Check out the new blog by that name featuring pictures and observations about Indianola, the South, and life in general:  Plastic catfish, Delta sunsets, possums, and Club Ebony.

What they have found is that contrary to what was previously thought, namely that change feeds on change, that is, that the change process is self-reinforcing, the opposite is more often true.  As they write, “There are good reasons to assume that prior change reduces the likelihood of subsequent change.”  As a result, most previous research on the subject of change is, well, wrong.   As is so often the case with statistics, the reason hinges on the existence of a hidden variable, in this case, “propensity for change,” and a few companies have a lot of it.  This skews the results (421).

The result for most companies, though, is that the change imperative dampens out:

Experience gained in prior change processes helps organizations to refine the content of organizational procedures, the attendant organizational aspirations, as well as the routines that govern the change processes.  The more often organization members have the chance to refine these elements (through prior changes), the less need there is for further change.  …

These behavioral aspects of our results suggest that managers and other organization members are able to learn from experience. This learning leads to changes that stabilize organizational features. Therefore, the ability to develop successful routines that guide organizational change processes can be considered a fundamental asset for facing upcoming problems. (428)

It’s also possible that once the change is in place, the people who made it happen see any further change as a threat or at best counterproductive.  This is not a totally egregious position:  If, for example, your organization has implemented maneuver warfare or in the case of industry, a Toyota-like system such as lean production, then further large-scale organizational change is not necessary for a while.  What is needed at that point is kaizen — continuous improvement — of the newly implemented system.

The other piece missing from the study is the competitive landscape, which drives how much change is needed and how often.  You can easily see the danger in a conclusion that “The more often organization members have the chance to refine these elements (through prior changes), the less need there is for further change.”

It isn’t clear from this study whether kaizen itself tends to dampen out for the same reasons, or whether it can be one of the “successful routines that guide organizational change processes.”  As I read the conclusion above, it probably depends on whether you are trying to kaizen an existing system [continually improve your way from GM to Toyota -- good luck] or using it refine a newly implemented major change.

Anybody have any exerience in this area?

[Many thanks to Prof. Joe Astrachan, who holds the Wachovia Eminent Scholar Chair of Family Business at Kennesaw St. University, for pointing out this article.]

If you’re going to be in the Northeast early next month, you might consider the Bossov’s production of Cinderella on the evenings of August 1 and 2 in Waterville, Maine (about 1 1/2 hours north of Portland).  I’ve seen several BBT performances — you won’t be disappointed.

Tim Leberecht has an idea on News.com today: blogs, but with a twist:

Make it mandatory for every employee to keep an internal blog and post at least once per week. Depending on their role, employees can blog about customer experiences, sales tactics, strategy, product improvements, organizational design, competitors, market trends, and even gossip. Potential productivity losses are outweighed by the value of knowledge that is being generated and shared.

“Potential productivity losses?”  Relax, he’s thought about that, too.

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!]