How orientation works
by chet ~ June 27th, 2008. Filed under: Boyd's Theories.The essence of Boyd’s approach to competition was to keep his own orientation as closely harmonized with reality as possible, while doing every thing he could to disorient his opponents.
Because “orientation” lies within the brain, strategists ought to be interested in how the brain works. It’s not surprising, then, that Boyd was fascinated by neuroscience and included selections from that subject in Strategic Game, charts 16 and 17. In particular, Boyd was interested in how interaction with the environment shaped the development and working of the brain, and hence orientation. Boyd found this relationship to be so strong that the complete title of his primary work on strategy is “The Strategic Game of Interaction and Isolation.” This is typical of Boyd’s approach: He would find or suspect a phenomenon, but he didn’t feel he had a real understanding until he could relate it to something that could be demonstrated in science.
The Basis of Orientation
Neuroscience has been one of the most rapidly developing of the sciences in the decade since Boyd’s death, and the stream of discoveries seems to be confirming Boyd’s faith in the importance of orientation and its neurological underpinnings. In “How the Mind Works: Revelations” in The New York Review of Books, Israel Rosenfield and Edward Ziff discuss recent discoveries on how the brain stores and processes information. Two threads emerge. The first is that the brain is a dynamic system that develops both through an unfolding genetic program and by interaction with the environment. This latter effect, also known as “neural Darwinism,” explains why “identical” twins are not identical, even though they carry identical DNA. As Rosenfeld and Ziff describe the work of two modern titans of the field: “Both Changeux and Edelman propose that during memory formation, our interactions with the world cause a Darwinian selection of neural circuits.” [Changeux was also one of the researchers cited by Boyd.]
But when it comes to the second major question, of how memory is “stored,” there is less agreement, with Edelman’s concept appearing to be very close to Boyd’s:
… whatever its form, memory itself is a [property of a system]. It cannot be equated exclusively with circuitry, with synaptic changes, with biochemistry, with value constraints, or with behavioral dynamics. Instead, it is the dynamic result of the interactions of all these factors acting together, serving to select an output that repeats a performance or an act.
The result is a far-from-equilibrium system that exists only when it is operating and whose behavior, indeed its ability to behave, depends on its interaction with its environment.
Rosenfield and Ziff point out a startling implication, that external reality itself is a construction of the brain in the sense that the brain receives a huge amount of sensory input, such as radiation of various wave lengths, and converts it into meaning, such as an approaching samurai sword. Some of the attributes of “reality” — they give the familiar example of colors — have no objective existence.
Common Outlook
What about people in groups? Boyd suggested that a good way to build a group that could shape and adapt to changing situations was to:
Expose individuals, with different skills and abilities, against a variety of situations-whereby each individual can observe and orient himself simultaneously to the others and to the variety of changing situations.
? Why ?
In such an environment, a harmony, or focus and direction, in operations is created by the bonds of implicit communications and trust that evolve as a consequence of the similar mental images or impressions each individual creates and commits to memory by repeatedly sharing the same variety of experiences in the same ways. Organic Design, 18.
As Rosenfield and Ziff note, there may be hard evidence for that recommendation, also:
We can recognize and understand the actions of others because of the mirror neurons; as Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia write, this understanding “depends first of all on our motor neurons.” Our abilities to understand and react to the emotions of others may depend on the brain’s ability to imitate the neuronal activity of the individual being observed.
Thus program such as Boyd suggests may be an expeditious way to develop a shared ability — a common outlook — to “imitate the neuronal activity” of the other individuals in the group.
Intuition
Finally, Robert Lee Hotz reports in today’s Wall St. Journal that the brain begins to act in discernible patterns some 10 seconds before subjects make a physical decision. Scientists can use these patterns to predict with 70% accuracy which decision the subject will make. As Hotz describes it in “Get Out of Your Own Way,” it’s as if the brain makes up its mind “10 seconds before we become conscious of a decision — an eternity at the speed of thought.”
Hotz reports on other research that is revealing the process of decision in action seconds before subjects show any awareness. Results such as these reinforce the conclusion that most of what we call “decision making” is intuitive (and what is usually called a “decision” would better be considered as an action). Reseachers are also finding “noise” in the brain that appears as much as 30 seconds before a subject must act and can be correlated with errors in decision making.
More work is needed to see if such noise can be created or magnified by the actions that Boyd called “operating inside an opponent’s OODA loop.” Other studies have shown a relationship between ambuguity, which can be generated by operating inside an opponent’s OODA loop, and areas of the brain such as the amygdala that are closely associated with fear. So it is not unreasonable to expect that some of the other outputs of Boyd-type strategies, such as surprise, and their effects on an organism’s ability to compete would find a basis in the neurophysiology of the brain.
Impact on the Practice of Strategy
One should not walk away with the conclusion that science is confirming guesses that Boyd made 20 years ago because as science progresses, many of these will turn out to be wrong or incomplete. Regardless, a better understanding of how the brain works — and can be made not to work — is fundamental to strategy, and Boyd was working that problem virtually until the day he died.
All of Boyd’s briefings are available for download at Defense and the National Interest.
[Many thanks to Chuck Spinney for pointing out the Rosenfield and Ziff article!]
June 29th, 2008 at 8:54 am
The concept of intuitive decision making is strongly supported by the field research of Gary Klein and colleagues. Klein’s book Sources of Power — How People Make Decisions has become a classic reference.
There’s a FastCompany article describing Klein’s work and a NASA interview with him. He also has out a more recent business book on “The Power of Intuition”.
Another interesting book is Jeff Hawkin’s On Intelligence. Hawkin’s, having resources from the computer industry, founded the Redwood Neurological Institute, which has since become the Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience at UC Berkeley. Hawkin’s interest was in understanding the how the brain actually functions in perception, pattern matching, and cognition.
Our virtual world also includes our own bodies, which don’t exist as we perceive them. Our brains have to integrate together the myriad inputs into a sense of body. Sandra Blakeslee, who co-wrote On Intelligence with Hawkins, is a science writer with a specialty in neurology. She and her son Matthew came out with a The Body has a Mind of Its Own last fall.
Training for flexible response by exposure to situations coincides with a report by Hubert and Stuart Dreyfus done for the Air Force in the 1980’s. Their model of going from novice to expert became widely known as the “Dreyfus Model”.
Dreyfus SE, Dreyfus HL. A five-stage model of the mental activities involved in directed skill acquisition [Internet]. University of California, Berkeley; c1980. Prepared as U.S. Air Force Operations Research Center Report ORC-80-2. Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC) accession number ADA084551. Available from http://stinet.dtic.mil/oai/oai?verb=getRecord&metadataPrefix=html&identifier=ADA084551.
Dreyfus HL., Dreyfus SE. Mind over machine: The power of human intuition and expertise in the era of the computer. Free Press, New York; c1986. 252 p. ISBN: 0-743-20551-0.
One of the better quotes on the human abilities for patter recognition comes from a book on mathematical methods for doing the same.
“The ease with which we recognize a face, understand spoken words, read handwritten characters, identify our car keys in our pocket by feel, and decide whether an apple is ripe by its smell belies the astoundingly complex processes that underlie these acts of pattern recognition. Pattern recognition—the act of taking in raw data and making an action based on the ‘category’ of the pattern—has been crucial for our survival, and over the past tens of millions of years we have evolved highly sophisticated neural and cognitive systems for such tasks.” — Richard O. Duda, Peter E. Hart, David G. Stork, Pattern Classification, 2nd ed., Wiley Interscience, ISBN 0-471-05669-3, p. 1.
Klein’s opinion is that human response combines both pattern recognition and the ability to mentally simulate/predict how the situation will evolve; updating the prediction rapidly as the scene evolves — which brings us back to Boyd.
June 29th, 2008 at 10:46 am
Keith –
Most interesting.
Klein’s work is indeed fundamental to how we perceive and react to unfolding situations. I cite him when discussing Fingerspitzengefuehl on pages 108-109 of Certain to Win.
One of the interesting new developments, as Rosenfield and Ziff report, is that not only have we evolved “highly sophisticated neural and cognitive systems for [pattern recognition] tasks,” but these systems themselves appear to evolve within our own bodies as we develop. In other words, not only the “program,” but the “hardware” itself changes through interaction with the environment.
Fascinating stuff — thanks again.
July 5th, 2008 at 6:14 pm
Chet,
It is fascinating stuff. There’s a large and growing literature on “hardware” changes under the term neuroplasticity. Another learning related example is a 2004 Nature article by Draganski et al., “Neuroplasticity: Changes in grey matter induced by training” (http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/427311a).
There’s an educator named Marc Prensky who has been writing about technology exposure, neuroplasticity, and the implications for education. His “classic” articles, “Digital Natives; Digital Immigrants” and “Do the REALLY Think Differently?” are readily available (http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/). The second paper more directly addresses neuroplasticity. In that article, and toward the bottom of his list of writings, he also mentions implications on military training.
Tying into that last thought of defense sponsored learning research, the Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) Initiative, has an announcement up for the “Academic Fest & Games Learning Society (GLS) Conference”. See on the right at (http://www.adlnet.gov/).
August 11th, 2008 at 7:54 am
Please be aware that “Darwinism” is being used in an somewhat eccentric sense by your informants. Many people - including some brilliant geniticists - find the implications of Darwin’s work sinister, to these the state of society is - or ought to be thought - more important than DNA. The enviroment for a human being includes mainly non social factors like the 9 months before birth, indeed some say that those 9 months are the most important of ones life. You mentioned unalike identical twins, well the differences can be due to one getting a much better blood supply in the womb than thier womb-mate. Another example girls with a twin brother tend to be tomboys - for prenatal hormone reasons. I like your ideas but beware of tying them to scientists who may have agendas of their own.
August 11th, 2008 at 8:21 am
from an essay by Mertz and Millen
” Because the dominant characteristics of insurgency protractedness and ambiguity — effectively stymie the American… approach to war”
September 2nd, 2008 at 4:49 am
It may be that Observation, Orientation and Decision are not steps as discrete as we’d like. Our brain pre-filters and decides much earlier than we think. While automatic pattern-recognition can be very practical and fast it has its downsides, e.g. “confirmation-bias” or “illusion”. So instinct or “Fingerspitzengefühl” while fast, can be very misleading. And in situations were it’s safe to trade speed for precision it’s possibly better to go for “safe” by doing more analysis. I hereby take the liberty of recommending two books on decision making that I like: “Seeking Wisdom: From Darwin to Munger” by Peter Bevelin and Books by or with Gerd Gigerenzer http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=gerd+gigerenzer&x=0&y=0
September 2nd, 2008 at 7:21 am
Lars –
Thanks for the comment and the recommendations.
Sure, the divisions between the elements of the OODA loop are arbitrary and not to be taken too seriously. Good point. Still, if we’re going to discuss these concepts, names are useful. By the way, Boyd used to put hyphens between the letters (O-O-D-A) to join them grammatically as a unified concept, so I’m sure he would have agreed with you. And he was familiar with experiments on the optic nerve, for example, that also blur the distinction between observation and orientation.
Fingerspitzengefühl, by the way, is something entirely different from instinct, at least in the sense Boyd used the term. Fingerspitzengefühl is built by long hours, perhaps years, of practice and experimentation under increasingly difficult and complex conditions.
There isn’t a trade-off between Fingerspitzengefühl and analysis, or at least there shouldn’t be, because what is it that tells you when it’s time to go with the analysis you have and act? For that matter, what tells you what analysis to do? And how to interpret the results? Where sentient competitors and customers are involved? Judgment based on experience. Fingerspitzengefühl.
September 2nd, 2008 at 9:17 am
Thanks for the clarification, correction and definition of Fingerspitzengefühl, Chet (I need to reread your book, it’s been a while).
There’s only on nit I’d like to pick and that’s the part where you say F’gefühl was “judgement based on experience”. While this sentence is true in this context, embedded with the other defining sentences. I think personal experience is overrated very often.
Personal experience is
1. very often statistically insignificant because it only happened to you which means too low frequency and too specific to one person,
2. faulty because you will overestimate loss inflicted upon you by chance,
3. faulty because you will underestimate loss if it was your fault,
4. faulty because you will overestimate gain if you think it was because of you,
5. faulty because you will underestimate gain due to circumstance and luck.
With this incomplete enumeration I’m referring to this list, which is an excerpt from the books I mentioned:
http://www.capitalideasonline.com/articles/index.php?id=1252
O-O-D-A comes from Boyd’s military background and, I think, it contains a bias for action or speed which may not be of the essence in a business context. Instead we tend to fool ourselves to suit ourselves. Hence my rambling about decision making etc.
I apologise if I’m wasting anybody’s time.
September 2nd, 2008 at 9:49 am
Lars,
Thanks — you’re not wasting anybody’s time. These are important issues.
Everything you say is correct, but in the end, what other basis is there?
The issue is not whether experience is an infallible guide to future behavior. Obviously it isn’t. But in a competitive situation, if I can utilize my experience, minimizing the influence of factors such as you present, better than you, then I’ll have a competitive advantage.
This is a very old problem in strategy, going back through the samurai schools to Sun Tzu and Zen: Those who, through their training, practice, and experience learn to maintain more accurate orientations (remembering that all this is dynamic) will win. Certain to, to quote Sun Tzu. The “speed” that counts in this case is more like that of your internal gray matter CPU.
If my orientation is infected worse than yours by factors such as you mention, then I’m going to have have some problems when we compete in the marketplace.
You’re right about the OODA loop coming from Boyd’s military background, but it actually traces back to his time running an R&D programming shop in the Pentagon. Maneuver warfare does stress the ability to operate at a faster tempo (not speed) than opponents in order to stay inside their OODA loops: Once the situation starts to break, you want to exploit it before the enemy recovers. Any application of this idea to business has to be through analogies, however, which brings its own set of dangers.
I certainly agree — and this is a big theme in Certain to Win — that the role of time in business competition is quite different than for armed conflict. We can’t stress this enough.
September 2nd, 2008 at 10:36 am
There is some intersection between changing environments, OODA-loops, and distribution of Myers-Briggs personality types. In static environments, the personality types that tend to accept what is told them, will tend to do as well as personality types that are constantly asking why. In changing environments, personality types that are more oriented towards constantly wanting to know why … will do better at realizing what is still applicable and what needs to be adapted.
Rote, repeatedly doing the same thing faster … can have minimal orientation (understanding) aspect … however, in a static environment, extensive orientation can turn out to be superfluous and waste of time.
We’ve seen numerous situations where there is logical discussion about the need to do something different based on well reasoned and agreed upon facts …. and then return a month or so later to find that decisions and actions have not changed at all (still following path that has possibly been ingrained for 20-30 yrs). For some people it seems that logical and well reason discussions are totally disconnected from their standard mode of operation (much more influenced solely by past experience).
This can also be viewed from the point-of-view of the statistics thread and what is the real level of understanding (both quantitative and qualitative). And from the “unfair family business” thread … I commented that at least some of OODA-loop motivation was to contrast with rigid, top-down, command&control …. that extends well outside of armed conflict arena.