead and did it anyway. And what did they do with Major Brian Urquhart? Well, they sent a psychiatric doctor to him and they said clearly, you're suffering from too much stress and go home. And he begged. He was like no, no, no, no, you have to. Just let me go. Like I'll go, I'll just send me. Like this isn't fair. They didn't even give the intelligence. They hit the intelligence from the guys, from the paratroopers. They didn't even know what they were jumping into. It wasn't even like hey, maybe there might be some tanks.
Austin Caroe:And again, because they had to protect the plan, the plan had to be protected. Yeah, and so that's something I call the objective problem. And you see this in army units and other units all the time, where you spend all this time and energy making a plan. There's so much staff work and there's so many powerpoint slides and there's excel spreadsheets and some people do gantt charts, and there's all this effort that goes into making the plan. Somebody, you know, you get the end of the planning process and somebody points out well, hey, if the enemy just just does this very simple and obvious thing, then the whole plan is going to fall apart. And then what does everybody do? Well, here's 10 reasons why they won't do that.
Ponch Rivera:So here's something for you. What's happening there is within a system, within a planning system, includes all kinds of agents in there. They're trying to minimize free energy, expected free energy, all right. So expected free energy is internal to the system and it's in the planning process. One way to minimize that is to hide valuable information, suppress it, right, and that's exactly what you're doing. And to your point about the desired outcome, when you're trying to minimize variational free energy, when your actions actually interact with the external world, that's what matters more than anything, right? So you want to make sure you know.
Ponch Rivera:This is why you have red teams, this is why we do red teaming, this is, you know, premortems and all that. This is why psychological safety exists. This is why removing fear in an organization exists. This is why weak signal detection is so important. But even in today's world, ego, the ego of the organization, the ego of the plan, kind of dominates man and that ego needs to be relaxed in order to have greater access to information within the system that says that's out there, Right? So I think there's an interesting connection to what's going on in neuroscience and EFE and VFE. Sorry, mark, go ahead.
Mark McGrath:Yeah, no, I think too, because I've certainly experienced this too. Sorry, mark, go ahead. Yeah, no, I think too, because I've certainly experienced this too. Like when you question a plan and you challenge it, everybody thinks you're nuts, everybody thinks you're not a team player, everybody thinks that you're, in this case, a psychiatric evaluation. It made me think of the book the Psychology of Military Incompetence by Norman Dixon. I don't know if you're familiar with that book.
Austin Caroe:Yep, yeah, I brought a bunch of books we might discuss, but yes, I have that book on my shelf.
Mark McGrath:It's a great book, I guess, when I think of a commander basically shitting on insights from a junior commander because it's inconsistent with the plan. As we know, planning is priceless. The plan is absolutely useless. I mean, we literally just had General Petraeus come on and tell us don't do that, what this guy did to his subordinate. General Petraeus actually told us don't do that. You need to get insights and perspectives from all channels to cover blind spots. And I remember, even in the early 2000s where your PowerPoint became the most important thing in the function of a hella board assault in Hawaii, you know, with your Marines and whatever. None of that mattered. Like man you could have used some animations on that PowerPoint. I mean, the colonel sat there and he was not entertained by your PowerPoint. Nobody wants to talk about, like the actual, what has to happen to the enemy, like what actually?
Ponch Rivera:has to. Yeah, can you change puppy to small dog?
Austin Caroe:Yeah, change change fire to configuration. So, yeah, I think what you said there, ponch, is interesting. I know you guys are all into the free energy and I'm reading through Ocinga's book right now. Mark's a great mentor and he sends me stuff to read all the time, but I'm reading through Ocinga's book right now and I think that I'm sure all that stuff is correct. I have absolutely no doubt that that is correct. The audience that I'm writing for yeah, there, it is right there. I've got my copy actually sitting out there. I was just reading it, so I try to.
Austin Caroe:I think that the conceptual reason why that happens is correct. From in dumb infantryman language, what's happening is everyone's just putting so much energy into the plan, like there's so much time and effort invested into it, that people just don't want to see anything happen to it. They don't want to have to restart everything, even if everybody knows it's wrong. They pretend that it's not, because it's like, well, whatever it's training, or it's this, or I don't have to go on the mission, so whatever it'll, it'll be fine. So the way that I think to get around that and what you guys said is very interesting, because it's basically like, well, just don't, don't do that. You can't just not do it. There are inescapable parts of organizations and how they're structured that it's almost like there's no way out of some of these problems, and so you have to structure some of your processes differently to ensure that these types of things don't happen.
Austin Caroe:And one of the things and bringing it back to the map, one of the ways that I think that many units can overcome the objective Fredericksburg problem is that plans need to be made for whatever echelon you're at. If you're at the battalion echelon, the battalion plan should be made or should emerge through a collaboration between the company commanders and the brigade plan should emerge through the interactions of the battalion commanders. And so let me explain what that looks like, and I call this the stakeholder planning process. Now, I don't want to replace MDMP. The stakeholder planning process is not a replacement for the military decision-making process. You have to have the military decision-making process for a variety of reasons. I know you guys probably completely disagree and you're like throw it out. I know Don Vandergriff is kind of like that. But you have to have it for a variety of reasons.
Austin Caroe:But the most important part, what do you start with when you're doing the stakeholder planning process for a tactical problem is you start with the terrain model. So you model the terrain and you have the G2, the intelligence officer get on the terrain model and say this is what we anticipate, this is what we currently see the enemy doing, this is what we anticipate the enemy is going to do. And then you put the company commanders on the terrain model while the battalion staff is just watching and observing. Maybe they have some ideas. But the battalion commanders say, hey, look, given what the enemy is doing, what about this? What have we tried this? Hey, I'll go down here. What if you went up there? Actually, I think you input, but he has to to what Ponch? To your point, he's got to put his ego aside and just let the company commanders kind of do their thing and gently guide them.
Austin Caroe:By the way, this is how I did my company live fire planning when I was a company commander. Now, part of this just comes to that. I'm just insanely lazy and I don't consider myself a very good tactician and I thought my platoon leaders were quite good. So I told my platoon leaders hey, y'all plan the live fire Like you guys make the tactical plan, not the training element. This was like the tactical plan. You guys make the tactical plan.
Austin Caroe:Here's the terrain model, here's all the things. Just come get me when you're ready. I didn't even watch them, you know, they came, they got me, they briefed me, I made some adjustments, I made some adjustments, they tried again. But if you do this it turns out you don't even have to write down the operations order, you don't have to make slides, you don't have to write anything down. Imagine that, except for maybe some notes, you know, maybe you capture the plan on like two pages, you know, of just kind of the general outline. Or maybe you publish a timeline. You know you publish some tools that people can use, but you're not like you know mission statement. You know this Italian will see.
Ponch Rivera:I want to make a connection here. This is very important for for business leaders. So in the flow system, we put in their value first. You know, customer first, value delivery those that are closest to the customer should be the ones doing the planning process. They know the customer, they know the terrain right. That's that's key there, Not the people in the ivory tower, not the people that are 15 years removed from the tactical side. But that's not what we do in organizations. They flip it around and then they hand the plan off for somebody else to go execute. This is not what you want in your organization. What Austin just described is exactly what you need to do in your organization and, yes, it takes time to do it. Yeah, you have to take people off the line to go do this, but what you get in return is unbelievable. You get high-performing teams right, because in order to be a high-performing team, you need a shared and valued goal, right? So one way to create value for your leaders is to invite them to participate in the planning process. So that's important.
Ponch Rivera:On MDMP, my view on it is it's a good practice. Are there better? Yes, but it's still a good practice, meaning if you have a good practice that's shared across an organization. Go with it right. So again, I just want to make that connection for organizations. They may be hearing that this is only going to be valid for military operations. No, no, no. This is exactly what you need to do in your organization Build a map, invite those that are closest to the customer to do the plan, use red teaming techniques, use an effective planning process, a good planning process For all. I meant you know, for all intents and purposes, use the MDMP. You know you'll get somewhere better and faster.
Austin Caroe:Absolutely so. A couple of things on this. One is, you know, we say this all the time we have this trope of like, well, plans are useless, but planning is everything, because you know, when you plan, you learn. And that's true. It's not that plans are useless, you know. I think they're probably more valuable than that. But the point is, who is doing the learning? If the battalion staff is doing all the planning, then they're doing all the learning.
Austin Caroe:And now, rather than firsthand learning, the company commanders of the next echelon down that receives the plan is now just receiving all that stuff secondhand, with a bunch of shortcuts and truncations and things like that. So you really want the people that are executing to actually do the planning for it, which seems obvious, but we miss that all the time. Another thing is we also mistake this for mission command, where it's like company commander, your mission is to seize bush hill. Now, I'm not going to tell you how to seize bush hill, because I'm executing mission command. But you know you take bush hill however you want, but you have to take bush hill. The my, my, the way I look at it is. Well, why is the company, why doesn't the company commander have a say in what objective he's actually doing. And I would say, if you're, if you're really executing mission command, that company commander is going to get a say in that plan and not a veto. Okay, because if you make the plan and then give it to the company commanders and say, well, do you have any input? Well, now we're just back at the objective Fredericksburg problem, where it's like, well, yeah, hey, sir, attacking Bush Hill is really not a good idea, and it's like, well, actually, it's fine, we'll give you some extra artillery. And you know, go get them Tiger, so they'll just go right around you and they'll overcome your objections.
Austin Caroe:So that's a lot of problems with top-down guidance, bottom-up refinement. That's a lot of the problem there is. Well, you know, everyone hears the top-down guidance, but you're fighting gravity and institutional inertia when you're trying to do bottom-up refinement. And I have another great example of that on D-Day for the obstacle clearance plan, this like super esoteric, but they knew the obstacle clearance plan wasn't going to work and they were so delusional that they were like, well, the bombers, some of the bombs on the beaches will fall short and that'll help clear the obstacles. It was total coke, I mean, it was horrible. So, anyway, if you ever get a chance read.
Austin Caroe:The best book on D-Day is Omaha Beach, a Flawed Victory by, I think, adrian Lewis. It's one of my favorite books, but Stakeholder talks about that my essay, stakeholder, and then. So another key thing with Stakeholder is well, shoot, which way was I going to go with this now? Yeah, so we talked about why we plan and learning. So, anyway, those are kind of the key things. If I think of the other thing, I'll share it, but yeah, those are key points.
Ponch Rivera:Yeah, on the point about planning we talk about planning is continuous, it's fractal, it's an anticipatory decision-making process that helps teams deal with VUCA so you can adapt to an external environment. And I think a lot of people don't understand. You know plans are important. Plans should be developed with maps, with a strategy. Your strategy should be that mental tapestry that changes with the more you learn about the external environment, so it's an emergent thing. And then the planning approach for teams and this is where we get into team science that you need a shared I'll call it a mental model again approach to planning. Mdmp gives us that. Is there a better one out there? The answer is yeah. I believe there are better approaches than MDMP. But if your opponents aren't using them, you know, then you're okay. But that doesn't mean and this is why in the Kenevan framework it's called a good practice, it's never called a best practice. Mdmp is not a best practice. It's a good practice, but I guarantee you the three of us can come up with better planning process that will crush the MDMP right.
Austin Caroe:So that makes it a gooder practice, sure that will crush the MDMP right, so that makes it a gooder practice? Sure, well, it depends on again, and you want to match the tools to the problem you're trying to solve. Mdmp is great if you're trying to resource allocation. In fact, you probably can't find a better. I'm sure you could, but it's hard to find a better tool for resource allocation than MDMP because it's very scientific. We've come up with different ideas. We'll do a lot of research, we'll compare them and we'll figure out which is the best way to go.
Austin Caroe:But I want to go back to one of the things that you said about. Yes, it's time consuming to bring in leaders and things like that. What I found was by constantly bringing in my subordinates to do the planning when we were time constrained or when I had to just make a decision because we didn't have time to go back and do planning. There was an enormous level of trust because they had participated in the planning. They knew that I cared about them and they understood my judgment and how I thought and how I went about making decisions.
Austin Caroe:I had to make a plan. I don't have time to get everybody together. The platoons are all spread out. We've got to do this attack in four hours. I don't have time to bring the platoon leaders in and do this whole thing. Hey, I'm going to sit down and do the best I can. I'm gonna make a plan and I'm putting it out over the radio and we're and then we're rocking, doing things like this. Than just the immediate result that you'll get when you try to accomplish it, you'll get those long-term results of building mutual trust inside of that organization, which again is a key part of mission command is mutual trust.
Ponch Rivera:Austin. I have a question. We have a client that's focused on quality right now. Let me ask you this we have a client that's focused on quality right now. Let me ask you this when you do this type of work, when you bring in those leaders that are closest to the front lines the customers in this case can you talk a little bit about the quality of deliverables? I mean, did you notice anything different by doing it this way?
Austin Caroe:Yeah, I mean so just in terms of output. My OER, my officer evaluation report, says this my company did the best out of all the other companies. So we finished the live fire lane in like five zero minutes and 50 minutes, where other units were taking 90 minutes, two hours, to complete the entire lane. So the output, the immediate like, the results that we achieved in the immediate term by doing this were just unmatched and you can't match that. But when it comes to like quality, are they trying to produce a product? Is it a product or is it a service that they're trying to work on? It's a product.
Ponch Rivera:But I'm curious. I mean, it's kind of hard to match the services that we delivered in the military to higher quality but higher quality decision-making, anything that you saw.
Austin Caroe:So I would say, and one of the things that I've written about, I actually have an essay called Quality which talks about how there's someone named Christopher Alexander, which I don't know if you've talked about him on the podcast before. I know Moose has read him. I can't remember. I don't think we Boyd doesn't have him on the reading, on his reading list, right? It's not his lettering, you know, john.
Mark McGrath:Robb did. It wasn't Boyd, it was John Robb that first turned actually not first turned me on, but one of the things that jumped off the page Because years ago I had studied. I was taking little kids to Disney. I thought to make the most out of this. I really got to try to understand how this place ticks, because it's just unbelievable. And one of the things that Disney had studied was the Garden City movement, and Christopher Alexander wrote two books, the timeless way of building and in a pattern language, and Rob had those on his global. This was years ago, but yeah, those are. Those books are phenomenal, highly readable. Um, totally, yeah, we were. We were talking about that.
Austin Caroe:Maybe I don't know, maybe a few months ago, you and I were talking about this book because I want to learn more about flow. When I was in command, I decided early on, you know, I'm going to put my ego aside and I'm just going to do what feels natural and I'm just going to try to be genuine and authentic. I'm not going to do anything I don't really want to do and I'm not going to do anything because other people have done it, because I think I'm expected to do it. I'm just going to do the things that I think make sense to me and my entire command. I just felt like I was. I had all this. I was very energetic and I was very focused. I was able to do all these things. So a lot of the things that I sort of naturally discovered by accident and just sort of focusing on this idea of just doing the things that felt right. When I look back then I realized, hey, this is a lot. There's a lot of what I did that's inside of this stuff, and one of those was Timeless Way of Building.
Austin Caroe:But in Timeless Way of Building and to give people an idea, christopher Alexander is an architect and one of the things that he was reacting against was modern architecture sort of brutalist architecture and mass-produced things that were mass-produced and things that were sort of put together in factories and then assembled. It wasn't beautiful, it wasn't bringing beauty into the world. He was also against architects making grand plans because they wanted to get their names in architecture magazines. It was all about looking good to their peers, and so what Christopher Alexander did, his idea, was like no, there's something in the process itself which brings about beauty in the world. It's how the building is constructed, in conjunction with the people that will use it in harmony with its environment.
Mark McGrath:The quality without a name. Isn't that what he?
Austin Caroe:calls it.
Mark McGrath:The quality without a name.
Austin Caroe:That is exactly right. That is the quality without a name, and so this book's been very influential in a lot of tech spaces and software design and things like that. But we have to remember that that quality is brought about because of the collaboration. But you're also sometimes you do things just because they feel right, and this is, you know, apple. There's probably a lot of stories with Apple here where I know it doesn't make sense internally. I know that internally it would be more efficient to connect this wire this way or whatever, but it's not aesthetically pleasing. So make it look like this on the inside, where no one's going to see, and that quality just emerges. It's not something that you can build in ahead of time. So kind of to your point, ponch, that's what I would think is. If you want to build something that's of high quality, that's bringing beauty and improving the world, it's in the process that you use to create the thing.
Ponch Rivera:Christopher Alexander's work has been used quite a bit in the agile space and pattern language We've talked about quite a bit and to me, pattern language, when I learned about it it reminded me of the things you learned in aviation of plan brief, execute, debrief and human factors, interaction pieces those repeatable things that build teams. So you're talking about flow. My first experience in taking like heavy project management lessons from MBAs right into military war fighting failed and I recognized this immediately. You know, I was like I knew Gantt charts. I knew these amazing things. I could do all kinds of things. I'm leading a large team in the Air and Space Operations Center and they're all aviators, mostly aviation background, and I'm trying to do this thing, design this amazing scheme of maneuver and all that. And I recognized man, this isn't going to work and I had to fall back on the patterns that I knew and the patterns everybody else knew, which was those contact points and plan brief, execute, debrief, using mission command and using the knowledge that. Hey look, we all know crew resource management, we know how to communicate, we know it's closed loop communication. We know these things, let's execute on that. We got the patterns back in there and that's when I recognized. All the shit that you learn from project management is useless unless you know how to do those things. So those patterns that's where they're getting at.
Ponch Rivera:What I saw in the agile space is they talk about these patterns but they excluded the science of teams. Right, and they go. That's only for the military and we don't need to do that. It'll naturally emerge. Well, self-organization isn't about just letting random shit and things happen. You got to have the patterns in there and team faster Flow within a high-performing team is just that workflows from one person to another. I think it's the number one characteristics of a high-performing team and delivering value. The pattern stuff that I learned from the agile community, from Christopher Alexander, is exactly what we were doing in fighter aviation. It's the team science stuff. It's how do you plan, how do you communicate, how do you execute, how do you create situational awareness, how do you build adaptability, and mission command came into that. So thank you for bringing that up. I haven't, you know, looked back at pattern language in a long time, but that's what the agile community was trying to do and where they failed.
Austin Caroe:They absolutely failed on this and they went with let's just let everybody figure this out on their own, Like, eh, it's not going to work that way, I've seen you ranting against Agile on LinkedIn recently.
Mark McGrath:I said oh I, I'm sorry, go ahead, moose. Oh no, no Ponch.
Ponch Rivera:He was saying how he loves your rants on Agile on LinkedIn. I don't try to rant on it. I've been in the community for a long time. I saw the problem. We created a flow system around. Hey look, it's team science. It's an exactive practice from the complex domain. You borrow from some other place. You take MDMP and you apply it. That may work out for you. You take crew resource management. You apply it, modify it, exact it over. It's that simple. You just look at who's doing great work around the world and go how do they do that? Don't do it the other way. Where you find people that remember in a complex environment, separating decisions from outcomes is important, right. So you can have a great outcome in a complex environment, regardless of how your internal processes are, and what we generally get are people that have those lucky outcomes write books about how fucking awesome they are Right and people.
Austin Caroe:Well, it's like Dave.
Mark McGrath:Dave Snowden always rails against a lean startup for doing that Right, Because it's like well, we're just going to, you know, survivorship bias.
Austin Caroe:We'll just find the winners. I will find we'll find all the things that are common to them and be like these are the things you should do, yeah.
Ponch Rivera:And that goes back to when I think you brought it up early on. Hey, we're going to write a story about the seven leadership lessons from watching I don't know. Pick a stupid movie over the weekend, sure yeah.
Austin Caroe:It's interesting that you.
Mark McGrath:Oh sorry, go ahead, moose. I was going to say just to close the loop on Chris Alexander. I'm sad the report that two years ago, yeah, issue with him, but just didn't. I was reminded of the. Of the books there was three, you know, timeless way of building pattern language and then the oregon experiment, which were all, uh, connected. And then I I remember how beautifully designed these books are, that you could read it in less than an hour. It's a 552 page book but you could read it in less than an hour because he has all the summer, he has all the the, he has all the chapter heads or the titles, the subtitle, everything was compressed in the front, so there were two paths to read it and I thought, boy, what a standard for designing a book. I mean, it's like even in the design of the actual book and we remember it all these years later. So, yeah, definitely on our list.
Austin Caroe:No, it's true. And another book that's kind of written that way is the Systems Bible by John Gall, which is absolutely fabulous book and that's one of the for officers that are progressing in their careers. It's like my number one recommended book for them to read is the Systems Bible, because it's almost like he wrote it about the Army, but obviously he's writing it about any large organization, but it's kind of written that way too, where big laws and important things are written in all caps and inside the book. One of the things that and kind of going back to what Panch was saying about the flow system and how you work with teams and build teamwork and stuff like that One of the essays I wrote was called Causation, which is about these leadership studies that are done by Inc and Google has one and Microsoft did one.
Austin Caroe:That's like we looked at all of our teams and they all share these traits you know they all have. They provide structure and clarity and meaning and their impact and psychological safety and you know all these, all these things. And you know it's funny because if you're, if you're struggling as a leader and you don't really know, like what you're doing, how does this help you? If you're a football coach and someone were to come along and be like well, we've looked at all the best football teams and it turns out they all have really good offense and really good defense.
Ponch Rivera:They play four quarters.
Mark McGrath:Yeah, they've got uniforms and everything.
Austin Caroe:Exactly and it's like well, how does this help me again?
Ponch Rivera:Well, let me point out something. That's how Scrum came about. All right, okay, we looked at this thing and they plan, they brief, they do this thing, they debrief, right, and you're like that's called a team lifecycle and 14 pages, and you got to go through a two-day course to go. All teams have to learn how to plan. It's actually what you put in that matters, right, which they don't teach you.
Austin Caroe:No, what you put in that matters right, which they don't teach you, no, exactly right. And so one of the things, you know, one of the things that inspired my writing was these super fluffy LinkedIn articles about you know, about this type of stuff, and I was like, can I just give people some concrete things, like the stakeholder planning process, like build a terrain model, put the commanders on the terrain model, brief them the plan, all right. Now like, and not exactly, it's not, not super prescriptive, not step-by-step, not, not here's a handbook, but here are some techniques, here's some ways to think about how you can do, how you can accomplish these things. And one of those concepts that I came up with is called fail seeding, which it seems.
Austin Caroe:It's one of these things that all my ideas, I feel like are super boring and banal, until you really start to explore them and unpack them and it's like, ok, maybe there's actually something here. Fail seeding is just failure and succeeding. You put those words together, you get fail seeding. And so, to back up where this idea kind of sparked from, I was at Fort Benning, now called Fort Moore, for the, I guess, the 50th anniversary of the Battle of Aydarang. It must have been the 50th.
Mark McGrath:Yeah, we were soldiers once in Young Battle, that's right.
Austin Caroe:We were soldiers once in Young Battle. So the 1-7 and 2-7 Cav soldiers, the veterans, came and talked to us Super impactful. So how, Moore's guys, Savage and all these other guys get up there and they're like rah, rah, we were the best and we were hand selected and we kicked ass and dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. And everybody remembers those guys because of the movie. We were soldiers once and yet. But if you read the book, there's another battalion in there that everyone's kind of forgotten about and that's the battalion I think it was, because two seven was at was at, uh, LZ Albany.
Mark McGrath:It was the group that was at LZ Albany.
Austin Caroe:Yeah, I think that was one seven cav. That was their sister battalion. Everybody forgets about one seven. So one seven was a hodgepodge. It wasn't hand-selected and trained by Hal Moore. There was a bunch of hodgepodge logistics officers leading infantry platoons. They're on their the swagger of Hal Moore's guys. They don't come across as victorious warriors, they come across as people that are still struggling with this defeat, and just them.
Austin Caroe:The way that they spoke about this was I'm getting emotional just thinking about it. I mean it was terrifying. They were talking about how they're just pinned down. He's a lieutenant, he's a captain, he's pinned down by fire and he like, wow, this is really bad. I hope some lieutenant colonel comes by and tells me what to do. I hope some major comes by and gives me some orders.
Austin Caroe:And these guys just didn't feel empowered to be like start attacking into the ambush, like to start fighting. They're just laying there pinned down because they didn't. They did not feel empowered to do things. They were like someone is going to. They were like someone is going to come and rescue me, someone is going to come and tell me what to do. And right there, as I was sitting, I was like never in my military career. Will someone who works for me be in a position like that and wait for me to come and save them? Period? It's not going to happen and I'll do anything I can to prevent that, because you just can't do that as a leader. You can't do that to your people. That's learned helplessness.
Austin Caroe:And so fast forward maybe a year or two and I'm a company commander and I'm like on day three and my battalion commander's on like day two, and we get an email from the battalion executive officer who was the second in command for the battalion. He sends us an email and he's like hey, the battalion commander, you know, next week or whenever, he's going to come, walk through your motor pool, come look at your vehicles and your containers and stuff like that. So you know, make sure your stuff's squared away All right. Now 99% of army company commanders are going to get an email like that and they're going to immediately start issuing directives and saying here's when the pre-inspection is and this is what I want to see. And da, da, da, da. And they're going to start prioritizing that inspection because they want to look good to that battalion commander.
Austin Caroe:And I said, well, I was like I'm not, I don't want to do that. I'm not going to do that. So I told the XO, I forwarded him the email. I'm like, hey, the battalion commander's coming, just make sure it's all squared away and if there's any questions I can help you. Like I know exactly what to do. I know exactly what it's supposed to look like. So if you need help you can come to me. But like this is on you, all right.
Austin Caroe:Well, the battalion commander comes down. I didn't even check, I didn't do a pre-inspection, I didn't do anything. And I could tell the XO was brand new, going to go very well, but I was fine. I was like you know what, whatever we screw it up, we screw it up.
Austin Caroe:Battalion commander comes down, the vehicles don't work, we have no paperwork for anything, we can't even open the containers because no one has the keys and it's just like a disaster. It's as bad as you could possibly. It could not possibly have gotten worse. So the battalion commander just looks at me and is like Captain Carew, just looks at me and is like Captain Corot, this inspection was an abomination. You fail and I'm very disappointed. You guys need to do better.
Austin Caroe:And I was kind of happy and I was like again, I felt like I was in flow, I felt like I was kind of on drugs and I was like, yes, sir, I understand, we'll do better next time. I'm sorry, we did not do so well. And I saw the second in command, the XO, just out of the corner of my eye. His mouth just drops open because what commander, confidently, is like well, sorry, but we'll do better next time. And sorry, I know, I'm going on and on here my XO comes into my office tears in his eyes and he's just like sir, I'm so sorry I let you down. And I was like hey, buddy, it's fine. We're a light infantry company. We're not deploying anytime soon. Our vehicles aren't pacing items.
Austin Caroe:Here's what you need to understand. I'm not out here trying to save you. I'm not out here trying to save you. If I give you something to do, if you need help, I'm always here to help you. Whatever help you need, I'll give you help. I'll give you coaching, I'll give you advice, you something. It's on you, man. If the company fails because of the things you did or didn't do, it's on you. We're in this together.
Austin Caroe:Ultimately, I'll take responsibility. I took responsibility for the failure on that inspection, but if we fail, it's because of you. I did that with everybody on everything, basically, where I was just like, hey guys, it's on you, I'm not coming to save you, I don't care if we look bad as an organization, I'm not going to save you. If we look bad as an organization, I'm not going to save you. And that, maybe more than anything, empowered my leaders to act, to do the things that they knew were right and to not lean on me to come and rescue them, which I see all the time in the military. When you have a strong, confident commander, they will prevent their organizations from failing because they are afraid that they personally will look bad, and so they will intervene and they will hobble their organizations because they don't empower their people, because they're afraid to fail.
Mark McGrath:Yeah, totally makes sense to me. It goes back to the lessons of Norman Dixon and the psychology of military incompetence. I wish a lot of those things you're describing I get it. I keep thinking back to that book and I always say I wish I would have been given that book as a midshipman and naval rotc, that that should be required reading for incoming officers, to read that book and understand it like, like no exaggeration. And what's funny is that book was written in 1976 and I had asked one of boyd's acolytes I'd asked gi wilson about it if, if boyd had ever discussed that book because you know it was contemporary to him he, him, he would have had access to it and he said he remembered Boyd talking about it, although it's not on the bibliography of the things that are in the archives.
Mark McGrath:But as you read it, though you would say I'm sure Boyd read this book, because he addressed everything in it on the things that have negative influences on a commander's point. And then, if you recall Norman Dixon, he was a foot soldier in World War II. I mean, he'd been down the business end before he had gone in to study psychology and get all his professional training, but he had lived this firsthand as a foot soldier. Sure, now what's interesting about that book as a foot soldier?
Austin Caroe:Sure, now what's interesting about that book, and maybe why Boyd didn't talk about it so much is. The Freudian analysis is probably wrong in most of the cases, although the description of the pathologies is correct.
Mark McGrath:The Freudian analysis of. There's like 14 of them, you know.
Austin Caroe:That's right.
Mark McGrath:Yeah.
Austin Caroe:The diagnosis of like, he accurately identifies problems, but when he's like well, you see, it's the british boarding school background that put these men on, or put these little boys on. You know strict, you know schedules for going to the bathroom, you know they made them super constipated and so this attack to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of soldiers was really a psychological release related to constipation. It's like okay, maybe, maybe not. There was a, there was a lot. Yeah, there was a. There's a lot of stuff like that in that book. And so I think and I think he accurately describes the, the authoritarian personality traits, but I don't know if he really gets to the root cause of a lot of them.
Mark McGrath:Huh, all right, let's close with this. Your most shared article has a very catchy name Laziness, oh laziness.
Austin Caroe:Yeah, I mean this is something that I really like to talk about. For some reason, this one you know this was kind of almost a throwaway one for me when I was writing it, but you know I've already kind of talked a little bit of how I'm personally like quite lazy, and there's a. There's a quote that gets thrown around a lot from Kurt von Hammerstein where he's like I divide my officers into you know what is it like? Lazy and intelligent, proactive and intelligent, lazy and stupid, proactive and stupid. And he basically is like well, the people who are, you know, the lazy and stupid, that's like 80% of the army, so that's most soldiers there's. You know, people who are intelligent and very proactive, put them on the general staff. They're going to do great, but people who are lazy and lazy and intelligent, those are the people that need to be at the highest levels of command and people. This is a pretty common thing.
Austin Caroe:People talk about this a lot, but when you really look into it, like why is laziness so? Why is that? You know, why is that the case? And so the essay is really an exploration of why is it that laziness is important and is it always important? And so there's a lot we could go into, but basically what it comes down to is laziness is about preventing harm at scale. The higher you go up in the chain of command or the larger your network, the bigger the thing that you're working with, the more consequential your decisions are, the less you should be doing. The less you should be doing Because every single thing that you do is going to have huge ripple effects, second and third order effects. And I give the example in the essay of you know a two-star general, let's say he's in charge of an army post and traffic accidents have increased dramatically recently and he's like well, this is unacceptable, we can't have all these traffic accidents.
Austin Caroe:You know staff go and tell me what to do and they say well, we really think we should have a safety stand down day. Well, they do the safety stand down day and that has all these. You know, training gets canceled. I tell a story about private snuffy. His leave gets canceled so he can't go propose to his girlfriend that he was going to do. So you know, he gets, he starts drinking and there's all these effects because we, we did everything to do the safety stand down day and um, and that's just what the problem is traffic accidents actually go down after the safety stand down day, and so this tricks everyone to the thinking well, safety stand down days make accidents go down, so we should do this once a quarter. And so it's just this huge whiplash effect where it's like, well, no, the safety stand on day didn't have anything to do with it.
Austin Caroe:Traffic accidents was probably just random fluctuation or something to do with traffic patterns or weather. It's all the different things that could have caused the spike. I mean, it's just regression to the mean. But we get confused and say, well, this thing that we did cause this other thing. Most things are very overdetermined, they don't have one or two causes, and so we get tricked because we do one thing and then we get a result. The result is good, and so we think that what we did is what caused that. And I would challenge that and say that that's not always the case.
Austin Caroe:When you're lazy, you're looking not to do things but to undo things. You're like well, can we just not do this meeting? You know, one of the things that and this is sacrilegious. So this is, you know, just between, just between us is when I was a company commander, I didn't have a training meeting, which is, again, that won't mean anything to people that aren't in the army. But not having a training meeting as a company commander, like purposely being like I'm not doing that, um is is basically going into church, and being like, uh, that is basically going into church and being like you know, jesus wasn't crucified or something like that Completely sacrilegious. And I'm not saying tall company commanders don't have a training meeting, I'm just saying it wasn't. I didn't need one because I was lazy and I was like I don't want to do meetings. I hate meetings. They're dumb, and when you look to undo things or not do things, you're not looking for changes.
Austin Caroe:You're looking for changes in the environment, but you don't want to change the environment for the most part, or you want it to improve. So you, instead of adding something, you can just take something away, and if you don't get a degradation, not necessarily you see an improvement, but if things don't get worse, then it's probably fine, and so you can just like sort. It's like jenga, right, where you slowly just take out one thing at a time and be like well, can I just not do that? And I do this all the time on staff work, where you know, when I was a liaison, there was this huge long email that they wanted me to write, but I knew no one read it, so I just stopped sending it. No one ever said anything and so and no one ever used that information for anything Like it wasn't nested with anything, so I just stopped, and so that's kind of what laziness is about.
Austin Caroe:It's about do less and build excess capacity, and I have a whole nother essay about the importance of building excess capacity and why, when it feels like you're wasting manpower, you're not. There's a whole great story from the mythical man month. I'm guessing you're familiar with that. Yeah, oh, yeah, yep. So anyway, yeah, that's. That's what laziness is.
Ponch Rivera:There's a couple other connections here. Uh, daniel kahneman writes about. Laziness is built deep into our nature. You know we talk about two percent of our body weight burn and twenty percent of our energy we take. You also look at zips law uh, the principle of least effort. So if you ever look into the, the power laws, you'll, you'll see the same thing in there. Here it's it's natural. You get into system one and system two. System two takes more energy, so it's easier just to use heuristics and just make shit up and go than it is to slow down. And this goes back to what we were talking about with bringing people off the line to slow down a little bit. That's actually what you're trying to do is build up, focus on system two thinking and bring it back into system one over the long run. But yeah, I'm with you on all this stuff. It's again laziness is. By the way, that image you have on your laziness article cracked me up. Man. Yeah, that's a good one.
Mark McGrath:That's what every Marine is thinking. Where'd you find that anyway?
Austin Caroe:I just, you know Googled, you know army lazy, or you know sleeping.
Mark McGrath:There you go. I really like that.
Austin Caroe:So, yeah, there's a couple funny there have left. We've been going for a while, almost an hour and a half, yeah I got a punch right here yeah, we're gonna put it well.
Mark McGrath:Yeah, we'll put a pin in it and we'll uh, we'll call it a day. We're gonna send everybody to the distro which is phenomenal, and they can read for themselves some of the amazing things that you've written. And then I was gonna say thanks for uh, thanks for coming on. I'm. I guess the next, maybe the next time we get, you can give us your debrief of the Osinga book.
Austin Caroe:Yeah, yeah, for sure, yeah, no. Thank you so much for having me on. People can check out the distrosubstackcom. I also have a YouTube channel where I have some videos. I've got a whole thing about Ranger School on there, a bunch of different videos covering Darby phase. I'd like to do more work, obviously, but you know, but I've got a day job so I can only do so much. But thank you so much for having me on.
Mark McGrath:And we want to remind everybody about that day job that your views are your views. The views that you share with us are yours and yours alone, not that of the United States. Exactly right, all right, thanks, austin. Thanks, guys.
