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
Boyd's Real OODA Loop: Deconstructing TEoWL with Chet Richards
John Boyd's OODA loop is widely misunderstood. In this illuminating conversation with Chet Richards – a close colleague of Boyd who received the original OODA loop sketch in the mail – we explore what Boyd actually meant when he created this powerful framework.
Chet reveals that Boyd's sketch in "The Essence of Winning and Losing" is the only official illustration of the OODA loop, completed shortly before his death. Far from the simplified circular process many embrace, Boyd's authentic diagram shows a complex system centered on orientation – the repository of genetic heritage, cultural traditions, previous experiences, analysis/synthesis capabilities, and new information processing.
We explore the critical concept of "Implicit Guidance and Control" – the pathway that allows skilled individuals and teams to bypass conscious decision-making. This explains how elite performers achieve flow states, responding intuitively to complex situations. As Chet explains, this capability develops through deliberate practice under increasingly challenging conditions, whether in military operations, athletic competition, or business environments.
The conversation explores how high-performing teams build collective orientation through shared experiences, developing the "implicit repertoire" necessary for coordinated action without explicit communication. This process creates organizations that appear to function as unified organisms when viewed from above – capable of rapid adaptation and overwhelming opponents stuck in linear thinking patterns.
Discover why Boyd's work remains profoundly relevant today, mirroring contemporary findings in neuroscience about predictive processing and the brain's energy-efficient approach to handling complexity. Whether you're leading a team, developing strategy, or seeking personal performance improvement, this exploration of Boyd's authentic thinking will transform how you approach competitive advantage in uncertain environments.
NWO Intro with Boyd
March 25, 2025
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Nice. All right, let's get airborne on talking about the essence of winning and losing. There's a lot of key points that you brought up in the last couple of weeks. On Slightly East of New, we have the presentation. We'll definitely put that on the link of the show notes and all that, but I think there's some critical aspects that we need to look at. One thing that I want to start off with was you talked about information and energy, kind of like a currency that flows through the OODA loop. I want to get your thoughts on why you chose information and energy potentially as that currency.
Chet Richards:Well, those are two that Boyd used. Of course he was talking about entropy. He talks about Shannon's theory of information and, of course, the standard interpretation of entropy as energy that's there but not available for doing work. And so what flows through the OODA loop? If you look essentially, you think, well, it's just all information, but that's fine until you hit the outside world. Then you hit action, think, well, it's just all information, but that's fine until you hit the outside world.
Chet Richards:Then you hit action and uh, and that's why you can't interpret the, the oodle loop, uh, uh, you know purely as it, as an internal, you know something going on inside your brain because it's got that action and also the observe, uh, function, the uh, so it had, so that kind of flops over to the outside world. So you say, well, what about orientation? When you look at Boyd's definition of orientation many-sided, implicit, cross-referencing process, projection, empathy, correlation and rejection then you start to say, well, what does he mean by projection? And it turns out what he basically means is trying stuff and seeing what's happening, or it's making predictions, trying them out and then comparing that to what actually you know what actually goes on.
Chet Richards:Sometimes you're predicting the effects of your own action, which which is, you know the main use for, but other times you may just be. You're predicting, gee, I think I, I wonder what's going to happen next. Yeah, now, as you know, boy doesn't like anything passive. So, uh, if he says, well, if you're going to wonder what he's going to do next, probe him and test him a little bit while you're at it, and that way you can better interpret what it is that he's doing Otherwise, if you're not taking the initiative in this, then it's always possible for you to be deceived. You don't know what he's feeding you, what he wants you to see, so that you'll predict and carry out actions that he wants you to carry out.
Ponch Rivera:Well, Chet, let's go through the brief. If you don't mind, We'll put it up on the screen. You kind of walk us through it. We'll have a conversation about it. Can we have one?
Mark McGrath:more bottom line up front.
Ponch Rivera:Sure.
Mark McGrath:And this is imperative for the bad Boyd crowd. This is the only place where Boyd illustrated the OODA loop.
Chet Richards:Yes, the only one, Absolutely. Word Boyd illustrated the OODA loop. Yes, the only one, absolutely. Yeah, I remember the sketch that showed up in the mail one day, sitting at Lockheed minding my own business. Well, what John would do is he'd call you real quick and then hang up, and then what you'd call him, it's Lockheed's dive, it just gets tacked on to the cost of the F-22.
Ponch Rivera:I don't think many of our listeners understand what you just said about having somebody call you and you calling them back.
Mark McGrath:Yeah, Anybody below the age of 40.
Chet Richards:They just don't understand. It costs money to make long-distance phone calls back in the good old days, and Boyd didn't have a lot of it being a retired colonel about his only source of income. And so if he could offload some of those costs and since we were using a lot of that stuff in the work I was doing for Lockheed, I figured well, it's got to be reasonable. My boss went along with it, so that's the way it is. I don't know how Lockheed accounted for it. Nobody ever said anything, so that was that.
Mark McGrath:There you go.
Chet Richards:Okay, uh, the question is that people doing a lot of stuff out there with oodle loops and, and all in all, I think that's good, uh, they, with the exception of one guy, they, they tend to take what boyd made, uh boyd, and make it even more complex. But uh, uh, you know, be that as it, you know to account for things that they know, that they see. And so I thought it might be useful to everybody to go back to the beginning and say I wonder, what did the OODA loop come about? What problem was it supposed to be solving?
Chet Richards:And another point which I didn't bring out in this briefing but I do plan to address somewhere is and why, at this stage of his life, did Boyd feel impelled to actually draw the Oodlewook sketch? Why did he? He went all these years without having a sketch of the Oodlewook and I know, for a long time he just, you know, you know he talked about that circular sort of thing and I've asked Chuck Spinney about this and Chuck said well, I tried to discourage him actually from drawing it because I knew whatever he drew would take on some kind of dogmatic flavors and people will be putting it up on the heads-up display.
Chet Richards:I said I don't know, I don't think that, but anyway, that is, the people would start to forget the sketch part on the end and say this is the OODA loop. Fortunately I don't think that's happened. People are continuing to experiment, continue to work and play with it and, I think, do the kind of things that Boyd would probably be doing if he were here. But I think two things happened that impelled it. The first is he was really in the late 1980s, starting about 87, 88 or so. He was getting very heavy into this japanese stuff. You know, he had been sun sun tzu ever since the very beginning, uh, but after he finished patterns of conflict, he ran across the japanese art of war by thomas cleary, um, which which introduced him to a whole bunch of different uh different stuff, different uh people from primarily from the samurai period. So he was familiar with miyamoto musashi, of course, from book of five rings. But, uh, there were several other uh people in there that clary went into and a great detail, zen master takuan, for example, yagyu muninori, uh, just to name a couple, and people that are into this sort of thing will know these names and people that are not, they're just people from the people from the early to mid-1600s, the height of the samurai period in Japan, and they were emphasizing over and, over and over again that actions just have to flow. And they don't of course use the term orientation, but that's clearly what they were talking about. Based on your previous experience and your training and all this kind of good stuff, there wasn't enough time, in the kind of combat they were doing, to stop and explicitly think you know, as Rumsfeld said, you fight with the army that you have. Of course he was responsible for the army that we had. He was second death at the time, but we won't go into that Anyway. So that got him thinking more and more.
Chet Richards:Now he had, about that time 1987, started to go much more into implicit. Of course a lot of that was what he got from the Germans and he actually talked about emphasized, implicit over explicit to an advantage and in time and that sort of thing. And he was realizing it's really hard to do with the circular, the circular sort of process. It's. It's actions just don't flow from anything in that process. It's, you know, you know they move in in discrete chunks, uh, and so, uh, I think that kind of got his mind going. Then he did conceptual spiral where he said well, it's clear that there are, there is some circular stuff going on.
Chet Richards:And in conceptual spiral he comes at practice of science and the practice of of a technology where you try things out, you and you learn from the results and you have to be very explicit. Particularly in the practice of science you have to have a testable hypothesis and uh, it's, it's got a academic scrutiny and you know, writing hypothesis is a is a real challenge. Uh, because it's written in the english language and things can be interpreted various different ways. And a lot of the criticism of almost any scientific paper goes back into how they set up their experiments. Almost almost nobody argues.
Chet Richards:You know, once you get it set up, how you and how you do the math. That's pretty straightforward and you come up with p value and if it's less than 0.05 or statistical kind of stuff, um, but um and that was fine. But again, that's not. And thinking back, that's not, that's not how you do conflict in real time against a thinking opponent. There's just not enough time for it. It's not to say that you don't, as you're doing this stuff, and even in sword fighting, and even Boyd, as he was doing his airplane stuff. As he was doing it, he was learning from it, but it was all implicit, it was out of going past the prefrontal cortex back and somewhere in the rest of his brain to be thought about.
Ponch Rivera:Be thought about later when, uh, you had a little more time, people weren't shooting at him so I was wondering if you could kind of take us through implicit guidance control through your world of of yoga, um, a practice, uh, and kind of step away from conflict now, because I think a lot of people look at conflict and go I want to stay away from this. Can you give us a practical application of implicit guidance control through your work in yoga?
Chet Richards:It turns out that I cannot, no, and the reason is very interesting.
Chet Richards:The word implicit implies groups. You don't need to be implicit with yourself. The opposite of implicit is explicit. Unless you talk to yourself a lot, you write down notes for yourself and look them up virtually. When we're talking about people, you're typically using the term intuitive. It's kind of tense.
Chet Richards:In fact Boyd talked about that. He said if you think about groups as being organisms if they work together long enough, train together, fight together, live together, they sort of if you look down from the top, it's sort of beginning to look like an organism now. And he said if you think about um, uh, you know, an organism that has einheit, you know, has this kind of thing to an outside observer, it would look like that the organism itself has finger spits in your fool. In other words, it looks like the organism is just responding intuitively, uh, when of course there's actually a lot of stuff going on between people and all that so. But he used the term implicit guidance and control and I think in that oodle loop he never really decided whether it was for people or for groups. So what goes on inside the, the orientation box, uh, is pretty much individual stuff and you include genetic heritage in there, unless you want to get yourself in some real trouble. Nowadays, uh, it's, it's all, it's kind of all individual, um, and so that gets into the intuitive. You know, make intuitive within ourselves. Right, there is talking about individual, those many practices.
Chet Richards:So you go back to yoga for that, or or or any skill that you learn when you first start doing it. You know it's, it's, it's very rough, uh, you have to stop and think and you try things. You fall over a lot, you hurt yourself sometimes because you go down too deep. But once you get, once you get past that point to where the, the mechanics of it, uh, are, are, are imprinted on you in your quote, a muscle memory, as you say, so you can go into a position. You know, know how far down to go you can.
Chet Richards:You can use your breath to feel sort of feel the energy, um, uh, as you're. Uh, for example, if you're in in warrior pose, those are, those are pretty uh, intensive poses. You have your warrior two, you have your arms out, you're imagining energy coming up from your core and flowing out your arms and as you exhale, then you're bending your knees a little bit more, you're opening a groin area a little more and you're sinking down. Just something, you're not pushing yourself and it's so. It's that ability to to do that. You go through that cycle of breathe and extend and exhale and relax and go down and it's uh, it's that qi qing sort of stuff all going on and that's that's kind of what you, that's what distinguishes yoga from yeah calisthenics.
Ponch Rivera:But the practice, the deliberate practice of doing those things builds your intuition, your implicit guidance, control your autonomic response, your skills. That's the idea?
Chet Richards:yes, and it's on various different levels. First you have to have the response. Then you've got to have it wired into your orientation so that in this situation that response is is you know what gets offered up? I say I hate to say triggered, because then it sounds like a, a reflex, and reflexes exist. But that's not what we're talking about here, because your brain is actively engaged. It's sort of like all of a sudden your brain knows what to do and you do it. You're, you're watching your proponents reacting, what you're doing, so you sort of know what to do on the next time and you're learning from your opponent so that if it gets that, you don't try the same thing again, sort of sort of thing. Which is how you can tell it's not reflex, because you should never, you know, do the same maneuver twice in a row, unless it's part of a deception, sort of course. With deception you can do anything that deceives anything at all, if you can figure out what that is. So what boyd said is that this implicit repertoire now we talk about implicit, now you have to he kind of blurs the thing.
Chet Richards:For a long time I thought he didn't know the difference between implicit and intuitive. But, as many people pointed out, he was very, very, very, very careful with words, and so I think when he gets into this area here, he's talking about teams, organizations, groups, groups of people, because that's really what patterns of conflict is all about. You we say einheit is fundamental. You know that. But if you're just talking about an individual unless you're schizophrenic and you have einheit among your various personalities, it doesn't make any sense. I'm being facetious here, but you know what I mean. But among individuals, that unity, that one, there's that mutual trust, common sense of shared purpose, that sort of thing, ability to read minds, as the Marine Corps talks about. It is fundamental before you go on to anything else, and so go ahead, so I want to try something here.
Ponch Rivera:As we're talking about organizations and teams and going back to some of the practices you brought up from yoga. The idea here is, in order to build a team or teaming skills, the process of teamwork you have to learn well is we actually deliberately train people how to work together as a team? And this way, when the team operates their OODA loop, it bypasses the decision-making, the hypothesis on how to work together as a team. So think about non-technical skills, is they're kind of inherent within the individual and collectively, the team becomes a self-organization or self-organizing entity that emerges into something that's greater than the sum of its parts.
Ponch Rivera:Absolutely Right, and this is important for our listeners out there, when we talk about building teaming skills, within your team's OODA loop or your team of teams multiple OODA loops or your organizational OODA loops, you have to focus on developing implicit guidance, control or that implicit repertoire of how to work together as a team. This is fundamental to what all high-performing teams do. They do this quite well and I'm using this as an opportunity because I think this is important when we try to communicate this as an organization, as a team. That's what we're trying to do At the individual level. We're looking at intuition, autonomic response, mental models there's many ways to call it muscle memory, all these other things.
Ponch Rivera:We're trying to bypass and I'm going to go back to something you brought up earlier about flow and prediction we're trying to bypass the higher energy approach to dealing with the external world, which is going through the pathway that goes from orient to decide on through act or back through observation. Those are predictions, by the way, most of the predictions are actions.
Ponch Rivera:So if you can bypass that, you now have access to novelty in the external world. Why is that? And we talked about this with Chet and others before using the brain and I don't like using the OODA loop as a brain, by the way, but using that as an analogy 2% of our body weight is burning 20% of our energy right, or 25% of our energy. That's a very expensive organ, so we need to reduce the energy spend by building these skills up, and that allows us to get into a flow state. A flow state is really about risk and novelty being present.
Ponch Rivera:Going back to yoga and the things that you know, so it's not what Chet believe is saying is you can apply this to both the organization, the team level, the organizational level or a cell. Just remember that the words mean things as we do that Right, and so don't you know? For the academics out there that get upset when we talk about the connection to the free energy principle and predictive processing and Bayesian inference yeah, it's all in there. However, this simple sketch that's in the essence of winning and losing is an abstraction of how, in my view, all living systems perceive, sense, act, plan, adapt and learn, and if you get this, you can build an organization, you can build these amazing skills that allow you to achieve a flow state, whether it's in yoga whether it's in team sports.
Chet Richards:We're going through March Madness right now. You're going to see a lot of things. Exactly, I was going to say basketball and soccer are two wonderful examples of it.
Ponch Rivera:Yeah, so, chad. I just want to thank you for that. Can you build on that some more or any more input?
Chet Richards:on that. Boyd talks a little bit about that in organic design, yeah, where he talks about you build this uh state that you were just talking about by, by experience of working together in your team in situations of more and more and more complexity, more and more threat. So you think about, you know kind of, your first days. I don't know um, I was, you know I went through army, rotc and you know they'd get us out, we'd do patrolling and it was so funny. You know the first few that we did. I mean Girl Scout troop could have easily wiped us out. But after a while you learn to read each other. You learn you know who you can depend on in the various situations and you began then to function as a team through this shared experiences that you had under increasing conditions of threat and complexity.
Chet Richards:So if you go back over here to where we get implicit repertoire from you notice there's already some inconsistencies here. Genetic heritage we talked about among individuals, but if you look at cultural traditions, cultural traditions really talk more about groups of people. If you're talking about individuals and how the cultural traditions affect them, you can, you can drop that down into previous experiences. But what boyd says, if you have. If you have people and he doesn't make any claim here that that the culture should be uniform you should take everybody from you know the same monoculture, or whether, like mike wally said, you should have as much cultural uh uh variation as you can stand. Uh, so long as you work together to build it into the state that you just talked about, so that when you get through it doesn't look so much like a tomato bisque. You know, everything nice and uniform, it's all been, it's all been whirred together until it looks uniform, but but much more, much more like minestrone or something. In other words, it's there, it's a unified thing, but but the individual parts uh have been, have not been completely right. People still bring their, their individual skills uh into it, but it's harmonized now so that it all, it all, you know, from a higher level, it all, it all works together. So it's not collections of robots, as boyd has sometimes been.
Chet Richards:Um, uh criticized. That you know. You know at all, because, because he never says anywhere in there uh, that you, that you try to erase these things over here. So it's not like they sometimes talk about basic training and tear the person completely down. You know, know, to the bare skin and bones and then build them back up.
Chet Richards:That's basic training, is basically working on the individual. I mean that's 90% of what they did. They do a little bit and I'm thinking more about I'm more familiar with Marine Corps basic training. Here I'd say 90% of what they do is all individual kind of stuff and then they go on.
Chet Richards:Once they leave Parris Island then they go on to the School of Infantry where they really start putting it together to how to work as a team, and how long they stay there depends on whether they're going into infantry or whether they're going to go up to some other school, because, as you know, every Marine is a rifleman, and I think that's good, I think that's the way it should be, but anyway. So you see, over here there's all kind of stuff going on as you poke into it deeper. So if we, if we kind of let genetic heritage sort of fade in the background and think about just on teams here, you can see you take what you got, your previous experience an individual, and then you add to that their previous experiences of working together as a team, the Schwerpunkt is, as you said, allowing it so that they seem to function as a very opportunistic organism If they were looked at from 30,000 feet and all you saw was just the organism a very nasty amoeba.
Ponch Rivera:I want to take this down to the individual level. I want to check in with Mark on something he he's, he's familiar or we're all familiar with. So genetic heritage could be something like our the dna, our biology, how we're designed as humans genetics, whatever epigenetics, all that stuff, cultural traditions, what we've been looking and this is kind of a mystery and I'm actually very glad john boyd put this in orientation uh, it could be. You know, the language, the language we use, the symbols we use, uh, numbers, things like that.
Ponch Rivera:That's part of our culture and it varies throughout the world. And going back to your tomato bisque analogy, we don't want, in my view, we don't want a homogenous world, we want a diverse world, the best we can make. And the same thing is true on a team. You want a cognitively diverse team. In fact, when you talk about instability of teams or teams that are highly maneuverable or highly agile are the most unstable, meaning they are the most dynamically or cognitively diverse group of people, absolutely, and have something that binds them together, which includes Einheit and which includes the teaming skills. Right, and it's just like an F-18 or an advanced aircraft. It's stable flight. A lot of parts are moving on it all the time, right To keep it stable, but that gives it agility, and John Boyd identified that with EM theory early on. So culture has a lot.
Ponch Rivera:We got to dive deeper in that on the show for sure, moose, and the previous experience, we have a lot of that. But, moose, over to you. We've talked a lot of that, but, moose, over to you. You know we've talked a lot about autism and things like ADHD. Any thoughts on orientation at the individual level?
Mark McGrath:Yeah, well, to ease into that, I think what Chad has pointed out is that what's something that we talk a lot with people is that orientation is fractal. You know, I have one, a team has one and OODA Loop Sketch helps support that. I think that from the individual level I can think of like how my own cultural traditions as a you know kid that grew up in Army, brat, son of a West Pointer, you know, went to high school in Pittsburgh, was a Marine officer, irish Catholic, you know you could go down and those definitely have an effect on me and who I am and what makes me up makes up me. I do understand what Chet is again pointing out, that it's fractal to the point where that affects a team and an individual, where implicit there might be some back and forth on the word implicit or intuitive but I do believe that a lot of those things that make up me definitely certainly control how I observe and sense make and I think that when people get that, I mean that's really the value of the weakness of bad boy right, which is pervasive, showing them that if you don't consider these things or think about these things, then you're not really going to understand what's actually what's actually going on. I don't think these things or think about these things, then you're not really going to understand what's actually going on. I don't think that you have any way to align with reality for what it is. And I think, like you mentioned autism, you know what I'm learning about autism daily is that they tend to see the world for what it actually is and they're not negatively influenced by culture or convention or anything. They see what's actually there and what actually is.
Mark McGrath:Now, there's a downside to that too. They don't have necessarily children that don't speak. Sometimes they don't have a sense of danger, which can be scary, but they actually seem to me. Anyway, my impression is they see the world for what it actually is. So, in other words, they have a, they have as an individual. I think they have a massive orientation, massive orientation advantage in that respect, almost like a superpower. I mean, we've we've talked about that. You know the law of neurodiversity, neurodivergent. We even asked Mary. I mean Mary told us about her dad. You know, john Boyd, that was the term punch, I think it was undiagnosed Atzbergers.
Ponch Rivera:Yeah, yeah. But the point here is we all see the it's fractal. We see the world differently. Based off of these, we'll call it a triad for now. Genetics, culture, briefs, experience and again going back to Chet's point, using genetics inside of a team organization perspective is probably not the right choice of words, because you know that's more geared towards the individual level.
Chet Richards:So maybe we'll find in the future another term to use for team orientation, and I think it doesn't have to be anything, you know, really, really negative in the sense that if you have an infantry, let's say an infantry platoon, some people are going to be better shots than others, are going to better eyesight they're going to have better. That's the person that, yeah, that you want out on. You know guarding the perimeter at night. You know you know to make your sniper other people are going to have faster reflexes. You know that's the person you want on point better hearing, all that kind of stuff. So you use the skills that you have in the best way to improve the overall team performance.
Mark McGrath:Do you think that, like just use the Force Design 2030 debate as an example do you think that the genetic heritage, the cultural traditions and the previous experiences of the Marine Corps and their sort of collective orientation, that's why a lot of people are having a real grate against it or a rub against it?
Chet Richards:That could well be. That could well be, I don't know. I really haven't studied 2030. I'm not being a Marine, but I'll let the Marines fight that out among themselves.
Ponch Rivera:So Boyd also gave us inside orientation, analysis, synthesis and, of course, new information which I want to go dive into with you, chet, because this goes into that. But after you know, once we have this triad, we'll call it genetic heritage, cultural traditions, previous experience these things can enable implicit repertoire. They build through deliberate work. Through doing the hard work, you create the repertoire.
Chet Richards:Necessary, but a lot of other stuff has got to be done to build it. Anyway.
Ponch Rivera:So take us through what you had to build out here with your Well.
Chet Richards:The next statement he did is okay he's working towards. You're going to need to make new implicit repertoire. Some of it is on the fly and others when you have time takes, as we talked about just here. It takes some effort to stick these things in your implicit repertoire. It's great to talk about your platoon being able to do certain things, but if when they hit the ground the lead starts to fly, they just go to pieces, then you know those actions are not in your implicit repertory.
Chet Richards:If you saw the movie we Were Soldiers, based on Hal Moore's book, of course, he talks about when they hit landing zone x-ray. Shortly after that, one of the platoon leaders decided to take the initiative ordinarily a good thing and ran out and got himself caught in an ambush, in a big trap and got himself pinned down by basically misunderstanding the orders that Hal Moore had given him. And the reason that happened, of course, was I should go back here it wasn't that these people were necessarily stupid. It's just before they deployed, a whole bunch of the people he had trained got pulled out of the unit because their enlistments were up and the new people that were in they hadn't had time to develop this climate that we just talked about.
Chet Richards:So you know, if you're an organization and you only have so many hours in the day, how do you decide which element you're going to add to your implicit repertoire?
Chet Richards:Things that you can again going back to empathy, you know, just a wave of the hand or a whistle or a point or something like that will make happen what you want to happen, as opposed to having to sit down and write out you know detailed orders, which is just not time to do, and so you go through the process of analysis and synthesis, as Ford said is necessary. You got to think about what it is you're trying to do. You got to come up with some ideas and then you got to try them out. And as you do those things and you do them over and over and over again with your group and, I have to say it again, under conditions of increasing complexity, uncertainty and maybe even menace then you can add these things into your implicit repertoire, but without some thought about what it is you're going to add, the process just doesn't work. So we have entire commands in the military training and doctrine command, tradoc in the Army and that sort of thing.
Ponch Rivera:So, Chet on this, can you walk us through how simulation works in building implicit repertoire, If you've thought about that at all, Um you?
Chet Richards:know it's a. It's a a technique, obviously, um, you can use any technique that that you know, that you want, and, uh, um, certainly, um, um, modeling and simulations. There's okay, given that, I believe, abc, b, c, d and e. What are the implications of that? You construct a model that uh, uh, that best, that you can't model that situation then you. Then you run that model by plugging in different and you know y'all are familiar with it, but you still got to get out into the you know and eventually and and test it out.
Chet Richards:Um, that's one of the big things. Avoid so thing until something is tested in reality. It's still a hypothesis. It's still a hypothesis thing. You've still got to go through tests, come back to observation and orientation and by going through that is a real loop, going through that learning loop enough times, then you get to where you can now use the implicit guidance and control link across the top to trigger those, and so that is one tool. It's not a bad tool at all. I mean, I started my career modeling simulation and if you have things that are explicit enough to where you can create models, then you know it's not a bad technique at all to use.
Ponch Rivera:So my view is, boyd actually put that pathway in the OODA loop. So when you look at Chuck Spinney's work and how he started to put a boundary around things, if you put a boundary around the OODA loop and you leave the action step or unfolding circumstance with the external environment out there, that internal pathway is a simulation. Circumstance with the external environment out there, that internal pathway is a simulation. So if you think about it, when you make a decision to act and we're going to, you know, hey, either turn our head or look at something or move our arm. Before we do that, we actually run that simulation in our head to reduce what they call expected free energy, risk, uncertainty, yeah Right, so that's already happening.
Ponch Rivera:And again, going back to what Mark brought up earlier about being it's a fractal, so that's already happening. And again, going back to what Mark brought up earlier about being it's a fractal, you brought it up to a larger organization that when you're inside an organization you sometimes you run model and simulations to see Because that that that that's probably a smarter thing to do than actually go take action on the world. How am I going to say this? I don't get in trouble here. Some, some organizations like to take action on the world without thinking through it right.
Chet Richards:And that's oh, that's been known to happen. Yes, yeah, yeah yeah.
Ponch Rivera:So again, my point there is, my view is within the OODA loop. Boyd gave us a policy simulation course of action planning pathway which moves from act back to observe, but remember it also goes through decide. So that is very aligned to how the latest and greatest in neuroscience says our brains work, which is fantastic, yeah, and borders on that same path right, and that's where we're going.
Chet Richards:Really amazing yeah.
Ponch Rivera:Yeah, and I want to go back to what Mark brought up early again. When you talk about bad UTA not you, chet, but when people do they're missing out on so much amazing work that John Boyd did. And I would say the majority of us, including Mark and myself, we do not understand yet, right, we're still trying to figure it out. He was that far advanced in this thinking because he was. I mean, this is what he did and you were there when he did this.
Ponch Rivera:So, again, I just want to point that out to our listeners that when we dive into this, when you ask us to show you what the OODA loop means in 20 minutes, that's almost impossible, right, it's like you asking me to explain the free energy principle in five minutes. I'm like I'm going to give you the sketch of the OODA loop and that's it. That's how I'm going to explain the free energy principle to you, because it's the same, right, that's the best explanation of it. So I'm sorry about that, but the point again is, boyd's sketch captured many of the ideas that are emerging today from neuroscience and which is amazing. That's true, it is.
Chet Richards:Yeah because these ideas were just beginning to, uh, to perk up when boyd, you know, when boyd died. There's still a lot of people thinking that you know the brain, you, you, you have at age whatever another is the brain, you're going to have the rest of your life and cells die off and that's and that's it. We're finding that that that's not true at all. The brain rewires itself and rebuilds itself constantly, and uh, so anyway, with that, with all that in mind. So the question is that how do you do analysis and synthesis? You know where do you get the material, either for your mental models, inside your brain. And I think what you said there is exactly, exactly correct. As far as we know and it certainly fits with voyage thing is that it's as if in any situation, your brain, kind of in the background, is running gadzooks models and it's running a more probably as an analog computer than as a digital, but didn't really make, and it's almost as if you have a little meter in front that says good or bad and and as you're running these models, that meter is going, going back and forth and when it gets one, that's kind of acceptable, that's what you do, and then you go on to the next one. So you have to train yourself to do that.
Chet Richards:And on chart 45 of Strategic Game, he kind of it's a strange, hardly anybody pays any attention to this chart, but it's really the heart of everything Boyd boyd does, including what we're talking about here. He says we can't just look at our own personal experiences or use the same mental recipes over and over again. So that begs the question if we're not going to use the same ones, then where do the new ones come from? Well, he tells you, we've got to look at other disciplines and activities and relate or connect them to what we know from our experiences and the strategic world that we're living in. We've got to keep sucking in stuff from the outside. If we can do this, then here's the key thing, and he actually highlights it we will be able to surface new repertoires. And I'm going to leave the next word out Develop finger spits and get fooled for folding our adversaries back inside themselves morally, mentally and physically, so that they can neither appreciate nor cope with what's happening without suffering the same fate ourselves.
Chet Richards:Develop finger spits and get fooled. Well, what is finger spits? And get fooled? Well, for an individual it's that intuitive what we were just talking about for a group. It gets that implicit idea going. It's stuff that we can execute in response to influence a changing situation, uh, as intuitive, as implicitly as possible. So he said, all right, so to do that now. That's where we're going here. Those are the actions that we're really trying to develop, those actions that allow us to fold the enemy and to develop finger spits and get fooled, which is an individual thing for folding the enemy back inside themselves. Uh, that's where we're going.
Chet Richards:Then we need this, this, this thing over here in the orange box, to feed that, you know, to feed that process. And so, uh, what boy did was, as you can see here, he took some of the pieces he was already working with and he started playing with them. You guys have seen all of the chicken stretching and all the stuff that he did to arrive at this point. Pages and pages. We only see really the finished product. Those drawings that he left us are actually very clean, which makes you think that there was a lot of stuff going on in the background over there, that that that he just, you know, tossed it when he was, when he was through with it.
Chet Richards:Uh, because I've been with john, when john was was was really working this stuff heavily. It was just, it was just chaos, you know, it was just he was trying all kinds of stuff. But as it started to crystallize, then he started making these drawings which are. They were easier to interpret if you knew what all of the symbols meant, and, as you know, we're still trying to figure out what they all meant. So anyway, other than that small thing, iteration after iteration after iteration, and as he was doing that he was putting pieces into a structure and I've got a little bit of it here.
Chet Richards:So he took the implicit repertoire, the implicit guidance and control stuff. He took some of the three stuff over on the left, I mean, stuck them into orientation, took analysis and synthesis. And it's really odd, he stuck analysis and synthesis into orientation even though in the uh figure itself, the orientation looking process in the, in the mustard color chart, just enables analysis and synthesis. Now he's taken analysis and synthesis and moved it down into orientation itself, and I'm not just it. Just after a while it just seemed to fit better that way. I think it's what he's what he's talking about there. But how analysis and synthesis affects our cultural traditions and genetic heritage yet to be explained. Epigenetics may be in that code, anyway. So that's what you see here. This is supposed to illustrate all of that experimenting and prototype snowmobile that he was building. That we see in the sketches that he left us at.
Mark McGrath:Quantico In the uh chart or slide 45 of the strategic game, the title at the top. What's the point of all this?
Chet Richards:right, right yeah, and then inside there's a block.
Mark McGrath:That's highlighted yeah, we will be able to. Well, so what he's saying is like we have to look at other disciplines and activities and relate, uh, or connect them to what we know from our experiences and the strategic world we live in. If we can do this, and then the box we will be able to surface the new repertoires.
Chet Richards:That is where the many-sided implicit cross-referencing process comes in. You're saying that's the process that you use to go to these other disciplines and activities and relate and connect them to what we already have, but he keeps building on it.
Mark McGrath:So I think of the fallacy of the specialist right, but I also think too that that's that's right there. That slide on 45 that compounds. This is like if you're just studying simple linear roundabout uda.
Chet Richards:You're absolutely screwed if your competitors are learning it this way you'll be building, digging yourself a deep, a deeper and deeper ditch or or groove as tom. Yeah, let's call it the deep groove. Yeah, you've got to be very good at what you do, but it it's, you've also got to be able to do this other stuff too. And whoever can balance those, that sort of contradiction, the best just got to have an event. They'll be able to have the advantage of specialization but also have the advantages of agility to develop this finger spits and get fooled for folding opponents, because that's the ultimate sharepunk. Develop this finger spits and get fooled for folding opponents, because that's the ultimate schwerpunkt. Is that finger spits and get fooled for folding opponents back inside themselves. That's really what you want.
Chet Richards:Once you get that, then chart 132 for patterns of conflict. Everything else sort of follows from that, except for grand strategy. Remember, all the stuff we're talking about now is down at the conflict level. There's a level above that that Boyd called the grand strategy and the national goal, and that's the constructive part. But we're not going to go into that here. That's a subject for another day. So what Boyd did was he had this definition of orientation back from 1987. He'd actually been working on for a while. I don't really. I wasn't there when he was doing a lot of this stuff here. I'd already moved to Atlanta in 83 and didn't get back to Washington that often, so I'm not exactly sure how he came up with these four things, but I do know a little bit about what he meant for them, and it's where the orientation now goes out and does the things that he's talking about on slide 45 of Strategic Games.
Mark McGrath:So say again slide 132 of Patterns of Conflict.
Chet Richards:Second Impression it's called, and that's the only place that he almost defines what it means to operate inside the OODA loop. Otherwise he just takes it as an undefined term, almost axiomatic term term. But uh, and it's interesting because he uses he uses the term inside the oodle loop again in in essence of winning and losing, without explaining how you actually get inside that figure that he draws. You know two pages later which it looks like. If you ever got inside it'd be like a maze you'd never get out but, but I don't know.
Chet Richards:It's something else for people to work on. But projections is clearly taking what we predict is going to happen and comparing it with what actually does happen. Projecting as we were talking. Your mental models are doing all this stuff. They're actually projecting out. If I do this, if I do that, if I do this if.
Chet Richards:I do that extremely fast and trying to portray, you know well, what can the enemy do. You know that, that sort of thing. And then you've got your good, your good meter, and once it gets good enough, then you, then you go and you go under, yeah, and then go on to the next one. See what effect that had on it, sort of thing so that's projections.
Ponch Rivera:Yeah, that's very aligned to predictive processing, basing inference and what and what's being done.
Chet Richards:Oh, yeah, definitely.
Ponch Rivera:So when you wrote this and I saw that you put projections or the actions involved, the action, remember we talked about actions being simulations and the action with the external world. So you're getting feedback from the external world. Right, this is the whole point. In a complex environment, you have to probe and the way you probe is you have to take an action to get feedback from the environment, probe and test exactly, exactly, not to say you can't pick up some stuff passively.
Chet Richards:Uh, you know open source stuff, but you have to be very careful with it, because now you're since getting what, what your opponent wants you to see. Uh, even if you go and try to pry it out of him, you never. That's why my counterintelligence is such an interesting field. You never know what the guy is telling you is really what the truth is. Or maybe he's an agent, a double agent, and he's put just you know, not unknown, telling you what the other side wants. You know, now empathy is interesting. Why empathy?
Chet Richards:This gets back to the group again. You know you don't need empathy inside yourself, you need empathy when you're dealing with other human beings. And so what he's talking about here is not so much the practice of science and technology but the practice of leadership and strategy within groups. And so you're sensing not only what's going on with the enemy, you also want to sense, feel with your own team, feel what's going on with the opponent and then compare those two.
Chet Richards:And there's a very interesting example of that in von Manstein's book Lost Victories, where he's talking about the German entry into the Crimean Peninsula. If you look at the geography of that, the entrance to the Crimean Peninsula, a lot of lakes, very, very marshy ground that you have to go through and it channelizes the attack. It means that the room for maneuver was very limited, virtually non-existent. It became a slugging match between the Germans and the Soviet forces on the other side and it was really, really tough. They were taking lots of losses on both sides and what he wanted to know was he wanted to feel which side was going to break first.
Chet Richards:And that's where that empathy came in. I mean, he had the lines on the map and he knew they were losing and he had the estimates of what the Soviets were losing. So he actually went down to the front where he could try to feel some of the stuff for himself Prisons that had just been taken in, see how his own people look, look in their eyes, all that kind of stuff. My father fought in World War II on Bataan and he said well, the difference between a war movie and a war documentary is just look in their eyes Wasn.
Mark McGrath:And a war documentary is just looking their eyes. Wasn't uh punch when we had Jim give me an on talking about rules of victory? It wasn't empathy for your adversary, that was one of the. Wasn't that one of the things that came out of Sun Tzu?
Chet Richards:It might be interpreted that way.
Ponch Rivera:Yeah Sun Tzu, a 2,500 year old Chinese, Well another one would be from TPS Toy Production System I know in China it would be Gemba. Go to the Gemba right. Go see Yep, Go see for yourself, Go and see for yourself.
Mark McGrath:But you've got to understand.
Chet Richards:Yeah, get to get bits of it. You've got to then understand what it is that you're seeing. I'm talking about one company I worked for. Take the CEO down to the factory floor. He'd stand there with a big grin on his face. Not a clue. It came from finance, maybe transferred in another company. Not a clue of what he was saying. So that did not meet Genji Gimbutso.
Ponch Rivera:Okay, so I want to go into the fifth component of orientation, and this is a great. What I'm looking at right now is from 1987, how Boyd defined orientation, which included unfolding circumstances, and this is important because he changed that to add to be new information, right? So new information, and let me just give you some background on this. New information is surprise. It's a surprise and information that's coming from the external world, what our sensory organs pick up.
Chet Richards:Right, because we don't get all the sensory you can think of a line from it, going straight into observation if you want In fact. Boyd, I think, actually thought about thinking observation in New Orleans, but then he wanted a separate observation process for a variety of reasons.
Ponch Rivera:Yeah, and then you go back to that question. I asked you about information and energy. This is the currency that's flowing through the system. Yes, yes. So now that fifth element inside of orientation new information. The way we talk about it is sensory signals, the signals from the external world and that carries a currency. Right so, but to me, when I read this, unfolding circumstances could be that new information as well. I want to get your thoughts on why you think Boyd shifted from the 1987 definition to what's now in the orientation circle.
Chet Richards:The only thing I can say is if circumstances may well be unfolding, but you don't, you don't pick it up. So so you don't understand what's actually going on.
Ponch Rivera:Say that again. This is. This is critical chat.
Chet Richards:This is just my guess. But the guess is the unfolding circumstances are out there but you don't. All you see is what you sense, and that's the purpose of that briefing that I reposted before that you know, your brain lives in the dark, in its own little world, and it's fed by senses, so that unfolding circumstances are out there, but unless until they get to where they can affect your analysis and synthesis, until you see them and understand them. So I think that's what he's trying to do here. It's what gets into your orientation, into your brain.
Ponch Rivera:that counts. Let's also point out something else Our orientation can actually act as a filter, preventing us from seeing things that are unfolding in front of us?
Chet Richards:Absolutely. That's the arrow going back the other way. That's it.
Ponch Rivera:Absolutely Right. So the implicit guidance and control pathway that moves from orient back to observe can be our ego, it could be our default mode of operating, it could be our perception of reality that emerges from our orientation, and these things actually can filter what we see on the external world. And there's other sayings out there, you know, we we only see what we expect to see.
Chet Richards:Ancestral incestuous amplification, as Chuck Spinney called it. Right, which is actually, which has also made it into the business press.
Ponch Rivera:I've noticed in a couple of places yeah, yeah yeah but again, this connects back to what uh researchers are identifying through neuroscience and biology, and that is, um, we do have something known as a reticular activating system or filtering system that prevents us from seeing things. It's else when we talk about echo chambers and we talk about, like flow systems, being in an Oxbow Lake, you actually take actions onto the world so you can minimize, surprise, minimize that new information coming in One of the things.
Chet Richards:Absolutely yeah, yeah.
Ponch Rivera:So there's a lot there, maybe thoughts on this, because when I saw this, I'm like this is something we need to talk about. There's a reason that Boyd shifted this from 87 to 96.
Mark McGrath:I also think it pulls away from the linear trap that a lot of people fall into. It's a very good point.
Chet Richards:Yeah, that's a very good point. It's a very good point, and so I think it's coming up on maybe the next chart or the chart after that.
Mark McGrath:Real quick, though when you talk to most people, you always hear them say then I move to the Orient phase. I mean they're still talking about tumbling around aimlessly and they don't even realize it.
Chet Richards:Yeah, that's exactly right, and so that's another good reason why it takes to try to understand where Boyd was going with GIST chart and not just stick with the other one. Because it's simple, the circular process is there as part of a learning process and it's because you are probing and testing and you're learning from the probing and testing. All right, that's fine, but it also questions all right, what are you going to probe and test? You need an intuitive feel for that.
Chet Richards:You can only send so many patrols out, for example, and you can only do reconnaissance and force in so many different directions at any given time, usually one. So which one is it going to be? And that's where that implicit part comes in. The commander is going through all these mental models in his head and just, and all of a sudden, okay, we're going to go this way, I want you to probe that way, go this far and do this, and we're going to watch, you know, see what happens, kind of a kind of a thing, as opposed to all the other possible directions they can go in.
Ponch Rivera:So, guys, I want to do this. I want to defend bad OODA for a second and do the simple observer way to side act the four-step process, and here's why I want to do it. Many people use it. It is useful in a clear domain where the relationship between cause and effect, where there's nothing changing in the world right, where it's highly predictable, that is a good place to use bad OODAoda. The problem with that is I don't know of any place, any context, where we know the relationship between cause and effect with with a high degree of certainty anymore particularly if there's thinking opponents involved right when things get so clear, you can use the bad ooda.
Chet Richards:Alarm bells ought to be just be going off all, all in your as a, as a, and going back, mark brought this warning up.
Ponch Rivera:If you're learning the I hate to call it the real OODA loop we'll call it that. It fits in all domains. I'm using a Kenevan framework here clear, complicated complex chaotic.
Chet Richards:It's a good framework.
Ponch Rivera:Yeah, yeah, and that's important because we do not live in a world where the relationship between cause and effect is known all the time. Large language models are trying to replicate bad OODA loop and so it's a little bit of agentic AI and what that means is they're using a bad model, not a bad model. They're using a model designed for a certain context in the wrong context. That means they're going to go into disorder. They're going to be in confusion.
Ponch Rivera:What we suggest and this is what's happening on our podcast and a lot of our episodes is the connection to the nonlinear, dynamic world of John Boyd's work. Actually, and what people are seeing in complex adaptive systems, thinking systems, thinking cybernetics and so forth is that the way we're going to scale AI. It's going to look more like Boyd's real OODA loop and this is critically important because if you understand that your teams are complex adaptive systems and we talked about this earlier, about building that implicit guidance control up for teaming skills the reason you're doing that is so you can deal with more complexity, right. And if you understand Boyd's OODA loop sketch and his work and all that, you can deal with more complexity Bottom line right there, right? So, again, kind of self-serving here, chet, but please continue. I'm sorry to jump in there and get you no. No, that was quite good.
Chet Richards:So if you look at itving here, chet, but please continue, I'm sorry to jump in there and get you. No, no, that was quite good. So if you look at it over here, you can see Boyd's still thinking about this stuff, because he says notice how orientation shapes. All right, you can see all that Also how the entire loop, not just orientation. What does he mean by that Entire loop? Not just? Does he mean that the entire loop is an ongoing, many-sided, implicit da-da-da, and so is orientation? In other words, the loop is this, but so is orientation. In other words, orientation is, but it's not the only one, go ahead, go ahead and finish Chet.
Chet Richards:Or it could mean that the entire loop is a process, but just orientation is not. You see, it could be that the entire loop is a process, but orientation just orientation is not. You see, it could be read either way, and I don't know where Boyd was in this when he finally had to hang it up.
Mark McGrath:This is what I run into a lot. I tell people, you know, there's orientation, the noun, and orientation, the verb, orient the verb yeah or orient the verb. You're right, yeah, and knowing the verb.
Chet Richards:Yeah, yeah, or orient the verb, you're right.
Mark McGrath:Knowing the difference between the two, because one of the ways that I think about the sketch is that and this, this kind of, was my thought after talking to Chuck for three hours. Chuck Spinney.
Chet Richards:Oh God, I could go to see you both. Well, it would have gone on longer had his wife not intervened and said Chuck, we got to go to dinner. You up the phone. Yeah, I'm gonna have to leave here in about uh, seven or eight minutes about.
Mark McGrath:Okay, I'll leave it with this thought uh, chet, is that the orientation the noun, orientation the verb? I guess the way that, after talking with chuck and thinking about it more, and I always kind of felt this that he described oodle loop sketch to me as an illustrative abstraction of essentially how orientation functions. And our orientation is our repository of all of those things, our being, it's who we are, it's our everything. And I think that that's where people screw up with the back to the linear OODA folks. They only think of orient the verb, they don't think of orientation, or OODAps or oodleps, sketch being sort of a, an illustration of how our orientation functions. And then when you do what chuck has done and what punch likes to point out too, with the markov blanket in the boundary, is that then you can really start to see how this is actually your orientation functioning within, uh, within your reality. Yeah, no that's.
Chet Richards:That's exactly right. Separate topic.
Mark McGrath:I started writing on how, like Ayn Rand, we were watching something about her and there's a lot of things that she says that are pretty interesting and her novels are great, but one of the things that she was saying, like she was insisting on, was that all reality is objective, which how can that even be?
Chet Richards:That's why our philosophy is called objectivism. Well, no, I got it.
Mark McGrath:Yeah, that's why our philosophy is called objectivism is our well, no, I got it. Yeah, that's why it's called objectivism. But when you think about all the things that make up your orientation, how in the world could you ever see, uh, reality as something objective? Because it's a, it's a hallucinate control, hallucination of what we think, we see. That's.
Chet Richards:That's a very subjective thing, not objective yeah, I mean, it may well be objective, but you're not what goes on inside your brain yeah, yeah yeah, so, uh, it's sort of like people are talking about do we live in a multiverse and are we a simulation and all that? And my question is what difference would it make?
Chet Richards:yeah what would you do differently if you knew we were living in a simulation? You know, maybe I, I don't, I don't. You enjoy the Matrix movies too, but you know we don't have the red pill or whatever. So what difference does it make?
Mark McGrath:So we do we have understanding Uda linearly, or understanding Uda in this respect? This is more the red pill. Ok, touche.
Chet Richards:Well, well, well, well done, Well, well spoken. And now this is interesting, because how can key statements and related insights be open? A statement is a statement, it sits there, but you see. But he clearly is on to something, something here. But you start taking it apart, the oodle loop sketch. You know. All that it does is it feeds information in stuff and and selects actions from the key statements, in other words, it's the related insights. You know the OODA loop is part of that. So he's on to something here, but I'm not exactly sure what it is. And I think what he's really saying is that you know, this is my snowmobile, you know Model A and I have to hang it up at this point, for a variety of reasons.
Chet Richards:So you guys take it from there. In other words, this whole thing, the statements need to be looked at and thought about and, you know, the insights need to be thought, like we were just doing here. You know, what does that just? What does that just mean? It doesn't make any difference if you interpret it two different ways. There's some insights to be made, and so I think that's the kind of thing he was driving, because, you know, he hated dogma.
Chet Richards:Yeah, he didn't like doctrine, because it was. It had a tendency to turn into dogma and you, kind of chuck, had warned him if you draw an oodle loop sketch, it's going to turn into dogma, and I and I I think that's kind of what he's warning people about. Uh, you know, which is why I think that the people that are going on with new diagrams and things like that and playing with it are doing exactly what they should be doing, whether they come up with anything useful or not, that's, you know, we'll have to see, but that's the direction that it should be, that things should be going at.
Mark McGrath:What was the published?
Chet Richards:remind me again the published date of this, or when he finished this before he passed Well there were two June 1935, I mean June right June 1995, and the final version was January 1996.
Mark McGrath:And he died March 97. About the time that his cancer, really came charging back.
Chet Richards:He started to get really weak and not really interested in doing very much else.
Ponch Rivera:Any chance there's a specific date in June? Just out of curiosity, do you know?
Chet Richards:No, no, I don't Well to say that. Hold on just a minute. I might have put that on the back page of the essence of winning and losing.
Mark McGrath:The reality is, while Chet's looking that up, I mean when we're telling listeners and people that we work with. You could take this this is the distillation of everything that John Boyd did, and if you skip destruction and creation, you skip patterns of conflict, you skip all the other briefings. You're really screwing yourself over, though You're going to have a hard time trying to understand this very simple five or six-page brief.
Chet Richards:Yeah, he called it the big squeeze. A six page brief. Yeah, yeah, he called it the big squeeze. Yeah, it says here. The first version carried the date 28, June 1995. And the last appeared sometime in January 1996.
Ponch Rivera:Okay. I was asking because going back to your point about a simulation. If it was 624, then we'd be in trouble, but that's another that'll make more sense in the future episodes, I promise you yeah.
Chet Richards:Okay, good. All right guys, I'm going to have to break off from here. I apologize. Anytime you want to get together again, let me know Things start getting slow.
Mark McGrath:Yeah, it's so important because I think it helps drive the point home with the bad Boyd crowd which unfortunately, as we said, is pervasive. If you're competing truly and you're looking to become more collaborative, more cohesive with your group, you have to understand OODA in these terms. You have to understand what Boyd's actually talking about, not what he's reduced to.
Chet Richards:I think that's exactly right. Why is he doing all this? What's the purpose? Now, what's interesting is he started using I asked Chuck, when did he use the term OODA loop? Chuck wasn't't sure, but he said he started using the terms uh, observe, orient, decide and act when he was chief of development plans. Uh, in, you know, in the air force, uh, and was that after thailand?
Mark McGrath:was that?
Chet Richards:before, before thailand, I believe again, I had left the pentagon by then, gone up to work for the agency and then went out to california to work for northrop. So I'm not, but I met him in his office as chief of development plans for him. Paul Berenson, uh, who was head of the office at that time, took us down to meet John Boyd. There was. We all got up, we knew who he was, from the EM, from the EM thing. So we met this tall guy. You know Air Force Colonel, hi, how you doing that was. That was about that, but I've forgotten where we're going with all of this.
Mark McGrath:We were just saying about it.
Chet Richards:Yeah, he was using those four words but when he decided to use them to describe first how he did air-to-air combat and then how you got inside an opponent's OODA loop and all that kind of good stuff, all that apparently came out after he retired, when he was doing the little paper for NASA that we have posted as New Conception for Air-to-Air Combat, also known as the Fast Transience paper, because if you look at that near the end of it he's clearly talking about what later became operating inside the OODA loop. And then when he went to Patterns of Conflict right after that, right at the front of it, he kind of took some charts from new concept air-to-air combat and that becomes the point of departure for patterns of conflict. And you read that now he is using the term operating inside the loop and I have a version of that from september 1981 that uses the expression operating inside the loop so talk about, you have on, uh, slightly east of new.
Mark McGrath:You have chuck's uh. Evolution of oh yeah, and there was a time where it was ODA.
Chet Richards:Yes, oda, and Chuck said thinking about it, he's talking with Ray Leopold who was there at the time. They were both captains, I think, working for Boyd, and he said it started out with observed design and they were trying to figure out something other than emission areas like close air support or battlefield air interdiction something other than that, or battlefield air interdiction something other than that. You said the reason those weren't useful for developing plans development plans was you can do close air support with any airplane. B-52s often do it, for example. So when you're trying to develop what kind of new airplane you really need to get more into.
Chet Richards:Well, what are they actually doing? And that's where there were very high-level stuff. Well, hard work and systems can observe, they can help make decisions. I'm thinking of task force alpha there, where they were. You know listening to monkey, you know putting sensors out into the ho chi minh trail and monkeys would set them off and all kind of stuff. Um, the vietnamese quickly discovered what was going on and so they would. They would set it up so they could set them off remotely to attract the bombing in that area while they were going somewhere else, and all that kind of stuff. And then and then act, and then they broke those down, but where he then took those categories and got them over into how you, how you operate in a conflict situation, somewhere in that period between 1975 and about 1977, somewhere in that period between 1975 and about 1977, 1978, when he really started working big time on patterns of conflict is where that change happened.
Mark McGrath:Well, chet, we're honored to say that, we're honored to have you as a friend and a teacher and as we continue to develop these ideas, it would be a gross understatement, but we really appreciate you coming on for your third time. You're now in the three-timers club of no Way. Out.
Chet Richards:Well, thank you very much. The honor and privilege is all mine. I can assure you these are a lot of fun and I learn a lot every time we do them. So thank you very much.
Mark McGrath:We'll talk again soon. Thanks, Chad. We will Talk to you later.
