No Way Out

Boyd's OODA Loop Beyond the Linear Model - Alex Vohr

• Mark McGrath and Brian "Ponch" Rivera • Episode 153

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Retired Marine Corps Colonel Alex Vohr joins No Way Out - The OODA Loop Podcast to unpack John Boyd’s authentic, non-linear OODA loop sketch from "The Essence of Winning and Losing." Drawing from his 25-year Marine career—including early adoption of maneuver warfare doctrine, leadership at the School of Advanced Warfighting (SAW), and combat operations—Vohr shares why the common four-step, speed-obsessed version misses Boyd’s core insight: Orientation is the schwerpunkt 

Think speed wins battles and markets? Only if you’re oriented correctly—otherwise, you’re racing in the wrong direction. Hosts Mark "Moose" McGrath and Brian "Ponch" Rivera dive into how Orientation—shaped by genetics, culture, experience, and new information—drives observation, decisions, and action in uncertain, complex adaptive systems. They explore nested OODA loops in teams and organizations, harmonization for aligned vectors, planning as orientation-tuning under time pressure, relative tempo over blind speed, decision quality versus luck, and avoiding OODA loop fatigue from oversimplified myths.

Vohr discusses his new book, Speed Kills: Leveraging John Boyd's OODA Loop to Build Organizations That Win (featured on the

John R. Boyd's Conceptual Spiral was originally titled No Way Out. In his own words: 

“There is no way out unless we can eliminate the features just cited. Since we don’t know how to do this, we must continue the whirl of reorientation…”

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John Boyd’s Conceptual Spiral was originally titled “No Way Out.” In his words:

“There is no way out unless we can eliminate the features just cited. Since we don’t know how to do this, we must continue the whirl of reorientation…”


Download a complete transcript of Conceptual Spiral for free by clicking here.

Stay connected with No Way Out and The Whirl Of ReOrientation

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Alex Vohr:

Background. So my grandfather was a naval aviator number 1000 and one. And he recruited all the guys, all the naval aviators who flew with the American volunteer group, the Flying Tigers. Wow. Yeah, he recruited all those guys. So kind of interesting guy.

Mark McGrath:

So clearly Boyd was an interest to you in a lot of respects, not just you were in the Marines.

Alex Vohr:

Sure. Absolutely. But uh, you know, I I became interested in him, I guess. Uh, you know, when I joined the Marine Corps, it was right in the midst of the whole development of uh of FM FM one Marine Corps doctrinal publication one now, which is war fighting. And so, you know, all of those people were, you know, hanging around the Marine Corps at the time. I never met John Boyd myself, and I never had was in any of his lectures or anything like that. But I certainly spent a lot of time with people like General Van Riper, who was who was heavily involved with Boyd. And um uh uh we, you know, there'd be people hanging around the basic school who were involved in our doctrine and our doctrinal development. My basic school class was one of the very first classes where they rolled out, they started to roll out the maneuver warfare doctrine. And it was really interesting at the time because it's something that, you know, s now everybody kind of takes for granted. But I mean, it's the same type of pushback that we've seen against recent changes that General Berger brought about as the commandant. You had that same kind of pushback to this type stuff. And most of the pushback was like, hey, there's really nothing new here. I don't think people really appreciated it as much, right? They just kind of thought that it was they they were reinventing the wheel. And I'm I think there's probably some of that too. You know, if people take a just a top-level look at things to include the oodaloop, I don't think they understand and appreciate the nuances of it as much, right? Well, there's certainly there's certainly a lot of that. And I've spent a career and I and I and as I've said in my book, you know, I've had a copy of the Oodaloop on my desk for years and years. And and the more you learn and the more you reflect and you look at it, you uh you learn things and you think about it.

Mark McGrath:

And when I just to establish just to establish common language here, so when we say oodaloop, and I are referring to the oodaloop sketch that that Boyd actually drew, not the not the circular linear uh uh misrepresentation of his work that he never drew. No. Absolutely. Okay. All right, that's that's good. So, like you, I when I encountered him in the Marine Corps, it was 1995, and I had no idea what what I had been faced with until years later after he was dead, and I realized the power of this stuff. To think that he was still alive at the time, it would have been cool. But back then there was no text, there was no email, so Right. Not not like as we know it now. So Well, um where could we start? Well, why don't we start with what was behind the book?

Alex Vohr:

You know, what was your what was your motivation to sure. So, like I said, you know, I I was involved in the um i i i a a lot in Marine Corps education as well. I was the director of the School of Advanced Warfighting for a year, uh Deputy Director for a year, a graduate. And so, you know, thinking about things and our doctrine and where that all came from was something that I was always very interested in. But when I retired, I was on a plane flying back from a business trip, and I met this guy who, of all things, had a had a company that produced Velcro fasteners in Jacksonville, Florida, and I was talking to him about these type things. I don't know how we started talking about John Boyd, but we but we did. And he found it really fascinating. And he was part of uh of an organization called Vistage, which is a corporate coaching and and consulting type group, and he got me involved as a vistage speaker. I went and met with his vistage chair and and I got to speak to a few groups. And uh I put together some material for that. Uh, you know, it was rough, it wasn't polished, and I'm not sure that was the best audience for it. A lot of the guys from Vistage are looking for some things that they can, you know, very quickly and concretely apply to businesses that range, you know, from anything like landscaping businesses all the way up to big corporations. It wasn't the best material. I spoke with them for a few years, but but I use that uh presentation that I put together and the outline that I put together as kind of the the uh outline for the book. You know, it ended up being you know 238 slides long as I continued to think about it. And then maybe four years ago I started writing to put it all together. Uh I thought to myself, after I put so much effort into it, I thought that I would write it down because, you know, as General Van Riper would have said, you you haven't thought hard about something until you've written it down. And that was absolutely the truth. Trying to put some of these ideas down on paper was pretty challenging.

Mark McGrath:

Well, no, he was certainly a pioneer in uh collaborating with Boyd and bringing Boyd's ideas into the uh into the fleet. Well, the fleet.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera:

I want to hear some parallels. There's some parallels you brought up here, Alex, and that's you go back to you know, we've we've had uh Fred Stein on here who did some work with Network Centric Warfare. Let's go back to that time frame. And you know, when I went to staff college after 9-11, this is uh 2005, Donald Rumsfeld era era where you know, known knowns, unknown unknowns, and all that from from that we get from Dave Snowden. But can you go back and and talk about what was happening in the military around the the mid-90s and the early 2000s that helped us help you understand complex adaptive systems?

Alex Vohr:

Yeah, you know, the the whole I don't think Boyd, and you know, you guys are much more familiar with the stuff that he's done in the archives, I don't think that the idea of complex adaptive systems was anything that he focused on necessarily, right? I don't think that terminology w was was around at the time, but I think it was clear uh from his work that he certainly thought in those terms, right? And you know, the whole idea that especially human organizations are, first of all, they don't behave in linear ways. They behave in ways that are nonlinear, right? Which are subject to scale, for example, and they're not subject necessarily to cause and effect. And as a guy like Nassim Talib would say, there's the potential for things to happen that we are that we completely don't expect, right? But at the same time, what's really also interesting about complex adaptive systems and nonlinear systems is that if you do a nonlinear distribution as opposed to a linear distribution, which looks like a bell curve, what's really interesting about them is that you know the probability of an event l landing within a standard deviation of the of the center is actually is actually greater in a nonlinear distribution than it is in a linear distribution, right? So we become kind of lulled into this idea that cause and effect actually is the way the world works, right? And it's not, as we know. And so um, you know, I think that complex adaptive systems in terms of the Marine Corps and and you know, the Marine Corps' understanding of it, I certainly know that um, you know, in in the mid-1990s, folks that were that were advocating especially for systemic design, for example, instead of our typical planning processes were thinking in those particular terms. You know, instead of using the Marine Corps planning process or the Army's decision-making process, they were planning for stuff. They were advocating for things that were much more collaborative planning approaches that they thought better fit, you know, kind of the complex adaptive systems that human beings are and that human organizations are. I think the challenges that you have with those type things is that, you know, all of your planning is always done in a time-constrained environment. And sometimes it's pretty effective to have a process together that everybody understands, and the process is designed not necessarily as a checklist process to solve the problem, but it's more of a checklist of things that you should factor that you should consider as you run through planning so that you end up with a complete product or a semi-complete product within a condensed period of time because you're time constrained regardless. And so, yeah.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera:

No, there's the solid connections there. And and I want to go back to the early point about uh Boyd's connection to Cass. So we we did learn in the archives that you know early connections at Santa Fe Institute and you take the news out of last week with Epstein Files, like you know, his conversation with Steve Bannon and them talking about Gellman, uh Gellman's work on the Quark and the Jaguar. There's other connections there, including the uh mathematics of the of chaos. I I believe that's uh his favorite book is uh How the Leopard Change Its Spots from uh Brian Goodwin. That's early, early complex adaptive systems thinking mixed with some chaos work. Um and that started to merge into uh our JPME. I think about the time you were there, and uh you know about the time I entered into it as a as a JPME one um in residence dude. Um but that's the time where we were living with network-centric warfare. The guys are writing about network-centric warfare connected to John Boyd's linear OODA loop, and we we've seen that, we've had that conversation with folks. And and what's happened is we're expanding this over time, and where we are today is is you know a significant leap from where we were 20 years ago, which is this type of thinking. And then to your point about uh planning, the the the the important part of planning is it's not about the plan, it's the process of planning, right? It's it's how do you continually plan? It's that adaptive capacity or capability you need to understand changing environments, right? And that's the that's what the uh open oodle loop shows us is an agent's relationship with the environment. How do you stay attuned to the environment? And that's what Boyd was trying to tell us. So your point about uh business leaders taking these little, I don't like calling them checklists either. They're kind of like a checklist approach, you know, we we show folks how to do that as well. But it's it's we we call it a nonlinear thing, it's it's like a good heuristic. Can you do these things and do them often? And I'll end on this point here, and that is the reason we want that in a group of people or a team is we want what they used to call a shared mental model of how to plan, right? So when you have that, you reduce the energy load that people have and trying to figure out what they're gonna do next. They they have a process to go through, right? But those processes have to be informed by first principles. And I think that's what John Boyd's real OODA loop sketch and his work provides us is if you understand this at a at a decent level, you can create methods that help you deal with the context you're in.

Alex Vohr:

Yes. So what you know, what the the the the Musock playbook, if you will, that all Marine Expeditionary units, you know, have as just part of their kit, and then they polish them through training is is a it's it's just a it's a it's a framework for planning that allows everybody to wrestle with the with the the problems that they need to wrestle for, like any of the mission sets that they have out there, whether it be a raid or a trap mission or you know, vessel boarding search and seizure, you have everything that you kind of need to think about, but there are no solutions within that. You're creating the solution based upon the model that you have. And planning in general, I know you guys talk a lot about, you know, that about orientation, which is, you know, obviously the most interesting part of the uh Boyd Zoodaloop. And if you think about it, what planning, the real value of planning is what it does for your orientation. It builds an understanding of your environment and the competition, and also an understanding of your own capabilities and shortfalls, right? That serve you well when you go into execution and things change. It allows you to pivot quickly quicker than anybody else. And it'll also allow your orientation to be closer to reality than perhaps it otherwise would be if you hadn't gone through the planning process, right? Because there's always a gap there. We're always trying to reconcile the gap between what the truth is, if you will, and what our perceptions are in orientation.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera:

No, absolutely. There's a uh let's let's anchor on orientation because I think this is critical. There's there's so one thing we do is we try to put a boundary around the system we're looking at. That way we can talk about that system in particular. So when we talk about the ootaloop of an individual, and there's they're all fractals, right? So we there's many, many ootaloops going on in our every part of our body. Yes. But when we put that container around something, it makes it a little bit easier to have that conversation. When we do that for an organization, it's a little bit different because there are no there is no genetic heritage, right? There's no common I mean you could say that the individuals have genetics. They do. But yeah, but the organization doesn't. The organization doesn't, right. So we have to be cautious. And I think Boyd was moving towards that when he was talking about uh you know harmonization, agility, uh intent. Moose, is that correct?

Mark McGrath:

Yeah. Organic design for command and control, conceptual sp yeah. I mean, those are the these are things that would keep emerging with him because these these were these were living organisms, these weren't machines.

Alex Vohr:

Yeah. I thought it was interesting what you just said about, you know, you got multiple, you got tons and tons of oodaloops turning, you know, and that's in my book I call that nested oodle loops, right? I mean, you have an upper level oodle loop within an organization, and then you have groups within that organization, they're all turning their own oodle loops, and then all the way down to the individual. And, you know, the other term that is important, I think, here that you mentioned is is is the term harmonization, because that's what that's what uh individual, that's what organizations do. That's what leadership tries to do is get an organization harmonized, everybody kind of pulling in the same direction. Elon Musk said, you know, if you think about an organization, you think about it like like vectors, vectors have both thrust and direction, and he tries to get all those vectors pointed and kind of thrusting in the same direction. That's harmonization.

Mark McGrath:

Well, it's it's it's a fractal scaling of orientation. Those oodle loops, I think, are downstream of of orientation, and oodle loop can't occur unless there's uh that that's a function of orientation. So when we when we teach it, and and as we understand Boyd and as we sift through the archives and everything else, it it keeps coming back that orientation can't be reduced to something that just appears neatly on a graphic. That orientation is actually something that's a shaping agent for how we sense make and how we see reality and and what it is that we observe. But it also directly it's the repository of all of our biases and all of our emotions and psychological state, and in addition to the five things that that Boyd said, most importantly, that ability to destroy and create, analyze and synthesize, which in turn is how we form hypotheses and we test those actions and then we loop those back through through learning. That's I think is the biggest disconnect with when the OODA loop is reduced and it's put in a linear formulaic template that looks great for like a big box consultant to come in, but in the practical reality of war fighting or trendfall trading or or or being a special needs parent or whatever it is, it doesn't really hold up because the environment gets a vote, and the environment or the enemy gets a vote. And those things are complex adaptive systems, they're nonlinear, they're unpredictable, and they're uncertain. Yeah.

Alex Vohr:

If you think that you know, the orientation, everything in the OODA loop really probably exists, and I hadn't really given this much thought, but I think it really exists in there to massage orientation, if you will, right? Because you orient and then you make that decision, and that decision is a hypothesis, you test the validity of your hypothesis, and and and that basically is saying my orientation is showing me this, therefore I think this will work. You test it through action, you incorporate that feedback back into your observations, which shape your observations, but also change your orientation, hopefully moving it closer to reality, right? That's what you're doing. And and you can build speed through that sometimes by by short-circuiting a deliberate decision process through your implicit path across the top of the loop, right? Which also there again shapes your your observation. If you see, if your orientation tells you you should be looking for this in this particular problem, that shapes your observation and sh and and necks down the data and information that you're you're bringing into your OODA loop. But none of that stuff can happen unless your ODA loop is turning, right? So you always have to be deciding and acting and taking feedback in. If you're not, you're not learning and your orientation's not improving, right?

unknown:

Yeah.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera:

So I think a good analogy of that is you you watch little babies when they explore the world, right? They're trying to make sense of the world with that they're touching things and put them in their mouth because that's their biggest sensory capability, right? And that's what they're doing there is they're updating that orientation by exploring the world of space around them. And then they, you know, they we're very slow to adapt as humans, by the way, or learn or build that orientation. You know, other animals come out and they can start running. Whereas we, you know, we can't do anything. We're pretty useless for the most part. So that that experience you have as a child or a baby, you're you're creating a world model, your orientation by by using your senses to figure out what's going on, right? Right. And primarily later on your eyes take over and you start to see, hey, that's a square, that's a box, that's hot, that's cold, and you can start to see that. But you don't know that um what when you know when you come out of mom's womb, right? It takes some time to build up that orientation. Same thing is true with the organization. When we build an organization, there's no common, I hate to use mental model, I'll use that for now. But when we work with teams and organizations, we're trying to help them understand. I'll use strategy or a product right now, is that strategy is a representation of the external world. And if you don't have that, you don't have a strategy, right? You've you just got words. So what we encourage folks to do is build an internal model or internal map of the external world for the organization. Now, there are many methods out there that are actually built off of John Boyd's work, one being worldly mapping, which is a fantastic way to do uh understand the external environment. There are other methods that are emerging that are very similar to worldly mapping and some that are built off energy maneuverability theory from John Boyd as well. But as an organization, that strategy needs to be shared, that orientation needs to be shared. And this gets into commanders, you know, commander's intent, mission command, and all that other stuff that that uh is built into this. That means that as a leader, um going back to your Elon Musk example, he has to continue continually provide a story or a narrative that gets those vectors going in a similar direction. I think Moose, you have a great uh um image of that. I don't know if you have it available right now.

Mark McGrath:

It's less it's less automation and templates and SOPs and things like that. And it's more intuition, as Boyd would say, finger, finger spits and good fuel. How do how does that implicit guidance, how does that, how does that empowerment from everybody in the organization having a shared understanding or having uh an intersection at some point of their orientation? How do they develop those those nonverbal cues, those other things that are created as they interact with their environment in a high trust mission command environment? That that's that's not automated. That's not because everything is constantly flowing, everything's constantly changing, but that intuition comes from that orientation, comes from that interaction. It does. Not from automation.

Alex Vohr:

I think finger spits and grafuls is interesting because it's I I also think it's it's highly domain dependent. I mean, we typically think about that fingertip feel for what is going to happen next. Okay. And you build that fingertip feel as an individual for what's going to happen next based upon a tremendous amount of experience that you might have in a particular domain. And that's why guys like uh Rommel, for example, in World War II, who had been fighting since World War I, you know, was a platoon commander and a company commander during World War I, he kind of had an intuitive feel for the battlefield. Or maybe somebody like um, you know, and anybody who grows up in a in a business environment around a family business where their family was doing, you know, this this thing and they were helping out as a teenager down there or listening to their father talk at the dinner table about how things went in that business, they've got such a leg up on everybody else because they just have an intuitive sense of what's coming next. Organizations can build the same thing if they're in it for a long enough period of time, right? They can build that as an organization, understanding the way certain things are going to behave in both the environment or with the competition.

Mark McGrath:

Aaron Powell I feel like when you're describing that and you say terms like tremendous amount of experience or family business, you're talking about orientation and how differentiated orientation could produce speed, but speed in and of itself will be highly dependent on how I'm how I'm oriented. Aaron Powell We might we might argue that Blockbuster was really fast. They were just going really fast in the wrong direction.

Alex Vohr:

Aaron Powell That's right. That's right. It wasn't their their their uh the speed that they were had was was not it wasn't consequential to the environment, if you will, right? They were miss they were misaligned, they were misoriented. For some reason they weren't taking the feedback cues or they were missing something that they did they just flat out didn't see that other people could see, right? And that this this was headed into a dead end. There might be other reasons for it. You know, Kodak Film kept producing Kodak Film in light of the fact that digital was coming out. But the reason they did that is because they were making it.

Mark McGrath:

Because they couldn't reorient.

Alex Vohr:

Right. And also they didn't want to reorient. There were some there were some uh uh bad incentives in terms of the profit motives because they were making a lot of money selling film. I mean, I think that's the same thing. They didn't want to walk away from selling film, you know.

Mark McGrath:

I mean, I think this is what we you know when we when we really look at Boyd, when we dig in those archives and we read those books and we see the things that he has in there, and you look at his margin notes in books that are not Jomony and not Sun Tzu and not Clausewitz and not Julian Corbett, and you're looking at Brian Goodwin, Ponch mentioned, or Alan Watts or Tayard Deschardin, and he's talking about, you know, quantum mechanics and uncertainty, entropy, biology, evolutionary biology, you know, that that's that's an organic whole. That's a completely different that that's a completely different take than something that would empower me to thrive in a predictable linear environment where a circular speed driven OODA loop would would might might help me. But if I'm disoriented, if my orientation is Off, it doesn't matter. It's it's I'm I'm gonna have uh dissonance from reality and I'm gonna be defeated ultimately.

Alex Vohr:

Trevor Burrus Right. Yeah. You know what is interesting about Boyd that he did cast his net widely, right? He read he didn't just focus on military topics. He obviously spread out and and tried to bring a lot of material in. And you know, I know guys like uh I mean Ian Brown's new book has done a tremendous service, I think, to anybody who's interested in Boyd by by grabbing a lot of that material and putting it toward the point where it's accessible, where you don't need to go to the Marine Corps University archives to find that stuff, right?

Mark McGrath:

Well, Franzo Singa, you know, in Science, Strategy, and War, I mean, there's a whole entire section on complexity and complex adaptive systems. I mean, that was a that was a c one of the cornerstones of his uh of his work. And I think that if you know they say, you know, I don't know if it's true or not, but like if if Boyd had written a book, which he didn't do by design, but but if if Boyd had written a book, it would have been something along the lines of what Osinga came out. But that that that complexity angle and that sound understanding of destruction creation, I think, is a really big differentiator from how reductionist UDA is understood by most, because they don't understand complex adaptive systems. They don't uh they don't understand destruction creation. I mean, we we constantly get bombarded with people that tell us we don't.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera:

I gotta ask this question. So you were so you're at Sam's, correct? Is it Saw? Okay. So y you know, in the very smart people go through courses there. Uh, you know, I I went through uh Montgomery and then through here at Norfolk for uh two. What what I saw is you get these brilliant people in there that think they know and they and maybe they do understand complex adaptive systems. Maybe I'm just a knucklehead. But it wasn't until I read Franz O'Singer's book where I started to go, okay, yeah, I need to look into this, and that's how I came across Kinevin and how I worked with Dave Stowden and and dove into that space. But not a lot of folks are interested in this. Uh they they just don't find interest in in trying to figure out how things work. Now I think that has to shift today. You have no choice now. It's in order to be more human, you I hate to say it, I believe you need to be more aware of how complex adaptive systems work. Why is that? Because AI is about to take all that ordered oodaloop, that that linear oodaloop approach, it's about to do everywhere for you, which means your space is limited now, right? Where you can and it's it's actually good for humans to be in that space where we're looking for novelty. But my question to you is is going back to your time at Jaws. That's okay. I can't believe I said Jaws. It doesn't exist. Jaws is something else in the in the You know, we got a Navy officer.

Mark McGrath:

He's not he's not as well versed as our acronyms.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera:

No, no, yeah. Uh but going back to that time period, what was it like bringing concepts like network-centric warfare, complex adaptive systems thinking, spiral dynamics, I think was going on at that time as well.

Alex Vohr:

Well, I'll tell you, you know, what we did at the School of Advanced Warfighting, which was really, you know, an interesting, certainly a fan a fantastic program, but what we we took a historical case study type approach. And you know, the advantages to a case study type approach is obviously prior experience is one of the elements of orientation. You're obviously not going to get a whole bunch of prior experience for in war fighting for the most part, fortunately, because we're not fighting very often. So we took a historical case study approach starting with the American Revolution and coming all the way forward. And then we interspersed it throughout the year with about six different uh war fighting problems or planning problems that we ran. Some of which were we had assistance from the Marine Corps uh MagTAF staff training program, and some of which we did as our own individually created planning problems. But one of the things that the the course was not is it wasn't tremendously dynamic. So as new information and new things started to come in, like you were talking about, we didn't necessarily flex and take a lot of look at those type things because we had a curriculum that was fairly set that we were running our students through. And we obviously adjusted the curriculum over time, but the curriculum wasn't as dynamic and reacting to what was going on today, you know? And I think that that's a problem you always have when you when you design curriculums and during um OIF and especially once things shifted to insurgency, a lot of the Marine Corps schools made some quick adjustments to be more relevant, to bring in more counterinsurgency type material into the programs. But you do that to a certain extent at at your own peril because as you develop a strong academic program over time, you don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, right? But there were people talking about this, and there were people coming in. And like I said, a big, a big advocate of that stuff who was active in the Marine Corps schools at that point, even after he retired, was General Van Riper, and he came in and brought a lot of that stuff in. So there were certainly those discussions, and our command and staff college sometimes experimented with that stuff one group, and they they'd have them plan using some of these like systemic uh design type approaches to things that as opposed to our more traditional approaches, but we just weren't that flexible with the classroom material. It's also interesting what you say about having a lot of smart people, but they're not interested in learning, you know. I listened to the pr the new provost of Dartmouth College talk the other day, and he said that one one of the problems we have in our universities right now is that our our academic are the uh our the faculty is very sure of themselves from uh from an education perspective. They're sure that they know the truth and they're giving it to the students as as opposed to being unsure and always learning and always open to learning. Instead, the it's become very closed, right? They've closed their OODA loop to outside influence, if you will, right? And uh I thought that was an interesting thing to hear.

Mark McGrath:

I might push back a little bit. I say they've closed off their orientation, they're not reorienting. Right.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera:

But but the feedback, but but Moose, the point about information flowing into the orientation. Remember, new information must flow into it to update it. You can do two things. You can act to change the world, or you can update your orientation. The way you act to change the world includes shutting down new information. It includes shutting down new information. I can cancel you, I can ignore you, I can call you whatever, right? I can do those things. In order to update orientation, you need access to greater information flow, right? It has to be done. So it is an outside end bottom-up thing. Control is outside and bottom-up, right? You need access to new information.

Alex Vohr:

Yeah, I I agree. And I think that that oftentimes is is is what one of the problems that you sometimes run into in planning, right? Because remember how I said planning is time constrained. And so oftentimes we'd run students through planning problems, or I was with the MagTAF staff training program. We'd run through MEF, MEF, MEF um command groups through planning exercises, and they'd be so focused on getting the product ready for the general that day, whether it was a mission analysis brief or a course of action brief, that they wouldn't take an intel the daily intelligence update up update. See what I'm saying? So they they would close themselves off to the new intelligence update coming, which is all new information about what's going on with the enemy, so they could take that time to focus on getting the brief ready. See what I'm saying, which is really counterintuitive.

Mark McGrath:

They're not reorienting. They're not reorienting. And then then because their orientation is misaligned or disharmonized from reality, a smaller, more agile, that's where speed does kill, because someone that's properly oriented now is empowered to have speed kill because their orientation is more accurate. So something like Khan Academy can crush a university that's more concerned with selling football tickets or DEI slots or whatever versus actual learning. Whereas Khan Academy, smaller, less money, whatever it is, you know, a dude with a camera and a YouTube can defeat a system like that because his orientation is dissonant from the uh the mainline academia, which empowers them, therefore, to also be faster. And because they're disoriented, they they speed could never be in their repertoire anyway. They don't have a repertoire. Right. And that's that's that's the other part of Boyd, I think that's critical. Again, these things are downrange of orientation, variety, rapidity, harmony, and initiative. Having that repertoire is if I don't have that, I don't have that optionality, if I'm closed off to that, as you say, I'm going to, I'm going to implode. I can have all the money, I can have all the capital, I can have all the toys, and I can still lose. Just like Boyd talks in that famous transcript of patterns of conflict at the Marine Corps Staff College, talking about how we had every toy, we had every weapon, we had the best everything, and we got our asses kicked, and we didn't even and we still don't honestly talk about what actually happened, because we just slap a new coat of paint on the old strategy. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

Alex Vohr:

Well, you know what what's interesting? I mean, that certainly was what you're talking about. So Boyd was obviously talking about Vietnam there. And Viet, you know, the Vietnam experience combined with the fact that there was a very high sense of urgency because the Soviet Union was still considered to be a threat out there, and we felt like we needed to get ourselves ready for that was what really drove the you know the the um uh the introspection, not just in the Marine Corps, but across the entire DOD in the late 80s, and what was result that resulted in the Marine Corps's new warfighting doctrine. One of the things that you guys uh talk about a lot is that this difference between speed and then accuracy of orientation, right? Um one of the things that I I talk about in this is I think in my book is that there's there's three ways to have uh good outcomes. Okay. The first way you can have a good outcome is you can make more correct decisions than your opponent. And that it sounds like a massive statement of the obvious. And I I defined a correct decision meaning given the information you have at the time, you make you make the decision that's most contextually correct with the information that you have. And if you think about it in that nonlinear distribution, if you make correct decisions and they're even if they're linear, and the probability is that that lands within that standard deviation, you're good. So you can make more correct decisions. Number two is you can make decisions and act faster than your competition, obviously, which is basically seizing the initiative. All of a sudden the competition in your environment begins to react to you, you create your own environment. So sometimes, you know, a bad decision executed with great force and speed is better than in the right decision later, to paraphrase, you know, I don't know who that was. Patent. And then the four patent, okay. And then the third way that you have good outcomes is you're just lucky, right? You can make bad decisions, you can go slow, and you can just be lucky.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera:

Let's expand on this because this is this is Andy Duke stuff, and I love it. You get into resulting and that's yeah, yeah. This is amazing. Right. So unpacking the OODA loop through Andy Duke's lens of resulting, and it's not her idea of resulting, by the way, but she she really made it popular. The idea of luck, this is important. In a complex adapt environment, a complex environment, you have to separate decisions from outcomes, right? What does that mean? It means your planning process, the simulation, the course of action selection, everything that you did. Once you actually took action on the environment and you see what feedback you get, it could be positive, a good outcome. You have to separate that from the decision process, right? So that that whole process of the OD loop. How how well are we planning? How's psychological safety? How's our strategy, right? Why is that again? Because that luck. And this is why many man managers write management books and leaders write leadership books is they're lucky. They're lucky, right? So you cannot repeat what they're doing because they're re they're telling you you do these magical things over here, and this will be the outcome. And that's bullshit. The truth is you have to learn how to separate those two. And I give a great example, or I give an example to my kids all the time. You can watch on the road, people are always making horrible decisions, texting and driving, right? But their outcomes are generally fantastic. They get to the location safely. So therefore, everybody should text and drive, right? That that's that's where so no, you don't do that. Yeah. But that's what we have to train organizations when you do a proper debrief, you have to look back and understand are we lucky? Right. Or do we what processes do we need to improve upon?

Alex Vohr:

And you can't control luck. You can control the contextual correctness of your decisions, and you can control how fast you're doing things. You can at least improve the the potential speed across the UD loop of your organization. You can do those things. Um, and the only thing you can do vis-a-vis luck or probability or chance or whatever you want to call it is you can prepare yourself to the results of either very good luck or very bad luck.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera:

Yeah, yeah. And and you know, on the on the speed topic again, my my concern with using speed is going f and we brought this up with uh you know Kodak and Blockbuster. But the point behind speed is tempo is good too. Tempo is you want you want that. You it means you want a higher quality orientation. That is the goal, that's the way I look at it. I think Moose looks at the same way. And that means our strategy has to be well communicated because the the environment uh go ahead, Moose.

Mark McGrath:

Well, yeah, I was gonna say too, that's like where where you bring in words like accuracy and correctness. I mean, if I followed destruction and creation, I shouldn't be looking for accuracy and correctness because I know that they don't exist. Because that's what Boyd told us when he fused uh Heisenberg with with thermodynamics and uh with incompleteness. So I I know that I can never be accurate. I have to be effective, and the only reason I can stay effective is by reorienting, not by so so like they're the correct answer or the accurate answer is fleeting because everything's in a constant state of flux.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera:

Let me try this with you, Moose and Alex. So Alex, you write about simple and complex systems. So you know, so we talk about ordered systems and unordered systems. So exploration to exploitation. To me, exploitation is is a quicker bootleop, right? That's that's that's once we get an understanding of what we're trying to do. Exploration is going to be more about orientation. It's that complex space we're working in. So invoking or you know, thinking about uh the Kinevin framework, we're going from the complicated to the complex. You know, there's a phase transition there. We want to use a higher quality orientation um in in that space. If we go and we sometimes we want to probe quickly, get rapid feedback, but we want that tempo in there so we can explore. And once we understand it, and once we go to manufacturing, if you will, or production, then we want a higher quality or a faster OODA loop, which we get. And that's what Boyd picked up, and this is my view, that he picked up from TPS, the Toilet Production System. And he pointed out a lot of the lean folks had it wrong, by the way, uh, if you go to the archives, which is a fantastic thing to look at. So y you know, we what in a complex environment, I lean more towards the uh tempo over speed.

Alex Vohr:

No, I I agree with you. Speed speed is not a good word. It's I call it in my book relative tempo, and it's it's relative to to the environment and to your competition, right? And I don't know if you guys saw the old um do you remember the the old Bugs Bunny cartoons where you used to have the boxer and you'd have either Dafty Duck or Bugs Bunny out there, I can't remember which one, and they were doing all these spins and thrusts and parries and jabs and all this stuff, and none of it made any difference against the against the destroyer. He punched him with one punch. That was the only tempo that was relative, right? That was the only tempo that mattered was his because it w all everything else was was just speed for the sake of speed, which but it but it was it was inconsequential, it didn't make any difference.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera:

Now that's a good good uh not everybody remembers Bugs Bunny, though.

Alex Vohr:

That's no no no that's old school.

Mark McGrath:

Yeah, it'd be a Gen X or or older, probably. Yeah. Unless you were my kids, because I I made sure my kids watched the reruns.

Alex Vohr:

I think that guy that he fought was called the clubber or something like that. I remember that, yeah.

Mark McGrath:

Yeah.

Alex Vohr:

But but no, that that's what's important. And you're right, Mark, I I don't think it can be uh you're right. You you can never be a hundred percent correct. There's always going to be that that, you know, you you have to decide when a decision, when to make that decision, when you think your orientation is enough to shift. That's why one of the things that Boyd never talked about, okay, but this is something that I I've suggested, is that I think the center of gravity of the OODA loop, okay, is the transition between orientation and decision. Because that is what gives you, that's what gives you, if you will, motion across the oota loop or progress across the loop. You've gotten to the point where your orientation is such that you feel comfortable and transitioning from orientation to decide, and that transition is where the center of gravity is. And when you begin to get inside of an opponent's uh OODA loop or you're confusing them or they're beginning to feel overwhelmed, what happens with them is they become bogged down in orientation and they fail to make that shift. So what you're really doing is by fogging up their orientation or confusing their orientation, you're actually attacking their center of gravity through a critical vulnerability. And that center of gravity is now they have the inability to transition from orient to decide. See what I'm saying? And uh that's why it's it's a concept that I introduced, some certainly something that Boyd never talked about. I'm not even sure how much he talked about centers of gravity in general.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera:

Well, let's let's talk about this. Uh I'm gonna I'm gonna take the approach.

Mark McGrath:

Well, he can I say he did. It was the schwerpunkt. Yeah, that's that's that's uh you know the orientation of the of the unit, of the of the person of the unit. Um that's how he was describing schwerpunkt. That was that was the center of gravity.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera:

Yes. Yeah. So but you're you're just saying it's between O and D. Uh is that correct?

Alex Vohr:

That's the Yes, that's where I think it is. I think uh what I say is it's the tra the center of gravity is your ability to transition from orient to decide.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera:

Okay, I'm gonna I'm gonna pull uh uh some neuroscience on here from the free energy principle on active inference. So again, if you put a bubble around the OODA loop, you know, like like um Chuck Spinney does. And we do it too. We so we put internal states and external states. We don't draw it any different or anything like that. There are there's that pathway that moves from act back to observe, and that's internal. So that is your course of action, that's your planning, uh, your plan. We call it expected free energy, it's future risk, it's a counterfactual. You're basically running a simulation of your orientation and your plan internally and getting feedback. So think of it like an internal red team, if you will. And this is for an agent, so it think of an individual at the moment. Same thing is true with the organization. So the moment you end up taking action on the environment is where you get the most value, right? Because you're already making decisions not to make take any action. You're just you're already making that internal decision, it's just hanging hang kind of hanging out there. And then that's that feedback you get from the environment that is the most valuable thing, right? That's what you and unfortunately in in warfare, we don't want that feedback much, right? We don't I mean, the one way to get feedback in warfare is to go fight a war, right? Uh I mean, uh, we want to avoid that as much as possible. But but that's that's an how an agent, or an agent being a human too, is going to work uh with that action pathway within the framework that Boyd gave us in a sketch and what Chuck Spinney drew in his evolutionary epistemology, right? So I think and you you quote that in in your book too. You talk about Spinney's view of of Boyd's work. I remember reading that in here about it's how a mind operates, right? So that's that's where I kind of differ with you on that. So that schwerpunkt I still think is orientation. Yes. Yeah.

Alex Vohr:

And listen, I one of the things I say in my book about centers of gravity, the only thing that is useful about centers of gravity is what is is they drive discussions like we're having right now. See what I'm saying? They they they they they drive you to to to argue whether the orientation is the center of gravity or whether you know my suggestion that it's just to the right of that, you know, and it's the transition. And those things help you understand both of those better. I mean, when we used to do center of gravity analysis for planning, and we would use the Joe Strange approach, for example, which was, you know, center of gravity, crit critical requirements, critical capabilities, critical uh vulnerabilities, it's a it's a kind of an approach to thinking about it. Um it was all just to learn more about yourself or learn more about the enemy system and to have that discourse that helped everybody's orientation as well, right? And you just want to do that.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera:

So I want to point out something about you just something that you just said. So we'll talk about Dime Phil and Pimisi and things like that and everything you just brought about. Uh most organizations don't know what that means. No. They the military has a pretty good grasp on it. And I think when you're trying to help an organization understand orientation, understand the external environment, close a gap between orientation and the reality, as you put it, or we'll call it minimizing surprise, reducing risk, you ha these tools end up being part of your implicit guidance and control. You learn how to use them just like PDC. Exactly right.

Alex Vohr:

Yeah. SOPs and and processes and all that stuff are part of implicit guidance and control. You're absolutely right. It's shifting stuff that you're doing from your explicit path to your implicit, so you have more time to think in the middle path, right? And I just thought about this.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera:

One of the things we talk about first principles. If you understand first principles, you can build the methods based on the context that you're in to help you improve your orientation. And that's that that's why we, you know, Moose and I talk about this all the time. For an organization to have a map, internal map of the external world, just like the world model movement and artificial intelligence right now is the same thing. That is orientation. That is a yeah. So we want that to happen, but most organizations don't do that. They outsource that, they outsource that to McKenzie. Yep. And McKenzie doesn't do it. Yeah.

Alex Vohr:

They don't even think about that. What I what and that's what I've tried to do in my book. I said, hey, what does your how does your organization observe? And then how do you take those observations and make sense of them through orientation? What is your decision-making process as your organization? And then how do you turn those decisions into action? So it's a reductionist approach or it's an analysis approach, if you will, of the UDA loop. We're going to analyze it, break it into its component parts. But then you synthanize synthesize it through that kind of leadership stuff, right? Because it's a complex adaptive system. You have to synthesize everything through leadership.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera:

Here's one thing that we've come across. We look at it now through ecological dynamics, the guys that look at complex adaptive systems thinking for sport, they they use the perception action loop. And and if you talk about perception action inside John Boyd's OODA loop, where is it? Well, action's clear, but Perception. Um, so what we do is we kind of frame it out and go, hey, look, those pathways are very, very valuable. In fact, I'll argue that they're more valuable than the phases people call, right? So we don't use them for phases. We use observations as sensory uh organs or your sensory capability to the external world and active as active states or actions as active states. So orientation is that world model, and then decisions kind of go and it's really not that important. But what is important is that implicit guidance control pathway that moves from orient orientation to action. And of course, the one that goes from orient to observe, which is what we call perception, and you get something called predictive processing or Bayesian inference, and you also get something known as active inference when you actually take action and run a simulation, right? So you you have these amazing capabilities that are now tied to evolving sciences in the social science, cognitive science, and neuroscience that John Boyd has already, you know, he already just hate to say discovered, but he made those connections. And we're just saying when you look at the OODA loop through a different lens and not the four phases, but you still got to look at orientation as a swearpunct, you start to see how this connects to sport, how it connects to strategy, building high performance teams, flow states, mental health, right? Counterfactual, storytelling, narrative, mission command, leadership. And I I think where most people are are missing out on this is they still look at it as observe, orient, decide, act. And that's my only challenge. I you know, what do you got there?

Mark McGrath:

Can can I mean this is one of the this is one of the papers that we found schwerpunkt as a dynamic agent that harmonizes tactical action with strategic intentions and focuses them to realize the str uh the strategic aim, which again is all uh a function of orientation. That's why when he says orientation is the schwerpunkt, it's a di the the orientation is a dynamic agent that implicitly guides and controls or shape how I sense, how I test, how I act, uh sorry, yeah, how I decide how I act, how I learn in order to reorient, in order to stay, to stay relevant. Now, downstream of that, if I'm doing that well enough, then I can have speed and then I can then I could defeat my opponents.

Alex Vohr:

Yeah, and and and I think I think the term, you know, we I've used the term center gravity, and and you guys have used the term schwer punk. You know, there it's a schwerpunk is a German word, like finger spits and grafool. It doesn't align directly with what I would consider to be a source of gravity, which is uh a source of strength. I would consider the schwer punk more if I was to identify that. That would be the aiming point of my operation, if I was an operational planner, right? That's the focal point. So they're a little bit different in what in the way we're using those terms, I think, you know. And terminology is important because common terminology helps us all orient faster, you know. Um but anyway, yeah. Very simple.

Mark McGrath:

Well, to be fair, I mean, even the even the acolytes disagree on what he meant on uh a lot of things. I I I I think when we're talking uh about a shattered orientation, if my you know, on on this um uh this piece was about uh isolation. I mean, ultimately when I'm isolated, my oodaloop per se, nested or otherwise, it can't function because I can't orient. That if I if I if if I'm losing, it's not because I'm not fast. I could be really fast. If I'm losing, it's because I'm disoriented. I've been isolated, I've been fixed. The the mismatches have been generated uh to create the friction that stops me from being able to make sense of what's going on, and I'm now rendered irrelevant. Now I'm Kodak, now I'm blockbuster, now I'm the Iraqis in the Gulf War, whatever it is.

Alex Vohr:

Aaron Ross Powell, Jr. Yes. Yeah, running running through the Mootla Ridge, right? Trying to escape to the Mootla Ridge with the Tiger Brigade hammering away at them, right? And an FHC. Something like that.

Mark McGrath:

But I guess I guess it's what what Well, I was going to say some of the things that were omitted from your bibliography are interesting. That I mean, that getting that fix of interaction and isolation, that's this whole entire strategic game. Is how do I you know Oodaloop's sketch doesn't come until he dies, like right before right before John Boyd dies. So everything build everything building up to that, um, that that distillation of his of his work is is suggesting that there's a lot more going on than just mere uh mere speed. But like No, like that's I hear you.

Alex Vohr:

Yeah. And and in in my book, you know, I I agree, you know, and I recognize that Boyd the Oodaloop was kind of wasn't something that it was it was towards the end of his time that he was working, and it But that's what I focused on in my book. That's what I chose to to talk about, right? Well, we've published them a lot, too and uh I think I I didn't say that's go ahead.

Mark McGrath:

I was gonna say, you know, we've published a lot of these images. You know, we when we're in there too, you can see his drawings leading up to the actual final one that we see in the essence of winning and losing, which is published right before he dies. There's there's nothing linear about what he's writing about. There's nothing linear about what he's drawing on any of these legal pads. There's nothing linear about it at all. And if you count the number of arrows, and that includes, you know, inside of orientation, what looks like a Pentagon, if you actually put the arrows in there, I think the number is like 31 or 32. It's it's it's it's it's pretty complex.

Alex Vohr:

It's a lot, there's a lot going on there's a lot. I think one of the problems that people have with with the with the oodle loop, and I I think sometimes perhaps organizations like like the Marine Corps, a lot of people have almost oodle loop fatigue, if you will, right? By the time they've gotten to be a a company grade officer, for example. It's not something it's a theoretical model. So it's very difficult to apply a theoretical model. If anything, what I've tried to do is, you know, on one side you have theory, and on the other end of the spectrum you have dogma. And in between theory and dogma, you have the first things you come up with is maybe like some tactics, techniques, or procedures to try to uh tr to test the theory to see if it works. And then once it looks like it works, that turns into doctrine. And hopefully it never turns into dogma, because dogma is something that you just do without questioning. But what I'm trying to do is give people TTPs, tactics, techniques, and procedures to work with the UDA loop beyond just thinking about it as a theoretical model, right? How do you actually do something with it? How do you think about what it means as an organization to observe, for example? What does how how does your organization make decisions? Sometimes that's important because if you don't understand that, then decisions sometimes don't get made, right? And so that's kind of my that's been my approach to this. But recognizing that it's not linear, you know, that there's a lot of complexity in here too.

Mark McGrath:

Do you think that potentially could isolate people if they get stuck on those formulas and templates and they don't they don't understand it authentically as Boyd was as Boyd was teaching it?

Alex Vohr:

You know, I think so. I I guess so, but I don't really offer templates per se. I just say, hey, let's do it. Let me rephrase.

Mark McGrath:

Let me rephrase. Yeah. If a reductionist understanding of Boyd's work in a linear sense to apply it formulaically or in templated format, which is by and large how most people most people understand it, aren't they aren't they leading to their own undoing, their own unraveling, their own isolation, as Boyd would have described?

Alex Vohr:

I I think I in my book I specifically talk about that in the sense that I talk about the nature of complex adaptive systems and the uncertainty that exists within the world, right? And that we're not a product of ca cause and effect. So this doesn't become plug and play. I just encourage people and organizations to think about how they do each one of those steps. How do I orient, right? How do I get my organization's head around a particular problem and come to some type of consensus that we can move out on, if you will, recognizing it's not going to be perfect. But how do we, how do we, how do we come to our understanding of of of the situation out there? You know, and that's what orientation is. It's it's your worldview of of what you see in the competition and in the environment. And so when I say my approach is reductionist, it what I'm really doing is analyzing the OODA loop. And then, you know, it's up to organizations to synthesize that and bring that all together once they understand the component parts. And it is a reductionist approach in the same way you would reduce a complicated system. You can't reduce a complex system, right? But it's all the tools that we really have at our disposal, right, as human beings. You just have to recognize that uncertainty still exists out there.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera:

I like it. So let me try this. So Boyd wrote uh in the 70s in his interview with the Air Force that I'm your environment, you're in my environment. So we have competing oodaloops, right? So let's take that as a leadership, leader subordinate relationship there, and talk about psychological safety. Leaders' actions, the actions that they take are provide outside information or unfolding circumstances for the subordinate to take into their OODA loop and decide if it's safe or not to bring up new information, right? So that is a that's a complex relationship. It's not, you know, how do I, how am I looking at everybody orienting around here? It's how are my actions affecting those that are in my organization? Yes. And that's the that's a different view than what you said. And that's in my opinion, right? And I think that's what's so hard about this is communicating that to folks that this is not a linear thing. This is more, this is about creating the environment, the conditions, and focusing on the interactions, because we know from complex adaptive systems, is the quality of interactions that matter more than the quality of the individuals. Uh we get that of the Marines too. We know that Dave Snowden is famous for saying this the military takes sub you know, subpar people and makes exceptional teams. We're good at that because we we we focus on the interactions and how that works. But how do you when you take this to an organization and you lay down the linear oodaloop, I I that that's where I kind of get, we got we gotta stop with that.

Mark McGrath:

Add to what Ponch just said, if I may, that I think that I don't disagree with OODA fatigue. I think that ood of fatigue is of the linear, inauthentic Oodaloop that Boyd never drew, never agree with you. Never taught to you. Well, like, for example, if when I go out, uh as I was in uh Los Angeles in October, and I'm training SWAT officers that are pretty solid on linear tactical oodaloop. And and they got it from their marksmanship training, and they know it, and they've heard it. And the shattering of orientations was was was pretty remarkable. And Ponch and I did an episode on this with the with the guy who uh had me out to LA to record on his podcast and then have me spend five hours constructing Oodaloop sketch from the bottom up with uh 13 SWAT officers from uh from all across the state of California. They realized really quickly that they've left a lot on the table. And what they had been trained was a speed dynamic, phased Oodaloop that comes out like a TTP or a format or a template, not an understanding of complex nonlinear situations which they always find themselves in. And it's not that it's not that those things aren't bad, like it's not that immediate action drills and TT, it's not that those things aren't bad. It's just that they're they're not a band-aid or a fix-all for the situations that we're most likely going to be dealing with.

Alex Vohr:

Right. And don't don't get me wrong, I I'm certainly not trying to create a linear linearized linear oodaloop, okay? I recognize and appreciate that complexities there. And that's why I always have the oodaloop sitting on my desk. I think people get fatigue, oodaloop fatigue, because they're like, hey, I've got this. They don't just look at it at the top level, they see the linear system, they're like, hey, this is pretty easy. They don't understand.

Mark McGrath:

Yeah, that's how we're training the Marine Corps. That's how I was trained. I came to these conclusions after I got out. I I had to have my orientation shattered in the civilian world when I left the Marine Corps that sent me on this academic journey that, you know, that I I've been on here with Poncha the last couple years. But when I when I originally started it and I got into Osinga's book and John Robb's work and started interacting with Chet Richards and other things, I realized that what I had been taught in the Marine Corps was a very good baseline thing that gave me a very foundational understanding of how these things might work in a secure environment. But then when you realize that complexity doesn't work that way, well, there's more to the story. And then the more you pull on Boyd, you realize that this guy was way ahead of how he's reduced, even by the Marine Corps.

Alex Vohr:

Right.

Mark McGrath:

The organization that he had more influence on than any other organization.

Alex Vohr:

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: The other thing that's just the truth here, gentlemen, is that the three of us are weirdos, okay? And what I mean by that is that we're interested in this stuff. I'm weird. There's there's a lot of people that are are not, okay? And uh to their detriment. Well, yes, it it it is, and they're just not interested. That's why I mean I know I'm not bracing myself for my book to become a New York Times bestseller, right? It would be cool. But I mean, there just aren't that many people that are that are as interesting. I think it's a catalyst you guys are.

Mark McGrath:

I think it's a catalyst and an invitation to conversation about John Boyd, who's often often misunderstood. And it's uh it's it's not the pie. It's I would position your book as a piece of the pie that's important. Couldn't agree with you more. There's there's I mean, because a lot of the work that Punch and I do, and you've seen this on our on our show, and you've read this in our in our our articles on Substack. I mean, we have people come on that know 0.00 about John Boyd. They know nothing of John Boyd, yet at the same time, they know everything about John Boyd because they're able to understand how environment shapes, how how orientation shapes, it's just inherent to them. You know, and our our argument is when you understand that authentically, you're unleashing and unlocking power that will be geometric on the uh upscale, as Boyd said himself.

Alex Vohr:

Yes. And you know, listen, the difference between training and education, and the difference between prescriptive and and descriptive, you know, education is descriptive and it teaches you how to think. It doesn't tell you what to do or what to think. And that's really what we're talking about here. You're shaping people. You use the OODA loop as a way of how to think about the world. You kind of lay it across the world, it provides context for you to understand what's going on in situations, right? That's where it's most useful. And I just try to take that a level lower and have people consider how their organizations do each one of the steps to include how they incorporate feedback and how they shift things from the explicit to the implicit loop, right? So that's all I'm asking them to do here as part of this, once they understand the broader thing. But it's also interesting to me exactly what somebody said earlier. You take all these different people, how do you get the Marine Corps, all the vectors in the Marine Corps pull pushing together and in in in the same direction in a short amount of time with people? So there's certain ways that organizations run as complex adaptive systems that are highly effective. You need to think about that as well.

Mark McGrath:

Yeah, no, no argument there. Yeah. I had a thought and I well, then the other thing is too I mean, this is also too why Boyd never wrote a book because it just kept it's it's just constantly changing and changing. And people, you know, Ponch has already written a book, and people ask us all the time, like, when are you guys gonna write a book? I mean, that's why the Substack exists and the podcast exists because it's too damn hard, man. Well, not only that, we're I think that what the way we position we following Boyd, who wrote 39 different versions of patterns of conflict, is that the the briefing, because because because Ponch and I are learning things every day. Like we're we're we're we're learning and we're adding to it. Now I think maybe someday we'll we'll never catch Boyd, but maybe we'll get close.

Alex Vohr:

Yeah, if you look in my book, I I just purely speculate as to why he didn't read a book and I per write a book, and I personally think that his thought his thoughts were advancing and changing so quickly. And it it takes time. You almost have to say, okay, I'm gonna cut off here, I'm gonna write the book, you know? And and and you're almost you're almost polishing what you've already learned rather than continuing to learn.

Mark McGrath:

Yeah, right on.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera:

I think there's a saying out there that captures why Boyd didn't write a book. It's it's goes something like this we know more than we could say, we can say more than we can write down, right? That's that's that's important. And then in this type of context, it's the conversations. Uh to me, when you listen to uh Boyd speak with folks, it's the interaction that helps him learn. And it's the same thing when you're when you're a student or excuse me, a teacher, you're on stage or you're you're you're leading a group of folks, you're learning as you're doing it. It's the interaction that happens, right? This goes back to experiential learning as a facilitator. That's the environment you put people in, is we're going to go somewhere. Um, I don't know where we're going, but I know how to get there. I'll get us there, right? That's right. Um, and that's a different it's it's an uncomfortable feeling. And I think Boyd was a master of that. And you talked to Mary about this and how he would command a room and have conversations and wake up in the middle of the night and have, you know, call Chet at two in the morning about math problems. That's a different that's a different thing. You can't capture that in a book.

Alex Vohr:

Yeah. He called he called Van Riper a lot too, and uh General Van Riper would say, you know, his his his family would say, Hey, it's that guy who's calling you, you know, and he'd spend hours with him on the phone. He'd call him at all hours of the day and night, you know, to bounce ideas off of him. And what was Boyd doing there? I mean, he was throwing out a hypothesis based upon his orientation, taking that feedback and changing his orientation as a result, right? That's what he was doing, you know.

Mark McGrath:

Uh um, I think General Van Riper, who I I'm strongly biased towards, he led us on our graduation run at OCS when I was at OCS.

unknown:

Yeah.

Mark McGrath:

When he was mixitic. But I I think that General Van Riper also showed how these theories can be applied really effectively in Millennium Challenge 2002.

Alex Vohr:

Mm-hmm. Yep. And I'm certainly familiar with that and what he did. You know, at that time, that was just uh that was when I was I was at the MagTaf staff training program, which teaches MEF level staffs how to fight, if you will, right? And and at that point, what I was actually involved with is I was I was heavily involved with getting one meth ready, and then I went out with them uh as part of the combat assessment team and and uh embedded in the staff and fought all the way uh to Baghdad with those guys and back. So that was pretty interesting stuff. But I was aware of uh what was going on with Millennium Challenge as well. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

Mark McGrath:

We appreciate you coming and uh having a having a discussion with us. It's fantastic. Yes. Well, I really enjoy it. We help Iron Sharpens iron, you're whatever the term is.

Alex Vohr:

I think what you guys are doing is just is just really tremendous. Uh keeping John Boyd's uh um ideas alive and also helping organizations with them. I think that's really fantastic. And uh I've watched a lot of listened to a lot of your podcasts and will continue to do so.

Mark McGrath:

Aaron Powell And we want our listeners to understand that that what you've produced and created is a great piece of the big puzzle that people have to put together to really understand Boyd, because it it he's much more complex, as we know. Uh and we would not classify your work as bad boyd. And if you've got bad boyd, there's a lot of bad boyd out there that comes from uh people with stars on their collars.

Alex Vohr:

I I I well I had a little bit of a moment just as I was publishing. I said, holy smokes, I don't want to get categorized that way, you know? No. Listen, I I also think the last thing I'll say is I think that the the Marine Corps still maintains its focus on this, and and one way I would say an example of that is the fact that the current Commandant's reading list has both of Ian Brown's books on it and the Commandant put mine on there as well this year. I think that they're trying to keep this alive and and the thinking is certainly within the Marine Corps.

Mark McGrath:

So lots of perspective, so it's good stuff. We'll stop recording, but Alex, uh Sempre Fidelis Beat Army, and thanks for uh coming on board with us. All right, guys.

Alex Vohr:

Thank you for the time. I really appreciate it. Great to meet you guys in person. Really enjoyed it. Nice meeting you. Thank you. Okay, Sally. Take care. Yep, see ya.

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