Harry 0:00

Where is the just enough, just in time risk management? Where's the just enough, just in time, and can you, without being careless, or without disregarding, facts as they are, rather than how they should be, can you speed up to get better, faster decisions, and make better, more effective actions?

Narrator 0:30

You're listening to Traction Heroes. Digging In to Get Results with Harry Max and Jorge Arango.

Harry 0:40

Hey, Jorge, it's good to see you.

Jorge 0:42

Always good to see you, Harry.

Harry 0:45

It's come to a place where I look forward every time I see your name on my calendar. I'm like, "Yes! I'm gonna have a good day."

Jorge 0:53

Oh, I know. Same here. it's a bit of a respite because most of my other calls are all like project work, client work, right? And these conversations are an opportunity to think about like the meta-work. It's like, how do you approach the work as opposed to the work itself.

Harry 1:12

That's right. And it's, not just changed the conversation for me, but it's changing what I'm reading. I'm selecting the books I'm reading and the articles I'm reading with a new level of intention that is not just to enjoy for myself and learn for myself, but also how I might share some of the enjoyment and share some of the learning with you and, hopefully, people who are listening in.

Jorge 1:36

That's also true for me. But I will say this: this year, I've been reading a lot of humanity classics, really old books, right? In some cases, books that are literally thousands of years old. And, I find myself reading those and thinking, which one of these should I bring to Harry? Knowing that it might take us a bit further afield than we want to go to. But yeah, whenever I am reading non humanities-related stuff, I'm always approaching it with a lens of, "Okay, so this might be fodder for a Traction Heroes conversation." So I am paying a attention differently to what I ingest. With that in mind, we were talking before we started recording, and it sounds like you've brought a reading to share today.

Harry 2:30

I did. And incidentally, I had originally intended to reread the section of the book that I brought a few weeks ago, when we had our little audio mishap. But I just finished reading a book for myself that I did not expect, based on the way the book was written, that I was gonna find anything that I could share in it. And yet, at the 13th hour, almost the last page, I found something that I really wanted to share with you, and hopefully other people will enjoy it as well. Like usual, I'll share the title of the book when I'm done, just so it doesn't perhaps send you down a path that would make it hard for you to listen to what I'm reading.

Jorge 3:17

I'm excited. Let her rip.

Harry 3:19

All right. Here it goes. "Concern for purpose, not merely process, ends over means, and the ethical dimension and moral consequences of our conduct, is important. We need people who are more concerned about the mental and moral aspects of the challenge, success and failure both on the battlefield and in the boardroom, in Congress and in the classroom, rather than merely the material aspects and technological prowess of our capabilities. "Technology springs from the mind of humankind and should be a servant, not our master. It is in our minds that we conjure up both good and evil. It is in our minds that we must seek to have an impact if we wish to change behavior. The perception of the opponent is always the target. Time is a free good, which, if used to our advantage, can be a force multiplier of immense proportions. Acting at the right time is as important or more important than acting at the right place. Wars are planned and fought first in the minds of human beings in peace time. What we do between the conflicts during ostensible periods of peace is critical to what we will do and how well we will fare in the next conflict.

Jorge 4:55

Okay, so I have not read this before. I suspect that it's a book about military matters just because of all the talk of warfare and...

Harry 5:06

It is. It's a, book called The Mind of War, and it's on the life and contributions of John Boyd. You could call him the father of the F-16 fighter and the F-15 and the originator of the OODA loop, and he's considered to be one of the greatest strategists who ever lived and certainly a military genius. I wanted to learn more about him because the OODA loop, which stands for observe, orient, decide, act, something we've talked about before, is central to decision-making and action-taking, and I wanted a better, richer, more nuanced understanding of where it came from. So, Grant Hammond wrote this book and it's a very intimate portrait of Boyd and his life and it is really exceptional. And I'm not one for reading books on war typically, but this was really amazing.

Jorge 6:08

I actually have a biography of John Boyd on my reading queue, and I'm wondering if it's the same book. I have not read it. Yeah, the one I have is called Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War. So it doesn't sound like it's the same thing.

Harry 6:25

It is not, and I read that book as well, and it was a good, fair, and somewhat illuminating portrayal of John Boyd's life, but not of his mind. And this book, The Mind of War, really gets into how he thought about organizations, how he thought about process, how he thought about technology, how he thought about change, and how he thought about our responsibility and our moral and ethical responsibility in that context.

Jorge 7:03

it sounds like that's definitely more up my alley. We did talk about the OODA loop before, but I suspect that we did that in a conversation that will not make the light of day because we did have audio glitches. This snippet that you read did not address the OODA loop specifically. Was there something about it that you wanted us to dive down into or can I ask you about the OODA loop?

Harry 7:33

Let's go straight for the OODA loop. I think I have a much better understanding of where Boyd was coming from now, in the context of discussing the OODA loop. And I have many thoughts about the OODA loop, which I have thought about writing about and have certainly been discussing with people.

Jorge 7:51

Okay. First of all, acknowledging that I don't know anywhere near enough about this or as much about this as you do. My impression of the OODA loop has always been that it's a type of cybernetic loop. What I mean by that is the idea that you have some kind of objective that you're aiming toward and you make adjustments on your way toward that objective. You read your stance vis-a-vis that objective and correct course as needed, right? That's, in my mind, the basic cybernetic loop. Is that a fair read? And, if not, can you correct my bad impression of what an OODA loop is?

Harry 8:39

It was an absolutely fair read. I think the thing is, it's somewhat incomplete in the context of how Boyd applied it. And the thing is, his discussion of how the OODA loop works becomes very cerebral and very abstract, and I think there's perhaps a reason that he struggled to write this down in a book. He gave briefings that were very dynamic and allowed him to answer extemporaneously on the fly to questions and whatnot. I'm not sure actually how much he valued prose and the context of capturing his ideas in a book. So maybe it's not fair to say that he struggled with that. But the idea is the OODA loop, the emphasis is really on two pieces of the OODA loop. The first is on the second O, which he called the Big O. So the first O is observe, and that is, what sensory data is available. The second O stands for orient, and one could take... I certainly took an overly simplistic view of what that second O stood for, even though I had encountered some of his writing in the past that talked about it in a more fluid and richer way. The second O this notion of orientation is really about how you apprehend the world. And it's a proxy for how we understand what's going on in a dynamic way around us. And the term "orientation" tends to imply more of a temporal-spatial understanding of what's happening moment to moment. So the idea is that the first O, which is observe or notice what's going on around you, and then apprehend the world, understand your concept of the world and what it means as it relates to how you are moving through space and time before you get to a decision and before you take action. So it wasn't simply see, figure out whether you're moving away from something or towards something, then make a decision, and then act on it. It was really notice what's happening around you, stay conscious of how you are interpreting the entire world as it's unfolding in front of you, and then make your decisions and act. That was the first thing that really stood out for me from The Mind of War, this book by Grant Hammond, was that the second o was significantly richer than I ever had an understanding of. And the second thing that was really different from perhaps my initial understanding of the OODA loop was, it's not simply an iterative process that you roll through and get good at like a martial art and that the OODA loop becomes, in effect, cognitive repertoire of observe, orient, decide, act again and again He really placed it in the context of a spiral of tightening up in a more fluid way. And I'm gonna read the next book by Osinga on this to try to better understand what this piece of it is, but those were really the two major takeaways for me that I think most of us, as we learn about the OODA loop tend to caricature it and don't really wrap our minds around it's true power in the Boydian sense.

Jorge 12:57

I had never put these two together, but hearing you talk about the OODA loop is making me think that it rhymes with hula hoop, and it's driving me nuts.

Harry 13:07

That's great.

Jorge 13:09

But so, here's the thing. You used this phrase "a spiral of tightening up," which I wanna pinch and zoom on. Because I'll tell you what, that evoked for me, hearing you talk about it, and it might be something that I'm reading into it just because I think I know the context in which Boyd came up with this model, which is teaching fighter pilots how to how to perform in dog fights. Is that right?

Harry 13:41

That's right. Yeah, a hundred percent.

Jorge 13:45

When I heard you say a spiral of tightening up, what came to mind is, we can be very methodical and conscious about this loop of observing, orienting, deciding, and acting. And what I mean by methodical is, you can be very conscious about, "What am I observing? What am I hearing? What am I reading? What is... what are my inputs?" You can be very self-aware of your bearing towards those things, how you're orienting yourself or the... how you're apprehending the world or the attitude you're adopting as a result of these inputs. Same with deciding and acting, right? Like deciding, like I can imagine like you could make a long list of, "I've perceived this on the pro side and I've perceived this other thing on the con side, and based on this long list of things that I'm assembling, I'm going to make some kind of mathematical choice about how to decide, and then I move on to act." And if you take this very methodical approach, you're gonna take a long time. And a fighter pilot does not have time to consciously go through this. So when I heard "tightening spiral," what I imagine by that is you almost wanna make this, become an unconscious behavior. Is that right?

Harry 15:18

I think that's exactly right. Because, as I learned racing cars and driving motorcycles, if you're thinking about it, it's too late. Full stop.

Jorge 15:29

Yeah, so let's map that onto the domain that you and I are at. Like, I've never, flown a fighter jet in my life. In fact, I've never flown any kind of airplane in my... i've flown in airplanes, but I've never piloted one. How does this apply to the kind of work that folks listening in most folks listening in anyway to this show might care about.

Harry 16:00

I've been thinking about that a lot as I've been reading the book. First I just want a quick shout out to Hoyt Ng, who's the Executive Director of Coaching and Programming for the MBA School of Management at UC Berkeley, at the Haas School of Business. Hoyt and I worked together at Dreamworks, and he was the guy that really introduced me to John Boyd's work. I knew of the OODA loop and I knew of Boyd, but Hoyt really was the guy who said, "You need to wrap your head around what Boyd is saying." Hoyt is an amazing character in my life, I wish I could see him more. But as I've been reflecting on the more practical application of this, the exact distinction you're making is the thing that comes to mind, which is, if you think about the OODA loop as this methodical, linear conscious process, it might be helpful maybe from a decision rights point of view to take into account data that's coming in and figuring out what it means and then making a decision and then acting on it then doing that over and over, managing decision rights and managing decision processes. I have clients today that are struggling with this, and they're not struggling with it because it's getting tighter and hula-hoopy, they're struggling with it because they don't have any conscious representation of how to manage decisions in an effective way, so they don't slip backwards or come undone. When I think about, "Okay, how am I gonna apply this as a leader?" I think about and you commented a minute ago on the notion of possibly making an almost mathematically-informed decision. And I just put my hat on that maybe what I need to do is think about this from a reverse Fibonacci point of view. You think about the Fibonacci sequence as a set of numbers that get bigger and because each number is the sum of the two proceeding ones. So it goes 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, and so on and so forth. But if you think about this from a Boydian point of view, from an OODA loop point of view, you might say, "Oh, maybe step one is 34." And then you subtract: you go 21 and then 13, and the spaces are getting tighter and tighter all the way back to one. And it's about speeding up your decision process in order to be able to stay in front of what's happening to you or what's happening to your team or your organization. And we're all experiencing this with artificial intelligence right now and the growth of LLMs and agentic computing. It is moving fast. And if we sit... it's moving really fast and if we sit around and get all methodical about it, that might be helpful. But what might be even more helpful is recognize, how long did it take me to make a decision and take action on it last time? Can I tighten that up? What can I do to shore up this reduce process? Remove waste, take steps out that don't matter as much. Okay, if something breaks, maybe you put something back in. And I don't wanna be careless about it, but I do think there's a certain amount of... When we're developing processes and when we're developing methods, we will often intentionally put steps in place and put branches in the decision trees in place to accommodate potential exceptions and maybe mitigate risks that might come up. Not all of those are required and they might slow the process down. So where is the just enough, just in time process? And where is the just enough, just in time risk management? Where's the just enough, just in time, and can you, without being careless, or without disregarding, facts as they are, rather than how they should be, can you speed up to get better, faster decisions, and make better, more effective actions?

Jorge 20:33

This might come across as self-serving, but I'm wondering if one of the ways in which you can tighten the loop is by bringing in people who have more experience than you do. Because one of the ways in which we might tighten this kind of loop is by doing it over and over again to the point where we internalize a lot of the relevant decision points. I'm gonna talk about something that I have no idea about, which is flying aircraft, just because this is the subject here. But I would imagine that an experienced pilot who has flown in many different kinds of weather is, going to know what kind of risks they can take when skies get overcast or whatever. Again, I'm talking completely without knowing about this, but you know the constraints and the capabilities of the context and your equipment or what have you better if you've gone through that situation in that same aircraft, let's say, many times before, as opposed to your first time doing it. I would imagine that your first time doing it, you're gonna be slower, right? So you might want to bring in an expert. And I think that part of the challenge with the AI stuff is that we're all new to it. It's not an area where there are a lot of people who have been doing it for a long time because it just hasn't been around for a long time. So, some of us have been doing it for longer than others, but no one's been doing it for like twenty five years, right? So, we haven't yet had the time to develop the, internal shortcuts that allow us to tighten the loop.

Harry 22:35

I think that you're onto something here. I made a couple of notes while you were talking, and I have a couple of books sitting behind me that are on my list of things to either finish reading or actually read, one of them being Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths, and the notion of heuristics and understanding what these rules of thumb are, it's how to think about a heuristic or an algorithm, in effect, is a shortcut, potentially, for making one or more decisions and taking action in a way that it's a lot easier to do if you're experienced. Because the last thing you want to do is take a shortcut if you're in a critical situation and find that it leads you down a road that, you know, strands, you. And heuristics these rules of thumb are ways of taking advantage of well-trodden paths that are shorter and faster and more expedient. They're not always perfect, but they certainly help you get where you want to go quicker in many cases. And for example, I think at some point in the past we talked about reference-based forecasting or estimation from a book called, How Big Things Get Done. I don't remember the author's name right now, I think it was Flyvbjerg, and I can't really pronounce it, horribly butchered the way I'm sure I'm saying it. But this notion of, if you've got a big complex project that you're looking to estimate, the most effective way to estimate and really understand both the what's likely to be the more explicit and understandable aspects of the project and also the hidden aspects of where things go wrong and take those all into account is to do this process that he calls reference-based forecasting or estimation. And that is to take a look at similar kinds of projects. And that's a much better way of estimating to understand the realities of what's likely to turn out to be true, than to go through a long, arduous process of decomposition and deconstruction of all of the various things that are going into a potentially large project or product development or design effort. That's an example of this, right? Find experts, right? Okay, so I want to do this thing. Who's done it before? And how would they walk you through the thinking? And where is it that you need to be more intentional and conscious and methodical, and where is it that you can rely on rules of thumb and reference-based estimates to get a better handle on what it's actually gonna take?

Jorge 25:44

And I would expect that that heuristic of looking for an expert can help you especially with the two Os, with observing and orienting, because if you're completely new to a situation, you might not know what to look for, right? You might not know what the relevant inputs are the relevant data points on the one hand, and then on the other hand, even if you did know what the relevant data points are, you might not know what they mean. So that's the orientation thing.

Harry 26:19

Yeah.

Jorge 26:20

And the other thing that I heard there and this is just to put a bow on it is that, in addition to bringing in expert help, you might also look for analogs: situations or projects or what have you that, even though not identical to the thing that you are facing, at least have some similarities that relevantly map to whatever you're dealing with. And I'll give you an example of that, in my case. This is the first time that any of us have had to deal with AI as a part of these systems that we're designing, at least the kind of AI that we're dealing with now. But at least some of us went through the radical transformation that the worldwide web entailed. And I'm seeing a lot of parallels between what's going on with AI and what I saw when the web happened in the early to mid-nineties, and I'm using that to help me orient myself in this new world. And that might not be perfect, but it's better than nothing, right?

Harry 27:38

Absolutely. And as you say it, I realize that is the reference case that I lived through as well, and I have been using as I think about the kind of transformation that we're living through right now. The going from the 1993 NCSA browser to where we are today, it's like there's a before and there's an after. And who in the world would've predicted where we are today?

Jorge 28:09

Some of us who were alive then and working in the space could have predicted that the world would look different, but we couldn't have said how. And at least in my case, I bet my career on that, and that was a bet that paid off for me. And I think it's a similar thing now. Anyway, that feels like a rabbit hole we could go down, and we are running short on time here. This is very useful and like I said, I've been aware of Boyd and the OODA loop, but I haven't dug in. This is a really good incentive to do that.

Harry 28:40

Yeah, and it was an eminently readable book. I learned something every few pages and I feel like I've got a much richer understanding of the world, of our country, of why wars happen, how they're fought and won and lost. Definitely put it on the recommended list.

Jorge 29:00

It sounds like a fabulous recommendation. Thank you for that, Harry.

Harry 29:03

Yeah, certainly. Thank you, Jorge.

Narrator 29:09

Thank you for listening to Traction Heroes with Harry Max and Jorge Arango. Check out the show notes at tractionheroes.com and if you enjoyed the show, please leave us a rating in Apple's podcasts app. Thanks.