The Committee of Public Safety

Colin S. Gray wrote in Modern Strategy back in 1999:

John Boyd deserves at least an honorable mention for his discovery of the ‘OODA loop‘. The loop specifies a process of Observation-Orientation-Decision-Action, allegedly comprising a universal logic of conflict. As a fighter pilot and subsequent investigation of the reasons why USAF F-86 Sabre jets achieved such remarkably favourable kill ratios in combat against MiG15s over North Korea (10 to 1), Boyd found in the OODA loop the essential logic of success in battle. Just as Luttwak’s logic of paradox permeates all levels and kinds of conflict, so Boyd’s loop can apply to the operational, strategic, and political levels of war, as well as to tactics for aerial dogfights. Boyd’s theory claims that the key to success in conflict is to operate inside the opponent’s decision cycle. Advantages in observation and orientation enable a tempo in decision-making and execution that outpaces the ability of the foe to react effectively in time. This seemingly simple tactical formula was duly explained and copiously illustrated historically by Boyd in many briefings within the US defense community over the course of twenty years. The OODA loop may appear too humble to merit categorization as a grand theory, but that is what it is. It has an elegant simplicity, an extensive domain of applicability, and contains a high quality of insight about strategic essentials, such that its author well merits honourable mention as an outstanding general theorist of strategy.

Contrast this passage with two passages from Gray’s Another Bloody Century, published seven years later:

Air Force Colonel John Boyd touted a tactical insight derived from personal experience from aerial combat as a general theory  of conflict. His OODA loop, standing for Observation, Orientation, Decision, and Action, is revered by many as summarizing the wisdom of the ages on how to win. The core notion is that success rewards the warrior who can operate within the decision cycle of the enemy. It is a sound idea, but as the philosopher’s stone for victory for victory at all levels of warfare it is distinctly sub-Clausewitzian. A major problem with the OODA loop is that its devotees assume that a tactical insight, even principle, will be no less valid at the operational and strategic levels of warfare. It is fairly clear this is not the case.

…and…

As we noted earlier, Colonel John Boyd, USAF fighter pilot turned guru, applied his tactical knowledge of air combat to warfare at all levels  by means of his simple formula of the ‘OODA loop’. Unmatched speed in the sequence of observation, orientation, decision, and action is held to be the key to victory. This insight, banal statement of the obvious, or panacea—take your choice—is probably the most important concept undergirding the current US programme of long-term military transformation. The OODA loop is a formula for decisive success in a manoeuvering style of warfare. American technology, particularly in the realm of the real-time gathering, processing, and diffusion of information, enables US forces to act effectively with a speed that leaves their enemies gasping in their wake. At least, that is the theory.

This is like reading from Baby’s First Boyd Briefing and reflects a child’s understanding of Boyd’s theory. Dr. Gray, a distinguished strategist of the ultra-Clausewitzian school, often complains about the van Crevald School’s shallow (or, in my opinion, actively duplicitious) reading of Clausewitz. Keegan and van Crevald get taken out back for a well deserved whipping for their mis-characterization of Clausewitz and somehow John Boyd gets taken along in the same sordid ranks. Gray sees this:

Faster! FASTER!

and reduces Boyd to a child who runs along side a children’s carousel shouting “Faster! FASTER!”. If the carousel spins fast enough, victory is at hand. If it slows down, defeat is inevitable. This is the vulgar version of Boyd’s theory, the one that the marketing directors of defense contractors can understand and spout. If Dr. Gray is, as he frequently claims to be, a professional strategist, he should be able to see that Boyd’s OODA loop, inasmuch as it really is the central totem of Boyd’s theory, looks like this:

OODA for Adults

Boyd’s actual OODA loop, found in his briefing The Essence of Winning and Losing, is richer and more complex than Gray’s description. Boyd’s theory is far deeper than just the OODA loop. With some military theorists, misunderstanding their intent is sketchy. If Boyd’s briefing slides were the only surviving remnants of Boydthink, this would be true of Boyd too. But there are many books on Boyd ranging from Coram’s biography that makes Boyd available to the common man to Dr. Frans P. Osinga’s deep and penetrating study of Boyd’s thought and its sources. Many of Boyd’s acolytes who knew him well like Dr. Chet Richards and Chuck Spinney are still with us and producing literature on what Boyd really meant. Boyd’s source material and his notes are all available on the web for anyone to see. You can get it here, here, here, or here. Even this blog has its own Boyd mirror: The Full Boyd, especially ones of the all important source lists. Boyd’s reading and understanding of some very complex ideas and texts would make most people’s heads explode. I suspect Dr. Gray’s would be among them.

Blaming John Boyd for “the most important concept undergirding the current US programme of long-term military transformation” is exactly as libelous to Boyd’s work as B. H. Liddell Hart’s blaming Clausewitz for the attritional deadlock on the Western Front on On War. If Pentagon functionaries have invoked Boyd’s name and some of his concepts in justification of the RMA and transformation, their advocacy is based on just as shallow an understanding of John Boyd’s OODA loop as Fuller and Liddell Hart’s understanding of Clausewitz’s discussion of decisive battle. Boyd’s life of thankless battles against expensive Pentagon toys that put more emphasis on the need to feed the procurement cycle than producing the weapons that America’s armed forces need to win its wars and his Acolytes tireless campaigning against Pentagon excesses shows that blaming him for the newest round of Pentagon wonder toys is the greatest foolishness. Note this statement of Chuck Spinney’s:

At the core of the RMA is a radical hypothesis that would cause Sun Tzu, Clausewitz and George Patton to roll over in their graves. That is, that technology will transform the fog and friction of combat – the uncertainty, fear, chaos, imperfect information which is a natural product of a clash between opposing wills – into clear, friction-free, predictable, mechanistic interaction.

Um, does that sound like someone inspired by the putative undergirder of “long-term military transformation”? Would such a man say:

…one day you will take a fork in the road, and you’re going to have to make a decision about which direction you want to go. If you go that way you can be somebody. You will have to make compromises and you will have to turn your back on your friends. But you will be a member of the club and you will get promoted and get good assignments. Or you can go that way and you can do something -something for your country and for your Air Force and for yourself…If you decide to do something, you may not get promoted and you may not get good assignments and you certainly will not be a favorite of your superiors. But you won’t have to compromise yourself…To be somebody or to do something. In life there is often a roll call. That’s when you have to make a decision. To be or to do? Which way will you go?

The Colin S. Gray of 1999 had understanding and discernment. The Colin S. Gray of 2006 was a blockhead and a disgrace to the memory of the Clausewitz he claims to revere. Clausewitz and Boyd placed the man before machine or idea. Neither of them were technological determinists like Gray accuses Boyd. Boyd was no more the Grand Turk of Transformation than Clausewitz was the Mahdi of Mass. Distortions of Clausewitz or Boyd serve no purpose and distract us from the real enemy of technophilia and futuritis. Both served the eternal truths of war and strategy and should be remembered as such.

Fredrich August von Hayek wrote in The Fatal Conceit that:

If we were to apply the unmodified, uncurbed, rules of the micro-cosmos (i.e., of the small band or troop, or of say, our families) to the macro-cosmos (our wider civilization), as our instincts and sentimental yearnings often makes us wish to do, we would destroy it. Yet if we were always to apply the rules of the extended order to our more intimate groupings, we would crush them. So we must learn to live in two sorts of a world at once.

As a professional libertarian, Hayek saw attempts at central planning as the extension of the familial or tribal order of command and control onto the more creative and vibrant emergent order of the market. The logic of central planning that worked in the small tribal group, he argued, doesn’t scale to the realm of his macro-cosmos. On the other hand, the impersonal bartering of the price mechanism, Hayek asserts, cheapens the intimate tribal linkages that provide the emotional reinforcement that the human mind requires.

However, Hayek erred in only providing a human mental universe populated by two worlds, the Tribe and the Market. A much more expansive framework is David Ronfeldt’s TIMN framework which provides four worlds for the human mind to inhabit: the two worlds mentioned by Hayek, the Tribe and the Market, plus two others, the Institution and the Network (hence TIMN, from Tribe-Institution-Market-Network). Ronfeldt provided this helpful table for telling which is which:

TIMN: The Table

Hayek postulates a two-way conflict between Tribe and Market. In this Manichean struggle between Darkness and Light, the Institution is merely a super Tribe which is ever plotting, plotting against the Market. TIMN offers a far more accurate four-way tug-of-war between Tribe, Institution, Market, and Network. Within Hayek’s dichotomy, the primary failure of neoclassical economics is overlooking the inconvenient fact that Markets have Institutional side-effects. Shifts in Market power warp Institutions. Institutional power, when concentrated, gives quicker and seductively easy results than Markets. This often leads Market actors to seek to turn Institutional power against rival Market competitors. A Market actor may also develop Institutional ambitions and use power derived from Market activities in the pursuit of purely Institutional power. The primary problem caused by Market distortions of Institutions are their potential to unleash and amplify systemic uncertainty to the point of generating black swans.

On the other side of this particular two-way shouting match, Institutionally focused actors will often neglect the small problem that Institutional power warps Markets in unpredictable and potentially harmful ways. Market evolution (in the aggregate unfolds) over extended periods of time and their power. As a result, their impact is more diffuse. Market power is more like boiling the frog than knifing it. Institutional power can distort markets with all sorts of side effects and the ultimate results may not immediately manifest themselves for some time.

Tribes add a third pole to Hayek’s two-way tug-of-war. Jared Diamond hypothesized that Institutions are created when human groups attempt to scale beyond the Tribe. In smaller numbers, key tribal mediators know everyone personally and can intervene in squabbles before they accelerate to the point of violence. Dunbar’s number may play a role here:

Dunbar’s number is a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. These are relationships in which an individual knows who each person is, and how each person relates to every other person. Proponents assert that numbers larger than this generally require more restricted rules, laws, and enforced norms to maintain a stable, cohesive group. No precise value has been proposed for Dunbar’s number, but a commonly cited approximation is 150.

Diamond further argues that once interpersonal relationships cease to be able to regulate group dynamics, a natural consequence of group growth, the only thing that can replace it is an Institution that can apply coercion to keep order and prevent free riding. An Institution reflects some aspects of the Tribe through its basis in social hierarchy but it’s much more impersonal.

As a hierarchy with tribal trappings, the Tribal group that lies at the heart of any Institution is jealous of other Tribes under its jurisdiction and often resorts to a wide variety of methods for reducing their scope. Killing the Tribes is bread and butter for Institutions. Many modern Institutions have a strong cohesion that’s based in creating a kind of supra-Tribal dynamic where people feel they have a strong personal connection with abstract and often remote authority.

Subduing the Tribes

It may be that humans see any social group as a continuation of the Tribe with the addition of Other People. Even the wan Tribes of modern Western society are necessary to the normal functioning of human beings. Western Tribes were reduced through the sword and the miter to a flattened mass ripe for the operations of the atomizing Market. Many Westerners who had found meaning in attachment to the Institutions that replaced the Tribes of their forbears were lost in the world of the Market. The Market, like all TIMN forms, had existed since prehistory in some form. Tribes frequently traded for distant goods in the nascent Markets of the hunter-gatherer phase. Institutions also had recourse to the market as they became predominant after the ascent of agriculture. But Markets never became prominent until early modern Europe. This marked a watershed in human history. The Adaptive Market Hypothesis (AMH) comes into play here:

[T]he AMH can be viewed as a new version of the EMH, derived from evolutionary principles. The primary components of the AMH consist of the following ideas:

• (A1) Individuals act in their own self-interest.
• (A2) Individuals make mistakes.
• (A3) Individuals learn and adapt.
• (A4) Competition drives adaptation and innovation.
• (A5) Natural selection shapes market ecology.
• (A6) Evolution determines market dynamics.

EMH and AMH have a common starting point in A1, but the two paradigms part company in A2 and A3. In efficient markets, investors do not make mistakes, nor is there any learning and adaptation because the market environment is stationary and always in equilibrium. In the AMH framework, mistakes occur frequently, but individuals are capable of learning from mistakes and adapting their behavior accordingly. However, A4 states that adaptation does not occur independently of market forces but is driven by competition, that is, the push for survival. The interactions among various market participants are governed by natural selection—the survival of the richest, in our context—and A5 implies that the current market environment is a product of this selection process. A6 states that the sum total of these components—selfish individuals, competition, adaptation, natural selection, and environmental conditions— is what we observe as market dynamics.

Much of the problem that many people face in understanding Markets is that Market reality, especially when dealing with a large macro-cosmos, defies the built-in assumptions behind the deepest human mental hardware:

The proper response to the question of how individuals determine the point at which their optimizing behavior is satisfactory is this: Such points are determined not analytically, but through trial and error and, of course, natural selection. Individuals make choices based on experience and their best guesses as to what might be optimal, and they learn by receiving positive or negative reinforcement from the outcomes. If they receive no such reinforcement, they do not learn. In this fashion, individuals develop heuristics to solve various economic challenges, and as long as those challenges remain stable, the heuristics eventually will adapt to yield approximately optimal solutions.

If, on the other hand, the environment changes, then it should come as no surprise that the heuristics of the old environment are not necessarily suited to the new. In such cases, we observe behavioral biases—actions that are apparently ill-advised in the context in which we observe them. But rather than labeling such behavior irrational, we should recognize that suboptimal behavior is likely when we take heuristics out of their evolutionary context. A more accurate term for such behavior might be “maladaptive.” The flopping of a fish on dry land may seem strange and unproductive, but under water, the same motions propel the fish away from its predators. And the antagonistic effect of human emotional reactions on logical reasoning described earlier is maladaptive for many financial contexts.

The Tribal mind is what the human mind is optimized for. Institutions are one step removed from Tribes and, while they have their own dynamic, are still comprehensible within a Tribal worldview. However, in markets humans behavior is often “maladaptive”. In a Tribal sea, their flapping moves them efficiently through an ocean of personal relationships. However, in the Market, they merely flop in a rather pitiable manner. The problem is one of scope. In one quadrant, the Tribal mind is comfortable and well-adjusted to reality. In the other, it is wildly confused. And that’s not even including Networks.

Many of the contortions produced in modern life in the West is caused when one TIMN form is imposed upon another. Marxism produced a massive imposition of the Institution on Market and Tribe (and nascent Networks). Neo-liberalism compounded this imposition by extending the reach of the Market back into the Institution and Tribe. The result has been a compounded weakening of both Institutions and Markets, leading to the rise of a revaunchist Tribalism of the most negative sort. The rise of the Network, Rondfeldt observes, has also been enabled by modern developments. In this new wicked problem of the wickedest kind, the scope for discord has been raised to new heights. In this battle of forms of organization, the Tribe, like the graviton, has the weakest immediate pull but cumulatively has the most pull over a wide area. Opening the lid of chaos forces most people back to the default configuration of the human mind which in turn unleashes the Tribe on the other forms, producing another cycle of internecine conflict. The distortions produce instability so potent that small waves can produce system wide disasters.

It may be that stricter demarcations should be drawn between the different TIMN forms. An example of these sharp lines are Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s 10 principles for a black swan proof world:

1. What is fragile should break early while it is still small. Nothing should ever become too big to fail. Evolution in economic life helps those with the maximum amount of hidden risks – and hence the most fragile – become the biggest.

2. No socialization of losses and privatisation of gains. Whatever may need to be bailed out should be nationalised; whatever does not need a bail-out should be free, small and risk-bearing. We have managed to combine the worst of capitalism and socialism. In France in the 1980s, the socialists took over the banks. In the US in the 2000s, the banks took over the government. This is surreal.

3. People who were driving a school bus blindfolded (and crashed it) should never be given a new bus. The economics establishment (universities, regulators, central bankers, government officials, various organisations staffed with economists) lost its legitimacy with the failure of the system. It is irresponsible and foolish to put our trust in the ability of such experts to get us out of this mess. Instead, find the smart people whose hands are clean.

4. Do not let someone making an “incentive” bonus manage a nuclear plant – or your financial risks. Odds are he would cut every corner on safety to show “profits” while claiming to be “conservative”. Bonuses do not accommodate the hidden risks of blow-ups. It is the asymmetry of the bonus system that got us here. No incentives without disincentives: capitalism is about rewards and punishments, not just rewards.

5. Counter-balance complexity with simplicity. Complexity from globalisation and highly networked economic life needs to be countered by simplicity in financial products. The complex economy is already a form of leverage: the leverage of efficiency. Such systems survive thanks to slack and redundancy; adding debt produces wild and dangerous gyrations and leaves no room for error. Capitalism cannot avoid fads and bubbles: equity bubbles (as in 2000) have proved to be mild; debt bubbles are vicious.

6. Do not give children sticks of dynamite, even if they come with a warning . Complex derivatives need to be banned because nobody understands them and few are rational enough to know it. Citizens must be protected from themselves, from bankers selling them “hedging” products, and from gullible regulators who listen to economic theorists.

7. Only Ponzi schemes should depend on confidence. Governments should never need to “restore confidence”. Cascading rumours are a product of complex systems. Governments cannot stop the rumours. Simply, we need to be in a position to shrug off rumours, be robust in the face of them.

8. Do not give an addict more drugs if he has withdrawal pains. Using leverage to cure the problems of too much leverage is not homeopathy, it is denial. The debt crisis is not a temporary problem, it is a structural one. We need rehab.

9. Citizens should not depend on financial assets or fallible “expert” advice for their retirement. Economic life should be definancialized. We should learn not to use markets as storehouses of value: they do not harbour the certainties that normal citizens require. Citizens should experience anxiety about their own businesses (which they control), not their investments (which they do not control).

10. Make an omelette with the broken eggs. Finally, this crisis cannot be fixed with makeshift repairs, no more than a boat with a rotten hull can be fixed with ad-hoc patches. We need to rebuild the hull with new (stronger) materials; we will have to remake the system before it does so itself. Let us move voluntarily into Capitalism 2.0 by helping what needs to be broken break on its own, converting debt into equity, marginalizing the economics and business school establishments, shutting down the “Nobel” in economics, banning leveraged buyouts, putting bankers where they belong, clawing back the bonuses of those who got us here, and teaching people to navigate a world with fewer certainties.

Starting in the early 1900s, various Institutional remedies were put in place to tame the Market excesses of the second half of the nineteenth century. Banning child labor and “breadwinner” wages for husbands, for example, removed women and children from the workforce and created space for a separate Tribal sphere. The outcome of these remedies that peaked in the 1920s is hard to say. A global depression and an unprecedented boom caused by the fact that North America is an island off the self-destructive continent of Eurasia obscured their impact. Now, in the face of the re-rise of Eurasian economic capacity and a second globalization of trade, the demands of the Market seem to be overrunning Tribal space with an unprecedented ferocity. This risks further Institutional and Tribal encroachment on the Market and more distortions. Defining the proper scope of each TIMN form is becoming ever more necessary.

Links to my assumptions series:

1. Assumptions: Desire
2. Assumptions: Adaption
3. Assumptions: Control
4. Assumptions: Power
5. Assumptions: Complex Adaptive Systems
6. Assumptions: OODA Loop
7. Assumptions: Orientation
8. Assumptions: Decision
9. Assumptions: Adaption Stack
10. Assumptions: Culture
11. Assumptions: Politics
12. Assumptions: Strategy
13. Assumptions: Operational Art
14. Assumptions: Tactics
15. Assumptions: War

(props Shloky) Defense and the National Interest is shutting down. For those that don’t know, DNI is the home of the late great John Boyd’s compendium. This is a priceless archive of one of the great and original American military thinkers of the twentieth century that has been available as a free download as a service to the greater strategic community. Shloky reports that John Robb is working on creating an archive of DNI but, in the interim, be a resilient community and download the Boyd library for yourself:

A Discourse on Winning and Losing

Abstract of the Discourse and Conceptual Spiral (413KB pdf)

Destruction and Creation (on chetrichards.com)

Patterns of Conflict

Original format in PDF (2.9 MB)
PPT (1.5 MB)
PDF of PPT (830 KB)

Strategic Game of ? and ?

Original format in PDF (587 KB)
PPT (319 KB)
PDF of PPT (97 KB)

Organic Design for Command and Control

Original format in PDF (409 KB)
PPT (201 KB)
PDF of PPT (90 KB)

The Essence of Winning and Losing (on chetrichards.com)

Earlier work

Aerial Attack Study (7572KB pdf)

Fast Transients (1292Kb pdf)

Source lists

Patterns of Conflict

Destruction and Creation

There’s also a lot of 4GW material for people who swing that way including the original Lind article.

Horst Rittel, in inventing the “wicked problem“, described it as having ten characteristics:

1. There is no definitive formulation of a wicked problem.
2. Wicked problems have no stopping rule.
3. Solutions to wicked problems are not true-or-false, but better or worse.
4. There is no immediate and no ultimate test of a solution to a wicked problem.
5. Every solution to a wicked problem is a “one-shot operation”; because there is no opportunity to learn by trial-and-error, every attempt counts significantly.
6. Wicked problems do not have an enumerable (or an exhaustively describable) set of potential solutions, nor is there a well-described set of permissible operations that may be incorporated into the plan.
7. Every wicked problem is essentially unique.
8. Every wicked problem can be considered to be a symptom of another problem.
9. The existence of a discrepancy representing a wicked problem can be explained in numerous ways. The choice of explanation determines the nature of the problem’s resolution.
10. The planner has no right to be wrong (planners are liable for the consequences of the actions they generate).

The explanation offered by the TRADOC pamphlet Commander’s Appreciation and Campaign Design is in the spirit of Herr Rittel but passes it through the cold, clammy grip of the color sucking vampires of DoD terminology (e.g. the rather colorful and memorable phrase “wicked problem” becomes the rather limp “ill-structured problem”):

1. There is no definitive way to formulate an ill-structured problem.
2. We cannot understand an ill-structured problem without proposing a solution.
3. Every ill-structured problem is essentially unique and novel.
4. Ill-structured problems have no fixed set of potential solutions.
5. Solutions to ill-structured problems are better-or-worse, not right-or-wrong.
6. Ill-structured problems are interactively complex.
7. Every solution to an ill-structured problem is a ‘one-shot operation.’
8. There is no immediate and no ultimate test of a solution to an ill-structured problem.
9. Ill-structured problems have no ‘stopping rule’.
10. Every ill-structured problem is a symptom of another problem.
11. The problem-solver has no right to be wrong.

Jeff Conklin narrowed this down to six characteristics:

1. The problem is not understood until after the formulation of a solution.
2. Wicked problems have no stopping rule.
3. Solutions to wicked problems are not right or wrong.
4. Every wicked problem is essentially novel and unique.
5. Every solution to a wicked problem is a ‘one shot operation’
6. Wicked problems have no given alternative solutions.

CACD provides this helpful breakdown on how dealing with the wicked problem differs from more righteous problems:

Well-Structured “Puzzle”

• Problem Structuring: The problem is self- evident. Structuring is trivial.
• Solution Development: There is only one right solution. It may be difficult to find.
• Execution of Solution: Success requires learning to perfect technique.
• Adaptive Iteration: No adaptive iteration required.

Medium-Structured “Structurally Complex Problem”

• Problem Structuring: Professionals easily agree on its structure.
• Solution Development: There may be more than one “right” answer. Professionals may disagree on the best solution. Desired end state can be agreed.
• Execution of Solution: Success requires learning to perfect technique and adjust solution.
• Adaptive Iteration: Adaptive iteration is required to find the best solution.

Ill-Structured “Wicked Problem”

• Problem Structuring: Professionals will have difficulty agreeing on problem structure and will have to agree on a shared starting hypothesis.
• Solution Development: Professionals will disagree on:
  • How the problem can be solved.
  • The most desirable end state.
  • Whether it can be attained.
• Execution of Solution: Success requires learning to perfect technique, adjust solution, and refine problem framing.
• Adaptive Iteration: Adaptive iteration is required both to refine problem structure and to find the best solution.

Conventional human problem solving breaks down when confronted by the wicked problem. Humans usually throw two problem solving approaches at problems. One uses the Automatic System and the other uses the Reflective System. Thaler and Sunstein comment in Nudge:

The Automatic System is rapid and is or feels instinctive, and it does not involve what we usually associate with the word thinking. When you duck because a ball is thrown at you unexpectedly, or get nervous when your airplane hits turbulence, or smile when you see a cute puppy, you are using your Automatic System. Brain scientists are able to say that the activities of the Automatic System are associated with the oldest parts of the brain, the parts we share with lizards (as well as puppies).

The Reflective System is more deliberate and self-conscious. We use the Reflective System when we are asked, “How much is 411 times 37?” Most people are also likely to use the Reflective System when deciding which route to take for a trip and whether to go to law school or business school. When we are writing this book we are (mostly) using our Reflective Systems, but sometimes ideas pop into our heads when we are in the shower or taking a walk and not thinking at all about the book, and these probably are coming from our Automatic Systems.

The Automatic System is what we in software engineering call legacy software. It’s the results of solutions to obvious problems that were so obvious that evolution hardwired them into our brains over eons. Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s illustration of a “well-structured” problem is what happens when you see a leopard. Your Automatic System has arrived at the one clear solution: run away as fast as possible (a good option if, as this guy postulates, early humans could run as fast as 37 mph). The Automatic System is fast while the Reflective System is somewhat slower. The Reflective System is geared to the CACD’s Medium Structured “Structurally Complex Problem”. It’s good at problems where the desired endstate is clear but there’s more than one way to get there. Wicked problems, however, are too complex for Automatic responses and strain Reflective responses. A good working definition for a wicked problem is any problem that falls into the gap between evolved and Automatic responses that Reflective calculations haven’t filled.

It seems that wicked problems will only succumb to distributed problem solving where many heads are knocked together and thrown at the problem. This creates multiple lines of approach that crush the wicked problem between converging columns of adaption. Some would identify this happenstance with the phenomenon known as crowdsourcing but that’s a misreading. Most of the great paradigm shifts come from a few aggregating minds but as much of 90% of the upfront processing will be done by lesser minds with varying degrees of ability and effort. At the end, a few super aggregators will step in and finish the final formulation. At that the multitudes can look back and see that they had been whittling away at a giant problem that they didn’t even known was there. The solution to wicked problems is culture, a form of Lamarckian natural selection where attributes acquired in life can be passed on to others without transfer through direct biological interface (though that’s a matter of choice).

The question that we face is how best to conduct the concentric cultural attacks on the looming wicked problems we confront on personal, group, national, and world levels. Any such detached question is complicated by the problem that any solution to a wicked problem has political implications, meaning that it will shift power from one party to others. The airy detachment of pure intellectual debate will inevitably be befouled by appeals to the Automatic System since triggering Automatic responses is a cheap, powerful, and time-tested method for achieving power. However, political infighting, whether expressed as logrolling, politicking, or outright war, may only tangentially contribute towards solving the wicked problem in the most tangential way: by creating an even worse wicked problem than the existing wicked problem. Techniques of dialogue have changed little since the dawn of time. If rhetoric and precision guided munitions have more conversational impact than war cries and spears, it’s more of a change in quantity than quality. Violence and sophistry are part of the wicked problem’s definition and its eventual solution. However, their underbrush must be cleared to get at the wicked problem, especially if, as I’d argue, solving the wicked problem is primarily a distributed effort. As a communication problem, noise imposed by sender, recipient, and medium must be minimized as much as possible to enable clarity.

Rittel’s own solution to defeating the wicked problem was IBIS, the Issue-Based Information System. IBIS involves at minimum four elements:

• Questions
• Ideas
• Pros
• Cons

An IBIS map starts with a root question:

Root Question

A question can only be responded to with another question or with an idea. An idea is best seen as first a potential answer to the question and secondly a chance to evolve into further questions:

Questions and Answers

Pros and cons can only respond to ideas. Further questions can also respond to ideas:

Questions, Answers, Pros, and Cons

Following those few principles, Rittel argued, even wicked problems could be mapped. A shared map would be capable of establishing a shared understanding, enabling distributed problem solving to begin. Actually doing the IBIS mapping requires skill; as the old Othello commercial said, it takes a minute to learn and a lifetime to master. There’s several approaches to utilizing IBIS for creating shared understanding. Rittel’s original version used pencil and paper, relics of the 1970s. Nowadays you can use Compendium, a free open source (LGPL) IBIS mapping tool in conjunction with techniques like dialogue mapping or argument mapping. Less structured approaches can be taken with techniques like mindmapping using free tools like Freemind or XMind or concept mapping using tools like Cmap or VUE. More structured approaches also exist but too much representational granularity leads inevitably to uses of words like ontology. IBIS is a nice balance between too little structure and too much.

How do you extend such an approach over a sufficient distribution space to generate solutions for wicked problems? That’s a question for another time.

The big question is what the best representation of the OODA Loop is: how does one explain Boyd to Grandma?

Came across this interesting version of the OODA loop that contains the full Boyd but keeps it simple enough to grasp. Rather than the dumbed down version like so:

Dumb it down

You get this:

Better OODA Loop

Definite improvement.

• War is a strategy intended to make the enemy conform to your desires when doing so is contrary to what they’d do if they possessed both the power to resist you and sufficient knowledge about your true desires.
• The giant caveat to the preceding definition is that war is also an enemy strategy intended to make you conform to the enemy’s desires when doing so is contrary to what you’d do if you possessed both the power to resist and sufficient knowledge about your enemy’s true desires.
• The nature of a war is determined by the nature of the desires pursued in a war, not by the nature of the power used in a war.
• The power used in war is quite vivid. It can easily overshadow the sometimes nebulous desires sought in war. Yet the more spectacular species of power used in war are not always present in war. In contrast, desire is always present.
• The essence of war is hostile intentions. Your intentions are hostile if you want to make others conform to your desires when doing so is contrary to what they’d do if they possessed both the power to resist you and sufficient knowledge of your true desires. War is any action taken on the basis of such hostile intentions.
• The stage of war is set by hostile intentions but then the appropriate forms of power must be found to fulfill those intentions in order for hostile intention to become hostile realization. Hostile intentions come first. Hostile power follows.
• While hostile intentions can shift the nature of available power from forms of power that are less appropriate for pursuing a set of intentions to forms that are more appropriate, often the quality and quantity of desire must be adapted to the quality and quantity of the power available to pursue them.
• Since war is a strategy, its nature is highly dependent on the politics that employs it. The nature of politics, more specifically the nature of the internal division of power and the internal struggle for power, determines the nature of war.
• However, in turn, the nature of war will shape the nature of the politics that employs it.
• Politics is always an appallingly messy process and the guidelines it lays down for war are equal parts wishful thinking, cynical rhetoric, and timid hedging. This makes the process of strategic reconciliation problematic and directly affects the nature of war.
• As a strategy, war is an instrument of politics and the main preoccupation of politics is power. Therefore, the main preoccupation of war is power.
• As a political tool, war is a strategy intended to create a division of power in our favor that others would resist if they had the power to do so and possessed sufficient knowledge of our true desires.
• War impacts culture by changing the division of power, which in turn changes the priority of cultural desires. The scale of a war’s impact on culture is directly proportional to the scope of the desires sought by the combatants and the power they have at their disposal to pursue them. A war with limited ambitions would create very few cultural ripples while a war with grander ambitions could permanently shift or even stop a culture’s forward march.
• Culture, through the medium of politics, regulates war, a political instrument. It acts as a ratchet to increase or decrease the scope and intensity of the desires it seeks and the scope and intensity of the power used to pursue them, which in turn dictates the scope and intensity of any war pursued in the name of culture and the politics it produces.
• Since culture is the art of the unspoken assumption, much of war’s aim and execution is guided by unspoken and largely unconscious assumptions and default choices.
• Changed politics will result in changed culture.
• War, as both an expression and instrument of culture, will continue to disproportionately influence culture in ways that escape conscious observation.
• War is the ultimate human intergroup tournament. While all wars are intergroup tournaments, not all intergroup tournaments are wars. Only some intergroup tournaments meet the definition of war.
• A key action to take, while engaged in the intergroup tournament, is to target the other four mechanisms of adaption with influence and violence.
• Diversity generators are critical for creating the designed, engineered, or random adaptations that, when added together, allow you to adapt to the rigors of the intergroup tournament.
• However, too much diversity will cause you to fissure and split. There will be disorientation and indecision which will lead to inaction which will lead to maladaption.
• Speeding up the generation of diversity may rip you apart and send the various fragments on their way.
• The critical regulators of diversity are conformity enforcers. Conformity enforcers control how much diversity is tolerated within a community.
• Producing either stifling conformity or anarchic disarray is the aim of targeting a community’s conformity enforcement. If conformity enforces squeeze too tight, rigidity may set in and your adaptation will become sluggish and behind the curve. Taking the opposite approach, letting a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend to such an extent that incoherence is produced, than adaption will become disjointed and ill aimed.
• One of the most powerful targets to hit is inner-judges. Inner-judges have the power to rally a community to new heights of effort. If inner-judges think that things aren’t going so well, they can flick off the internal light switch and collapse the entire war effort from the inside. Enlisting them on your side, whether they’re conscious of having volunteered or not, is a key part of a combined strategy of victory. Inner-judges are a potential fifth column if turned in a negative direction. Thinning their ranks with violence is also an option.
• OODA loops, if they repeatedly produce losing adaptions, may have a inner-judge that starts to disrupt it internally, meaning that if it is under attack, it ends up fighting a two front war, one against the outer intergroup tournament and one internally against an inner-judge. The inner-judge, because it’s deeply embedded in the cycle, may be tougher to defeat.
• Since politics is the struggle for power, whether through the “other means” of war or not, resource shifters are a critical target. Some winning adaptions can be made to appear more winning so that they attract more power than they actually deserve. The distribution of power by resource shifters can be disrupted by slicing through supply lines and diverting power.
• War itself acts as a resource shifter, stealing from the loser to give to the victorious. The goal is to shift more power to yourself than is shifted away from yourself.
• War operates along a spectrum of power that falls between an absolute concentration of power at one extreme and an absolute absence of power at the other extreme.
• What separates one end of the spectrum from the other is energy and visibility.
• Energy is how much power it takes to make the enemy conform to our political desires while visibility is how easy it is for the enemy to gather knowledge we don’t want them to have.
• There’s a trade off between visibility and energy. The more energy that’s concentrated into a form of strategic power, the more visible it is. The smaller the amount of energy that’s concentrated into a form of strategic power, the less visible a form of strategic power is.
• War is a mixture of two forms of strategic power: violence and influence. In the middle between violence and influence is coercion, the strategic power we use to hurt the enemy until they stop resisting our desires. It’s an even mix of violence and influence, a recipe for moderate palates.
• Influence has low visibility and low energy while violence has high visibility and high energy.
• Influence takes many forms: diplomacy, propaganda, subversion, commerce, agitation, intelligence, education. However, the most elemental form of influence in war is deception, the strategic form of power used to distort enemy perceptions in ways that help us satisfy our desires.
• More depends on how you mix influence and violence due to the wild unpredictability of war.
• It may be that violence will eventually be resorted to when a community has the power to wage it. It often seems cheaper than compromise and easier than influence.
• The two are not mutually exclusive.The process of analysis and deduction open gaps of vulnerability where one group can penetrate another’s dissection of the world and disrupt or even dictate the trailing process of synthesis and induction. Violence can open the holes that influence needs to reach the inner mechanisms of enemies. Influence can make the breaking, killing, and maiming of violence easier.
• Strategic asymmetry in war results from one side orienting, aggregating, and compressing more successfully than the other side. War is a clash between compression algorithms.
• A point along the spectrum of power where you have blocked the enemy from finding a strategic advantage is a selected degree of control along that wavelength of the spectrum of power.
• War is not an attack on a lifeless mass. War is an attack on a living enemy and the one thing you quickly learn about the enemy is that he reacts.
• The nature of the power used in war (the power of violence) can release raw passions of hatred and enmity in both violator and violated. These strong feelings can distort the original cultural priorities and political goals that the strategy of war was supposed to achieve. Throw in chance and probability and you’ve created a volatile mix. Throughout history, many have poorly judged the impact of hostility and change in the strategy of war, especially when choosing when to use it and when not to use it.

• Tactics is the fifth and final software control loop on the adaptive stack.
• Like culture, politics, strategy, and operational art, tactics is an OODA loop.
• Tactics is the direct interaction of power and desire with the outside world.
• If tactical interaction leads to the successful pursuit of desire, than tactical adaption is successful. If tactical interaction fails, than tactical adaption is unsuccessful.
• There is nothing between tactics and the outside world. Once tactical action is taken, the outside world pushes right back. This leaves little time or space for deliberation.
• Tactics is the instrument by which operational art successfully arranges desire and power in time and space. If tactical interactions end successfully, operational art can make a successful arrangement. Such arrangements often require that opposition be cleared out of a certain space at a certain time.
• Tactical success and failure flow up the stack, making the chances for operational, strategic, political, and cultural success or failure either much greater or much reduced.
• Tactics needs the Automatic System more than the Reflective System because it has a greater demand for quick reaction.
• Since tactics is easier to reduce to routine and habit than politics, strategy, and operations, military thinkers such as Clausewitz considered tactics more of a science than an art. Principles can be derived from tactical examples that have some hope of application beyond a passing set of circumstances.
• A specific tactical implementation rapidly becomes obsolescent but the principles remain, when interpreted with caution, fairly consistent over time.
• Most obsessions about ongoing adaption are obsessions about tactics. Tactics are easy to see and easy to describe. Most daily interactions are tactical. Obsession with tactics leads to a shallow, short-term fixation on the easily visible and short term rather than the obscure and long-term of other control loops.

• The operational control loop is the fourth highest level software layer on the adaptive stack.
• Like culture, politics, and strategy, operational art is an OODA loop.
• Operational art arranges the prioritized desires of culture and the divisions of power made by politics, joined in a reconciliation mediated by strategy, in time and space.
• If this arrangement successfully pursues desires, operational adaption is successful. If not, operational adaption is unsuccessful.
• Operational art is the instrument of strategy, the means by which strategic reconciliation is made. Operational art moves desire and power into the arrangement that strategy determines will make a reconciliation between the two effective in realizing desire.
• Operational art experiences more friction and willful opposition from opposition than strategy, politics, or culture. It is far closer to the edge of survival and further from the luxury of abstraction than higher control loops on the stack. The more abstract notions of culture, politics, and strategy meet the real world with its real pressures. Abstractions begin to break down and the uncompressed mess of the outside world starts to leak in.
• Operational adaption is faster than cultural, political, or strategic adaption because feedback from the outside world comes faster.
• Operational art uses tactics to effect the best arrangement in time and space. It maneuvers desire and power to the point of contact with the outside world. Then tactics engages and interacts with the outside world.
• Operational methods can be visualized as lying along an operational spectrum, categorized by the concentration of power they involve. Methods that use a low concentration of power are found towards the left end of the spectrum, culminating in passive observation of the opponent. Methods that use higher concentrations of power are found to the right, culminating in the total annihilation of opposition.
• The operational spectrum can be seen as a controller knob. You start with white lies. After the white lies you turn the dial to to systematic fraud: propaganda, subversion, media. Further on, you reach posturing. Turning further, you reach threats and intimidation. Turn further and you reach hurt, actions which cause pain and coerce but do not necessarily destroy. Turn a bit further and you reach destruction of property, then the destruction of individuals, finally culminating at the end of the dial with annihilation of populations and the outside world, the expression of absolute violence.