Can Boyd be implemented?
by chet ~ March 13th, 2008. Filed under: Boyd's Theories, Business Strategy.“Do you know,” a friend recently asked me, “of any successful implementation of Boyd’s theory in which a business deliberately set out to implement it and was able to document the results? And don’t tell me about Toyota because that was fitted back into the theory long after the fact.”
The simple answer is no, I don’t. It was an odd question because this person has installed elements from Boyd’s work in many of his clients’ operations.
What Boyd tried to do
The reason that there hasn’t been a complete and documented implementation is that Boyd is synthesizing a method of thinking about conflict, not a prescribing a system for conducting it. That is why, for example, he talks about a pure “category” called “maneuver conflict” but does not ever use the term “maneuver warfare,” which is a way to fight that largely (but not exclusively) draws upon the theoretical construct, maneuver conflict. You cannot implement “maneuver conflict,” but you can, as the Marines are doing, implement maneuver warfare.
Here’s another example: In Organic Design, Boyd writes about “appreciation and leadership” as preferred alternatives to “command and control.” To influence an organization to operate inside competitors’ OODA loops, you need both appreciation and leadership, but here’s the trick — never at the same time. What does this mean? More important, how do you use them in your organization? Boyd doesn’t tell you because that depends on the specifics of the organization: What works for me might fail for you. But if you mull over Boyd’s logic, compare it to your own experience, think about pros and cons, and most critically, experiment (recall “hypothesis and test” in the OODA “loop” sketch), you will come up with ideas for making them work — implementing them.
Practices and climates
I know this sounds like an excuse, but bear with me for a minute while we re-examine Toyota. As everybody who has looked at the Toyota Production System knows, it consists of practices that can be implemented with mathematical precision: layout of cells, arrangement of cells, number of kanban, range of takt times, optimal leveling sequences (heijunka), etc. Yet, even now, some 35 years after the Toyota Production System became operational, few other companies that have succeeded in implementing it to anything like Toyota’s level.
The reason, as Jeffrey Liker points out in The Toyota Way,
The paperwork is minimal. The efficiency is maximal. And the employees themselves [as opposed to a centralized production control system] are completely in charge.
That is, if the employees didn’t commit to making the system work, it wouldn’t move at all. The Toyota Way is why they do it for Toyota and don’t for most other manufacturing companies. The other important point about the Toyota Way is that the system is always getting better at whatever it does. As one Toyota exec put it, whatever we do this year is baseline for next year. A lot of companies talk continuous improvement (kaizen), but few achieve it. Their organizational climates are why.
Finding your “Way”
What Boyd did was to look into the question of what sorts of “ways” work. If you run Murphy Manufacturing and are going to create “Murphy’s Way,” what should it have in it to be effective? The Boyd 101 answer is that it should include concepts corresponding to the four German words from Certain to Win — Schwerpunkt, Fingerspitzengefuehl, Auftragstaktik, and Einheit – and that it should foster the “ingredients” that he put into his “Theme for Vitality and Growth”: Insight, Orientation, Harmony, Agility, and Initiative (Patterns, 144). You can find all of these in Liker’s description of the Toyota Way and in basic Marine Corps maneuver warfare doctrine as expressed in MCDP 1, Warfighting, and MCDP 6, Command and Control.
You can also find them in Sun Tzu, which is no accident because Boyd was more heavily influenced by Sun Tzu than by any other strategist, and the style of Patterns of Conflict is modeled after The Art of War. So ask yourself this: Can you implement Sun Tzu?
If you can’t implement it, what good is it?
What you can do with both Boyd and Sun Tzu is internalize them: Study the underlying ideas, deeply understand the philosophy, change it where it doesn’t apply, instill it in your organization, create — through thought, word, and deed — an effective climate, and then implement practices that will work for you.
It’s important to keep reminding yourself that the essence of Boyd is snowmobiles — developing the ability to deconstruct existing dogmas, positions, assumptions, orientations, and mindsets, create new ones, and employ them effectively under time-induced stress. This is not as simple as it sounds, because unless you take effective countermeasures (Boyd gives you some ideas in Patterns, charts 118-125) time-related stress leads to a build-up of menace, uncertainty, and mistrust. Under this debilitating atmosphere, building snowmobiles or much of anything else becomes very difficult.
As I noted in the snowmobile post, Boyd concluded the Discourse with:
A loser is someone (individual or group) who cannot build snowmobiles when facing uncertainty and unpredictable change;
whereas
A winner is someone (individual or group) who can build snowmobiles, and employ them in an appropriate fashion, when facing uncertainty and unpredictable change.
Develop that ability and you’ve implemented Boyd.
March 14th, 2008 at 12:59 am
Chet, excellent post! I’ve always felt oddly frustrated by the “snowmobile’ example, but you’ve really brought the core of the idea to light here.
March 14th, 2008 at 2:38 pm
Chet,
Wow, exellent post! Keep up the good work. This is a nice companion piece to Certain to Win.
I can’t wait to crack open your other books.
Best regards,
Carl
March 14th, 2008 at 4:42 pm
Has anyone done any thought or works on how Boyd’s work can be applied to politics? The concepts could prove very valuable within political campaigns.
March 14th, 2008 at 4:59 pm
Lenni:
Yes, there are plenty of people who have thought about it, although I do not know if there has been much formalized thoughts regarding it. I do know Robert Greene of The 48 Laws of Power has incorporated OODA into his observations heavily, although when reading his latest books, he doesn’t point that out very much. He talks more about OODA in his blog posts which are excellent, and has acknowledged that boyd had a very heavy influence on him.
Once you read one of Greene’s books, you realize how much of this stuff is related to Boyd’s work. The good thing about Greene is he gives tons of political and social examples. While I wouldn’t say he rely’s on Boyd totally, as he uses many, many other war philosophers and other historical evidence to prove his points.
James Fallon of The Atlantic is currently doing a running commentary on the ‘08 elections, and he has written about OODA.
I would say check out http://www.powerseductionandwar.com His books would be an exllent compliment to Mr. Chet Richards’ works. Read them both, not just one or the other. Greene talks about other issues related to strategy as well and is VERY comprehensive. You can get his books of Amazon.
Carl
March 20th, 2008 at 5:02 pm
Sir-
You hit it on the head - organizational culture is the key. I am a US Army Officer currently writing about, and trying to push within my organization, an organizational culture shift which will delegate authority for action down to lower levels, among other things, thus enabling quicker OODA loops. I am continually suprised on how many officers I encounter have never even heard of John Boyd. I recommend “The Mind of War” and “Certain to Win” to every young officer I meet.
By way of answering the initial question, I would offer the following.
I deployed to Afghanistan in 2004 and was part of an organization that embraced many of the themes that Boyd talked about - mainly decentralization and focusing on defeating the enemy (as opposed to destroying the enemy). We had a great deal of success (evidenced by the historic Afghan elections that were conducted on our shift.
By contrast, I recently returned from Iraq, where I saw us struggling mightily because we focused too much on destroying the enemy under an oppressive centralized command and CONTROL (emphasis on control) structure. You have only to turn on the TV to see the results.
Keep up the great work!
TJ
March 21st, 2008 at 5:20 am
TJ,
Yes it can be implemented. I did in my company commands, particularly in my HHC of an armor battalion, which I had for 18 months. Read about it more in my book Raising the Bar. Also, please email me at donald.vandergriff@hqda.army.mil, and I will send you a copy.
Don
March 24th, 2008 at 7:24 am
Since I was the person who asked this question, let me say that although our firm does implement many of Boyd’s concepts, it isn’t because we we necessarily try to do so. Our Integrated Decision Management process was developed at Stanford and SRI independently of Boyd. It was in retrospect that we observed the parallels, and there are many. To borrow Liker’s phrasing, IDM is a system that helps companies develop “…an organizational climate that supports…” strategic thinking, planning, and execution.
However, Chet’s response is spot on. I’ve used the snowmobile example (with appropriate attribution) in my classes to emphasize that underlying any decision process must exist the ability to synthesize information and produce novel solutions.
March 25th, 2008 at 8:06 pm
Don,
Thanks for the response. I sincerely appreciate the offer, but I read Raising the Bar as soon as it came out! I have a nicely worn, highlighted and note-ridden copy sitting in my library. I am looking forward to the next one. I think that your work on personnel system reform is a key part of fostering a culture where Boyd’s ideas can be successfully implemented.
Thanks!
TJ
March 27th, 2008 at 2:10 am
Robert,
I recently came across an example of a company who took a Boyd-like approach to a problem (although I doubt any of them know who Boyd was).
Ingersoll-Rand is a industrial company which manufactures, among other things, industrial grinders. The company had a historically slow product cycle - they introduced a new grinder about every four years, on average.
Recognizing that this put them at a competetive disadvantage, they formed a project team who was given the mission to turn out a new grinder in just one year - one quarter of the normal time.
At one point during the development of the product, they had to make a decision about the grinder’s casing - plastic was more comfortable to the customer than metal, however, there were concerns about whether it would hold up as well.
The traditional method within Ingersoll-Rand of solving this problem would have been a long, careful, scientific study of the tensile and compression properties of both materials - but that would have taken far too long.
Instead, they came up with an alternate testing method. They tied a piece of each type of material to the back of a car and drove around the parking lot until the police showed up and told them to stop. This became known as the DRAG TEST. The result? The plastic held up as well as the metal and the decision to use plastic for the casing was made in far less time than it would otherwise have taken.
I see several elements of Boyd here.
1. The company recognizes that it has a problem (slow product life cycle), which demonstrates a solid OUTSIDE INFORMATION feed into the organization’s OODA loop (CLOSED SYSTEMS DIE)
2. The company recognizes that the ability to quickly adapt to the environment (marketplace) is necessary to stay competitive (FAST TRANSIENTS)
3. The company takes concrete action (not just talk, vision statements, etc…) and forms a team with a difficult but achievable goal.
4. The team uses CREATIVITY to solve the casing problem vs. throwing TIME (FAST TRANSIENTS) or TECHNOLOGY at the problem. (PARALLELS w/F-16 development)
I really like the DRAG TEST. If we think about all the different ways the company could have gone with this (maintain the status quo, explore alternate materials, aquire new technology for material testing, etc…) we can see that the DRAG TEST isn’t just speedy, but EFFICIENT in that it solves the problem using less time, effort and money than the previous processes.
5. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, it’s evident that the company leadership had BOUGHT IN to this concept, and provided and environment in which the team was free to use it’s creative talents to reduce the FRICTION of the product life cycle. “Friction is diminished by implicit understanding, trust, cooperation, simplicity, focus, etc.” (ORGANIC C&C DESIGN)
Also, think about the TRUST required to make a major product decision based on the DRAG TEST. The test almost certainly did not determine the resiliency of the plastic vs the metal with the accuracy of the scientific testing. But the real question is, was it good enough? It appears that it was.
Hope this example spurs some ideas on implementing Boyd - it did for me.
TJ
March 27th, 2008 at 1:03 pm
Thanks for the example, TJ. That’s a very interesting and compelling anecdote. However, I think it still points out that the group at I-R “stumbled” on some behaviors that in retrospect, look Boydian. They weren’t intentionally setting out to implement Boyd’s ideas.
I, too, have experienced case after case of companies intentionally using a type of Boyd-like process to achieve successful outcomes in situations that are dynamically changing, risky, and in which team members didn’t have anything that resembled Einheit before a formal execution of the process began. But the intention in those cases was not necessarily to emulate Boyd’s way of thinking. It just happened to parallel it.
My question, actually asked on behalf of a colleague, was to understand if there had been an intentional formal business implementation of Boyd’s ideas and if such an implementation had been documented. I was really hoping Chet would say yes, but now that I’ve read his answer here and reread our dialog over the last few years, I’m happy to say I like his answer here better. It tells me and confirms my deeper suspicions that a “…method of thinking about conflict…” is the goal and most importantly, not an unyielding prescription of tasks that can be easily duplicated by one’s competition.
June 12th, 2008 at 9:12 pm
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