Strategy Meets Reality Podcast

Orientation is Everything: Inside Boyd's Thinking with Chet Richards

• Mike Jones • Season 1 • Episode 2

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What does the OODA loop really mean—and why do most leaders get it wrong?

In this episode, Chet Richards—military strategist, Boyd collaborator, and author of Certain to Win—joins host Mike Jones to dive into the deeper layers of John Boyd’s thinking. We go beyond the buzzwords to explore how orientation drives every aspect of decision-making, tempo, and strategic agility.

You’ll learn why mental models—not just data—shape how organisations perceive, decide, and act in complexity.

🔍 In this episode:

  • What orientation really means in the OODA loop
  • Why decision-making is more than speed—it’s about fit
  • The role of decentralisation and trust in military and business leadership
  • How culture and power dynamics shape your ability to adapt
  • What business can and can’t learn from military doctrine

Guest Bio:
Chet Richards is a retired USAF Colonel and a leading interpreter of John Boyd’s work. He is the author of Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business, and has worked with military, government, and corporate leaders on applying Boyd’s ideas to organisational life.

📘 Buy the book: https://a.co/d/9ZR4Pvp

🔗 Learn more: https://slightlyeastofnew.com


🎧 Keywords: Strategy, OODA loop, Decision Making, Chet Richards, John Boyd, Orientation, Decentralisation, Leadership, Military Strategy, Business Agility, Organisational Behaviour, Systems Thinking

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Chet Richards (00:00)
if you can thrive on chaos, then it's definitely to your advantage to create chaos.

Mike Jones (00:04)
Yes.

It's almost counterintuitive, isn't it? when, when things are getting out of hand we then try to seize control,

Chet Richards (00:11)
eventually, you'll be vulnerable to another business that understands that better than you do and starts taking market share away from you.

Mike Jones (00:50)
Welcome to Strategy Meets Reality podcast.

I've been a great admirer of your work and a close colleague of yours, John Boyd, for a number of years, if you can give a bit of context about yourself,

Chet Richards (01:01)
Well, I first met Boyd in 1972 or three. It's amazing how 50 years dims your memory. He was still a colonel in the Air Force running a thing called the Office of Development Plans in the Air Force section of the Pentagon known as the Air Staff. It's the staff that works with the chief staff of the Air Force. Each of the services have their own staffs there,

We got dragged up one day to go down and see John Boyd I knew who he was, but from the energy maneuverability book that he had written, which at that time I think was still classified, So we all, they gathered us all up. We all went down here. It's this real tall, very dynamic guy. So I introduced myself and he asked for my background. that's how was, know, mathematician and that kind of thing.

he retired in 1975 and wrote his paper, Destruction and Creation, about that same time. he had been thinking about the ideas of destruction and creation for several years, And so when he got ready to put them down on paper and things were starting to form, he wanted a mathematician to look over the stuff that he had written about Gödel's theorem.

Mike Jones (01:43)
Mm-hmm.

Chet Richards (01:56)
So I looked over what he wrote and it very little to do with mathematics, but he had stated the theorem correctly and his application of it wasn't to mathematics, of course, it was to this problem in the theory of conflict At about that same time, it turns out, Boyd was also starting to think in terms of orientation, observation, decision and action, but not

not in terms of conflict, how they applied to development, he got out of the Air Force in 1975 he began to apply this observe, orient, decide and act pattern to conflict. He started thinking about what he was doing when he was flying fighters.

and he did patterns of conflict, probably took him from 77 to 86. And then he did two little satellite briefings after that, Organic Design for Command and Control and Strategic Gamer,

So

at this point, in the late 1980s, he was still using the, well, you observe, then you orient, then you decide, then you act. But he was beginning to have some real doubts about that because he was starting to read the Japanese stuff. Now, I should say he had studied Sun Tzu ever since he started doing this stuff.

he began to realize that

There was something wrong with this observed, orient, then decide, and then act. I it seems so obvious right at first, that's what you're doing. But the Japanese were saying, no, no, no, no, no, it's too slow. Action has to flow immediately from orientation. And there cannot be any hesitation. They actually call that hesitation sickness, how Thomas Cleary translated it in the Japanese art of war.

And so he started thinking about how to put all this stuff together. It took him a long time. The first thing he did was he did an examination into the circular OODA Loop And that briefing, which is the first one that I really worked extensively with him on after he retired and I got back into the DC area and then to Atlanta where we stayed in touch.

And what he came up with is that the circular pattern is essentially the scientific method where you have a hypothesis and you test them. It's also the method of technology where you construct something and then you test it. And then you figure out what didn't work, what did work, and then you make another prototype and then you test that. And so that's the observed-orient hypothesis test or deserved-orient design, design being a hypothesis, a prototype design test cycle.

Mike Jones (03:46)
Yeah.

Chet Richards (04:11)
And so that's where he got into it. And he put in, he stuck in analysis and synthesis. Because for one thing, he didn't want this to look like a reflex. Reflexes exist, but that's not what he's talking about. He's talking about all this stuff going through your brain. Now this doesn't mean that it's all going through the prefrontal cortex and you're trying to make nice logical, if A then B, then C, then D. The model that Boyd eventually used was the prefrontal cortex may be handling all the consciousness stuff.

Mike Jones (04:20)
Yeah.

Chet Richards (04:40)
mean, we're still learning a lot more about that. But what's going on the other 95 or whatever percent of your brain is all this other processing. Obviously a lot of that is making your lungs work and your heart work and all that kind of good stuff. But a lot of it is processing this information in near real time and feeding that up into your... So even when you're engaged, and again, I've talked to many martial artists about this and I've had my own experience with it,

And they say, yeah, that's the same thing. You're never not observing. You always have your eyes and your attention focused on your opponent. And that doesn't mean that you get target fixation, You're seeing the big picture and the small picture all at the same time. And you're trying to pick out patterns in it. And you're trying to fake them out. Try to discombobulate it to a point where there's an opening where you can then attack. it's...

Mike Jones (05:15)
Yeah.

Chet Richards (05:23)
As Musashi implies, if you do this right, you can attack with 100 % success. Sun Tzu, of course, said the same thing, a general who understands my strategy, a certain to win, which is where I got the title of, you know, employ him. But the idea being it's all this stuff going on in the back of your brain that's feeding into what you might think of the front of your brain being a big TV screen And decisions are being made with something like you might envision a meter.

Mike Jones (05:33)
Yes. Yeah.

Chet Richards (05:48)
you know, going on. as your brain is going through all of these various, what if, what if, what what if kind of stuff,

so your mind is trying out all these possible things you could do many, maybe thousands of a second. You got this little meter, good, bad, good, bad. Finally, when you get one over here, there's maybe good enough in the thing. Then you go with it. And then you start your brain doesn't stop. It's continuing to go. It's watching what you do, watching others. So this idea that you stop and observe and then you stop, what does it mean? Gee, I don't know. It might mean this, might mean that, might mean you're dead. You know, pull the the cost to pull the sword out of your gut.

Mike Jones (06:17)
Yeah, yeah.

Chet Richards (06:22)
He's probably chopped your head off at that point. So the idea is the brain is working and that process, there's what he called orientation and he stuck analysis and synthesis into the middle of the orientation block. Now his initial definition of orientation,

Mike Jones (06:33)
Mmm.

Chet Richards (06:37)
a many-sided implicit cross-referencing process, projection, empathy, correlation, and rejection. But that's what he says involving genetic heritage, previous experiences, new experiences, and cultural traditions, things like that.

Analysis and synthesis was missing from the orientation block in the original. But when you did a conceptual spiral in 1993, 1992, it was published in 1992, all of a sudden analysis and synthesis sits in that orientation block. But because everything's going on, it sits in the process. He never calls it orientation. This is interesting.

In a conceptual spiral, he does not use the term OODA. He talks about circular processes of observation. But he never talks about an OODA loop. that's OK. OODA loop fits very nicely. But the analysis and synthesis is a key step in this circular process. That's your brain constantly working. You may not even think you won't be conscious of maybe 99.9 % of it. Maybe you're getting this sort of feelings, fingerspritzengefuhl

Mike Jones (07:19)
Yeah, yeah.

Chet Richards (07:37)
you what's the right thing to do? It's like sometimes they, again, martial artists used to tell me if you're well trained, you're doing it right, you're in the zone, you just know what to do next. So it's not reflex, but you know what to do next. And you're getting feedback from what you do, both how it feels to you and what the opponent does and how it reacts. So your whole brain is working. All right, well, in 1992, then he put conceptual spiral to bed, but he still hadn't drawn an OODA loop

Mike Jones (07:45)
Yeah.

Yeah, I think that's...

Chet Richards (08:06)
sketch.

something still bothered him, you know, the observe, orient, decide and act, or that circuit thing was fine for, for science where you, you come up with a hypothesis, and you then try to test it,

you know, it was still, there was still something missing about all this and it took him a long time. And I don't know if you've seen it or not, but there's a bunch of drawings that people have recovered from the Boyd library down at Quantico, Virginia, And

Boyd is trying to fit all this together. One drawing after another, after another cryptic abbreviations, some of which we still haven't deciphered. But eventually it all settled down to the one that we see now, that one that's in the essence of winning and losing.

And the other thing, of course, that's so different about the

the OODA loop sketch that Boyd drew in Essence of Winning and Losing are those two implicit guidance and control feeds. One of them coming of course to action. And that's the one we just sort of talked about there. But then there's the one going to observation and that's the nasty one. That's the expression a man sees what he wants to see and disregards the rest.

Chuck Spinney calls it ancestral simplification. Many, many ways to describe it. People confirmation bias. If you stop and think about it, you know, you can, it's a big world out there. You can only see and focus on so much. When we have peripheral vision and all that, and that's good. But basically there's a limit to how much you can observe. You have to focus down. And so that's what, but.

Mike Jones (09:14)
Yes.

Yeah, I think it's dangerous. I think it's dangerous when

leaders disregard any other information other than they want to see. And that's what you often see quite a bit. They just disregard.

Chet Richards (09:37)
very, very, very common. Yes,

in fact, I would say it's probably much, much, much, much more common than it is that there are leaders that are able to not do that. Because let's be honest with you, you've been in the military, you've been associated with senior leaders in business.

I get the feeling that the vast majority of these leaders on both sides felt like, I fought the system for all these many years. I got the corner office. And what I really want is to sit in the corner office and have, and be minioned to, have people tell me how great I am, you know, what a fantastic job I'm doing. You know, have the car all warmed up and ready. So when I get down in there, the chauffeur opens the door, I hop in, they close the door, take me to the private jet, you know, none of this standing in line at Heathrow nonsense. And,

Mike Jones (10:05)
Yes.

Yeah.

Chet Richards (10:16)
That's what they really want is to be told what a great job they're doing. And there's good physiology on that. know, are, if the people are discovering all these little things in the brain, probably the most famous one is the amygdala group that tends to light up and send out signals when it detects what we might call mismatches. And so what, one of the things, if that's the case, the easiest way to avoid the pain of mismatches is just don't see them in the first place. And if somebody brings you bad news, get rid of them. know, it's really not hard to do it.

Mike Jones (10:18)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. Well,

this, and this is what happens all the time. was on a chat previously to someone. We were talking around how some leaders consciously or unconsciously surround themselves by people that are only going to tell them what they want to hear. And the whole communication structures of organisations, you know, it, it's red, but miraculously by the time it hits the leader, it's green. and, and this comes

Chet Richards (10:45)
in a corporate environment.

Mike Jones (11:10)
really key when you think about boys work around orientation. you know, from your quote from your book, Certain to Win, what I really like, I think nails this. I'm going to just read it from here. And you put boyds ideas to any form of competition is to keep one's orientation well matched with the real world during times of ambiguity, confusion and rapid change when the natural tendency is to become disorientated. And I think there's that point about keeping your orientation

Chet Richards (11:38)
So thank you, Stuart.

Mike Jones (11:39)
as close to reality as possible. think all this stuff we talk about, distorts it.

Chet Richards (11:41)
Thank you very much. I haven't seen any

reason to revise that. wrote It seems to apply to me to any form of competition.

applies differently to business because, you know, in typical conflict, military conflict, like what was concerned about it was A versus B. And if you beat B, you win. In business, of course, it's A and B competing for the money from C. And you can do anything you want to B, but if the customer buys this product anyway, you you lose, even though you had all these great stratagems and everything. And in fact, some of those can backfire on you if you seem to be unfair or using your monopolistic advantage and all of that to squish competitors.

Mike Jones (12:10)
Yeah.

Chet Richards (12:19)
You can have a customer backlash. think Tesla is seeing a little bit of that now, customer backlash, having nothing to do with the quality of the product, just having their overall impression of the company. I think I got the idea from Tom Peters, who in, I think it was 1987, published a book that was just completely broke open the whole field of management consulting.

Mike Jones (12:28)
Yeah.

Chet Richards (12:40)
Up until then, he had been having one call in search of excellence where you find things that good companies do and you say, well, that's what you should do too. And in thriving on chaos, he basically said what you just quoted. Now, the corollary to that is that if you can thrive on chaos, then it's definitely to your advantage to create chaos.

Mike Jones (12:58)
Yes.

Chet Richards (12:59)
And so it's creating and exploiting chaos, but doing it in a way that you learn from it and that you exploit.

By exploiting the chaos, actually further your company's objectives. You bring out the product or whatever delights the customer Excuse me.

Mike Jones (13:13)
Yeah. And you see a lot of leaders when

it comes, start to be a bit chaotic or ambiguity starts to build up. They do the opposite. It seems that they don't want to do anything. It becomes paralysis because it's uncertain where, with John Boyd's work, there is that bit about, you know, just doing something, an action. Then you can then see how it unfolds into the external environment.

Chet Richards (13:36)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Jones (13:39)
and you can learn from it, reorientate, and then you'd be able to know what to do next, hopefully.

Chet Richards (13:41)
and

Yeah,

that's exactly right. And if you think of the military and in martial arts, there are times when you just do, you do something to see how the opponent is going to react. you're probing and testing as Boyd called it,

But however, everything that you do though should have a

Mike Jones (13:55)
Yeah.

Chet Richards (13:59)
purpose to it, even if the purpose is to try to discombobulate, always have an objective, always have a purpose in mind. Because if you don't, then it's hard to learn from it. You can't get a mismatch if there's nothing to match it with. So you should always have some kind of an idea of what you think is going to your line. Your orientation is making a prediction. If I do this, this will happen. Okay, you did it. What happened? Now, again, this is all going extremely fast in the back of your mind. Now, in companies, it's different. You have committees, you have people that can study, they can gather data, they can gather analysis, they can...

Mike Jones (14:12)
No.

Mmm.

Chet Richards (14:28)
go out and do customer interviews or even better, can buy the competitor's products and try them themselves.

Mike Jones (14:34)
Yeah, but again, I think that's that mental agility, that understanding, you know, have strategic conversations with leaders and what surprised me in the military, we're always thinking all the time, if I do this, what am I likely to see or what do you reckon their response will be? And I don't see that. I only see like a really 2D sort of thinking.

Chet Richards (14:52)
Yeah!

Mm-hmm.

Mike Jones (15:00)
where they just go, well, we're gonna do this. There's no thinking about, okay, so what would be the second or third order effect of that? What are you expecting a response to be from either the customer or your competitor or the regulators? And so they're not getting this rich understanding or orientation of what could happen in the external environment.

Chet Richards (15:10)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I think that's very common. It gets back to the question we talked about. Why not? I mean, it's obvious to you and me, and at least speaking for me, I'm not a titan of industry, CEO of a multi-billion dollar company or anything like that. But again, you just go back and look at what's happened. So given that this is sort of obvious, why don't they do it? And I think it gets back to where we're talking. At any given time, it's better, it's just easier not to.

Mike Jones (15:44)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Chet Richards (15:45)
It's

easier to have people tell you, no, this is just a pad. We've got this under control. Our new product's going to work. Don't worry. And like you say, so pretty soon you're no longer paranoid and pretty soon you don't survive. It just happens over and over and over again. But it's very interesting because you made another one. Let me interrupt you for just a second here. We were talking about...

Mike Jones (15:52)
You

Who

Yeah.

Chet Richards (16:09)
When times get bad, your profit margin is starting to come down, your rates of return, your internal rate of return is coming down, the board of directors are starting to get restless and they're the ones who can fire you. So as far as you're concerned, they're your real customers.

when things get tough, they want to pull, they call it pulling the controls up to the, to the central office and to essentially making sure people don't make mistakes. And boy, to say in times of uncertain stress and uncertainty and all, you need to do the exact opposite. You need to shove decision making down. That's where you need to take John Vandergriff book on mission control and actually read it and apply it. Actually try to do it.

Mike Jones (16:36)
Yeah.

Yes.

Chet Richards (16:45)
And because it's somebody seeing something down there in the boonies that you didn't notice, but they did because they live it every day. That's more likely to save your company, be beneficial to your company than what you see through a bunch of sterilized reports that have gone through the telephone game that you just described, know, where A has something to B, B repeats it to C, C repeats it to D. By the time it gets to about F or G, it's totally unrecognizable. You probably can't even tell what, what subject is talking about. And

Mike Jones (17:12)
Yeah.

It's almost counterintuitive, isn't it? when, when things are getting out of hand or don't feel good, we then try to seize control,

and centralize everything where actually the opposite is true. We look at von Moltke talks about mission command and it's all about how do we decentralize decision-making to the people closest to the problem.

Chet Richards (17:33)
Now there are some

problems, of course, that can only be solved at the highest levels. For example, theater logistics sort of thing. Or if you're going to open up a new front, a new theater, if you need to shove, the reserves always belong to the commander who allocates them. so there are some things that do in fact do need to be set up. And the overall strategy, what's the Schwerpunkt (direction) going to be? What do you want me to accomplish in this upcoming?

goal and all that kind of stuff is a top-down thing. But the execution is always bottoms up. And as people are executing, they're seeing things, of course, as it develops. you mentioned the Elder von Moltke guess known for his thing, no plan survives first contact with the enemy. And in the famous retelling of that by the American boxer Mike Tyson, everybody has a plan till they get punched in the mouth.

Mike Jones (18:03)
Yeah.

Yes.

Great

Chet Richards (18:22)
Somehow you kind of understand

Mike Jones (18:22)
philosopher.

Chet Richards (18:24)
that sort of makes it a little more real

Mike Jones (18:26)
There's so much wisdom out there. it's, know, before we started this, you said a quote from Rommel that I thought was just perfect. Well, I'll say that again. Yeah.

Chet Richards (18:34)
His own, yeah, the training of

his men and his own quickness of mind would bring victory. Yeah, so.

Mike Jones (18:40)
Yeah.

And

Sun Tzu had something similar. He said, victorious warriors win first and then go to war. And he also said, just as water retains no constant shape, so in warfare there is no constant conditions. And I think this ancient wisdom that these lot are talking about is exactly what we're talking about now. But it doesn't seem to be applied.

Chet Richards (19:02)
Thank

It's just hard to do. Like somebody said, it requires that you be able to fire your friends. There's some truth to that. That's what I said. Family businesses have, and I worked in family business for a while, taught executive MBA program for family businesses. They have a lot of advantages because they know each other. If they want to use it, they have a lot of built-in Einheit, know, cohesion, mutual trust. If they want to do it, if they want to go off, however.

Mike Jones (19:11)
Yeah

Chet Richards (19:32)
However, what you said right there is also true about family business. it's, and in fact, if you look at the data, they on the average don't last any longer than any other business after about three generations, like 95 % of them are gone. So.

Mike Jones (19:49)
Yeah, okay.

So, when we think about those from Sun Tzu and Boyd and Von Moltke and Rommel, you know, I think they're all talking about actually, you could do a lot before the battle actually ensues. You know, there's this stuff that we can do to prepare ourselves.

Chet Richards (19:53)
Mm-hmm.

I'm market drama.

Mm-hmm. Well.

And Musashi carried it one step further, which, we're building snowmobiles here. So this is a nice part you may find, be able to use in your snowmobile. Musashi took the Sun Tzu quote, and he said, well,

that's the case. If you absolutely cannot win, there's no reason to get yourself killed. You know, at that point, back off, apologize, run, whatever, and then go back and work some more and practice some more. In other words, if you see what Sun Tzu gave you was right at the very first, the second, I think, verse in the book, the first one says something like war is important to the survival of the state. we have to say the second one says now there are these five factors that you can assess things by. And then he gives seven

Mike Jones (20:25)
Yeah, yeah.

Chet Richards (20:50)
sort of expands it down a tactical level when he gives a list of seven things. they harm, and what probably happened is that the Sun Tzu text we have now, put together over many years, many hundreds of years perhaps even, oral tradition before it was finally written down

And the thing about that was that the ideas that Sun Tzu came up with, is primarily talking about how groups of people engage with other groups of people, in war. He's not so much concerned, if concerned at all, with how individuals fight each other. But if you stop and think about it, if you look at his five things there, you can tell, according to Sun Tzu,

And this is where I

and you know who's gonna win. That being the case, you do that calculation before you go to battle, like you said, and then you decide if you're gonna fight at all, if you are, then it gives you some guidance on how you're gonna fight. Are you gonna try to lure the enemy in, are you gonna attack? Sun Tzu does not like, of course, or strategic offensive, because back in that day, I guess it was very, very logistics heavy. It took a huge amount

Mike Jones (21:32)
Yeah.

Chet Richards (21:58)
of resources to drive into enemy territory. He said, there are better ways to trick the enemy into coming to you. Let him be all tired out and pooped out and trying to maintain a supply line, trying to protect his rear and his flanks And at that point then you start probing and testing until you find something to exploit. Then you explore it. you continue probing and testing, find something and just keep the ball rolling until he disintegrates.

Mike Jones (22:21)
Yeah, that highlights a really, important thing around strategy. people when they think about military strategy or strategy is all about, we lose all out war where, know, when we're thinking about, boyds work and Sun Tzu is not quite like that. There's more nuance to it.

Chet Richards (22:36)
That's exactly right.

Yeah. Why are you? Why do you want to fight this war? Yeah, given that you're in it, you need to bring it to a acceptable conclusion. But what is it that you really, really want? I mean, is it just you want to be able to have big parades with, you know, big flags that say we won, we won? Or is there some other purpose? And one of the things you have to give Clausewitz credit for is he he does insist that you think about why it is your fight. What's the purpose of this war? What type of war it is?

Now that's been interpreted in more modern sense than I think Clausewitz originally intended when he was saying, you know, you've got to understand the political nature of the war. And as the fourth generation warfare theorists and people like Martin Van Kreml had pointed out that that may be true for a lot of wars, maybe not so much true for other types of conflict.

Mike Jones (23:30)
really true to modern business, know, and that idea of really understanding, what you do and why you're doing it. Probably to remove some of the noise, because you can go into a lot of businesses now, and actually there was some shocking statistics that, you know, there's a high percentage of people in the workforce don't really understand what the actual aims are of the business.

Chet Richards (23:52)
Believe that? Haven't found one yet where they did. Yes. Well, small businesses perhaps, you know, where, but you get these giant corporations and then you start saying, well, the real purpose of it is to keep the CEO from being fired. Cause he can fire you and the board can fire him. So, you know, it's actually pretty simple.

Mike Jones (23:53)
Yeah, and that's quite shocking. Yeah.

Yeah, that's where we look at the. Yeah.

And I suppose that's where you come to purpose. Purpose is always a thing that made me laugh because in organisations like that, that are large, they probably espouse a purpose that they're there to, I don't know, do something really grandiose. But actually the purpose of part of the organization. Yeah, yeah. The real

Chet Richards (24:28)
yeah. Mission statement sort of stuff. Yeah.

Mike Jones (24:34)
as Stafford Beer says, know, purpose of system is what it does. And you look at most of those, exactly what you said, the purpose of system is to keep the CEO from being fired. And then you're thinking about, well, actually what are we trying to do? Where are we trying to, you know, add value in a modern sense of business? And you think that's not aligned to what the customer expects.

Chet Richards (24:54)
And eventually, you'll be vulnerable to another business that understands that better than you do and starts taking market share away from you.

And it happens over and over and over again. So, and as businesses, of course, get large, there's the almost, it may be inevitable tendency to start focusing internally because the larger it gets, seems like the more internal processes you get, the more internal police that you get to make sure that you comply with these processes.

Mike Jones (25:01)
Mm.

Chet Richards (25:17)
Some of them are line managers, but then there's, there's of course the staff organisations, finance, HR, and always making sure that you fill out all the forms correctly

Mike Jones (25:24)
Yeah, bet,

Chet Richards (25:25)
No, no, no, you

Mike Jones (25:25)
Yeah. that, that, again, that's a bit what we're talking about. you know, you said Boyd, hated dogma And it's that bureaucracy that slows down our ability to orientate, or enact essentially and have that agility, but also removing the, we're constraining our people too much. We're moving the freedom of action from our people that actually, like you said, can use their initiative.

Chet Richards (25:26)
But it was still, you know, so, all right, I understand.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Exactly. Exactly. Because creativity and initiative, my definition of leadership is fire up the creativity and initiative of everybody in the organization and focus, harmonize it and focus it to accomplish the purposes of the organization. Harmonize is one of Boyd's favorite words. It was his antidote to synchronization. Just make sure everybody's head, but given that they know what direction they're heading in, what's supposed to be doing, then they will be the ones that get into the nitty gritty and figure out the best way to do it.

The overall framework, this is the thing that makes the Toyota production system such an active, incredible genius, was that it harmonizes the top down and bottom up. So the top down is responsible for what kind of car are we going to build, for example. How big is it going to be? What engines and all it's going to have in it. But they're also responsible in training people in this system so people know where they can take the initiative and where they can improve the system and...

and they know other things where they have to go along with the system. So you have the standard workbook, standard in the Toyota production system. And people say, well, we have one of those in our company. And you say, who wrote the standard book in your company? Well, hired, industrial engineers come out and they look at the thing and they figure out the best way to do it and how long it ought to take. And then they measure how long it took you to do it. And then if you took too long, then that's waste and they ding you. I said,

Okay, how many industrial engineers does Toyota have? And it's hard to say really, because the functions get spread out over virtually everybody in the organization. They do have people trained in industrial engineering, but they tend to be more specialists. And they're trained in how to operate the pull system itself, you know, that makes it all makes it all work. So top management job is to set that whole structure up and get it going and monitor it see how it's going along. And then

Mike Jones (27:18)
Yeah.

Chet Richards (27:36)
the execution of it, of course, coming from the bottom up, of everybody in the company has a job to do where they can use their initiative to improve things. And it's harmonized by the top management to make sure that when it does, a high quality car rolls off the line

Mike Jones (27:43)
Yeah.

I think that's that key, isn't it? It's about having that clear intent and really understanding about the outputs and outcomes that you're expecting. Yeah.

Chet Richards (27:58)
Yes, absolutely.

Sure. What is it? What is the commander's intent here? Yeah.

Mike Jones (28:02)
Yeah, yeah. And

as well on that point, you mentioned about the key principles, you mentioned in your book, so you've got Einheit, I'm going to say this terribly, Fingerspitz. There we go.

Chet Richards (28:15)
Fingerspitzinggefühl, fingertip feeling.

It used to be a German word. I brought it over into English now. So it's fingerspitzinggefühl, fingertip feeling.

Mike Jones (28:21)
Yes,

I prefer that one, I can say that one. Then you've got Schwerpunkt and Alf, I can never say this. mission command. I just thought mission command, yeah.

Chet Richards (28:24)
Yeah, yeah, things hit the field, yeah.

Yeah, Auftragstaktik Mission command, yeah. Yeah, just call it mission.

That's what Boyd did. And was uncertain to win. He goes through all four of those, although it messes, and patterns a conflict. Although he doesn't use Fingerspitzenfuhl The only place I saw Fingerspitzenfuhl used was in strategic game. But it's sort of implicit in there. He's telling you what it is you need to be able to do. And Fingerspitzenfuhl is the ability to do it quickly.

Mike Jones (28:48)
Okay.

Chet Richards (28:56)
intuitively and with the minimum amount of explicit communications. in the sense, that's what John was talking about.

Mike Jones (29:04)
So how do you think

those principles can help leaders now navigate this complex world?

Chet Richards (29:11)
Well,

again, you don't want to make a checklist out of it any more than you want to make a checklist out of the five things that Sun, Sun's or seven that Sun Tzu came up with. But what they might think of as orthogonal dimensions that you can operate, you can operate on. We've got this is five dimensional space. You have to add a behendicite, a mental agility, which is the ability to change your orientation pattern or your OODA loop pattern of

Mike Jones (29:13)
No.

Chet Richards (29:37)
according to the environment, either to respond to it or to try to influence it or both. It's hard sometimes to draw the difference. Anyway, it's how to get out of a mental rut, for example, which is extremely difficult to do even if you have the other four things all going on. you can think of General Motors trying to adopt something like the Toyota production system. They've got to take their orientation up, out, and put it in a different place. And they can do all the high and and splits, give you off, take a spare foot if they want. If they don't,

Mike Jones (29:42)
Mmm, I like that.

Chet Richards (30:05)
have the philosophy of people who understand, as you said, why they're doing these things. They ain't gonna work. They'll use the initiative to actually make the system worse because they don't understand what it is, the purpose behind the system and the things that would make it better.

Mike Jones (30:12)
No.

Chet Richards (30:21)
You had deep understanding.

Mike Jones (30:22)
that's such a, great thing I think is getting lost now that real clarity of role. so-called leadership experts at the moment on LinkedIn, they talk about, role clarity being a bad thing. But in complexity, know that if someone understands not only what

the organization is trying to achieve in order to achieve what? So they know the higher level thinking and they understand their part in it. That enables them to navigate that complexity a lot easier rather where it's a sort of loose and people just sort of, I think this is an expectation that people with really few boundaries or constraints will suddenly self-organize into something, but I'm not too sure.

Chet Richards (31:04)
Don't self-organize into something. That's quite true if you may or may not like the results.

Mike Jones (31:06)
Yeah.

talking about this mental agility, just going back to, I think about Apple, you you're talking about their reorientation and trying to get himself out of a mental rut.

Do you think that's what they're facing now because they've not really produced anything new?

Chet Richards (31:25)
think that some of that,

I mean, look at the problems with Siri, look at their problems with AI in general, their inability to come up with any product or service that just absolutely delights customers. I every year you come out with a new iPhone and say, okay, this is nice, about time to replace my old one, you know, give me a new one, or iPad, my new iMac here that I'm doing. So a wonderful machine, but five years ago, the one that I bought that this one replaced was a wonderful machine.

And other than the fact that this has got a bigger screen, of course, a lot faster. But still, that's OK. It's still a computer. And I think they appear to, I won't say miss the AI boat, because I'm not sure exactly where AI is going. You just never know. But they do appear to be having a lot of problems integrating these new techniques into their systems. So it'll be interesting to see. On the other hand,

Mike Jones (32:01)
Mm.

Chet Richards (32:20)
can go back to pollen season here in the American South. Look at Microsoft. They kind of start... To me, it's going to wrong. I used Wonders products up until 2002 or so, I guess when I switched over to Mac. And they worked. They were okay. didn't notice. And it was... Yeah, they crashed a lot. But at that point in time, the Apple systems were crashing a lot too.

And then Windows 2000 came out and Windows 2000 was really cool because it didn't crash. I it had a lot of security flaws and things we learned about later, but it flat did not crash. It'd go weeks without having to restart the computer. I said, this is so cool. But then from that point on, it just sort of plateaued. They went through their various, wow, Windows versions and it just kind of, you know, they had that big thing where they had, oh, where was it?

Steve Ballmer took over and they were trying to get all the bugs out of the code overflow buffer overflow errors and things like that. And he would throw chairs across the room and all that. And so Microsoft would just kind of they tried to bring out products. They brought out a competitor called the Zune to the iPod. I don't know anybody ever bought one. It was a total disaster as an iPod killer. And of course, they never were able to have

Mike Jones (33:20)
Yeah.

No, I didn't even... Yeah, yeah.

Chet Richards (33:43)
Windows phoned and so look, but then for some reason they found this guy, Satya Nadella, who was a long time Microsoft employee and they put him in charge and he turned the whole thing around to where a Microsoft is, I say, doing some really neat stuff now they've got a handle on AI. They're at least in the race, you know, with competitive products and AI. And if you read Nadella,

Mike Jones (33:56)
Mmm.

Chet Richards (34:10)
and listen to him, he's talking about a lot of these same ideas that we are. And I think he is incorporating a lot of Indian philosophy in it, but then a lot of the ideas that Boyd used eventually traced the roots back to those. Zen originates in Southern Nepal, Northern India several years ago, that's okay. And then it melded in with Taoism and other things. But the roots of it, way thinking about the world like that,

of trying to harmonize everybody and get everybody on the same page and get barriers out of their way and encourage them to make mistakes if they need to, but learn from them quickly and then go on. I think it's something that Nadella brought to Microsoft. as far as I can tell, it's just done a fantastic job with this. Apple needs to find somebody like that. I mean, Tim Cook's done it.

Mike Jones (34:54)
Yeah.

Chet Richards (34:57)
good job as a caretaker, I think, know, the products that they ship now, because he's manufacturing and logistics guy, they work, they work well. And no, no problem with that. But it's just, there's no magic anymore. So

Mike Jones (35:09)
No,

you think about it and go, well, it's a bit like what we talking about early on in the podcast around the homeostasis and not looking for mismatches because that's a lot harder to do. So why do it where we could just, know, businesses get to a point where they're stable, they're doing okay. And they try to hold onto that as long as they possibly can.

Chet Richards (35:30)
remember, one of the managers of guru's years ago, I don't know who it was, said for most companies, it might have been Tom Peters, that for most companies, their primary goal is to keep doing what they've been doing, keep what they've got, they're making money, keep making money, make a little more money next year than they made this year, that sort of thing. But the primary goal is, as you said, homeostasis. The problem is, and Boyd

Mike Jones (35:43)
Mmm.

Chet Richards (35:56)
figured this out, but as many other people is it over time, a, organizational version of entropy builds up inside the system. that we mean disorder will increase. Another way to look at it is more and more of the energy. and you can measure that by people's salaries or time that they spend doing things. It's taken up on internal issues rather than external issues. And this just continues to build up and up. And so the system itself just kind of winds down.

becomes incapable not only of driving the marketplace, but even responding at a timely way to it. And you sit over and over again, the number of companies that go out of business every month,

Mike Jones (36:29)
Hmm.

It's the thing I've been wrestling with and it's just, you find when that internal entropy builds and they get really comfortable and then suddenly they're more internally focused, that that's where their orientation goes. Only internally, they forget external. And then all their aspirations start to be what they believe to be true rather than testing it, looking for those...

Chet Richards (36:44)
Mm-hmm.

Try it.

Mike Jones (36:56)
challenging their beliefs against what's happening in reality. Yeah, And yeah, sorry, you're good.

Chet Richards (36:57)
because they don't want to know. Yes, they're absolutely right.

Yeah, what starts to be really important is not what's going to drive the marketplace, but what's my vice president boss going to think of this? And we know his or her proclivities, what they like and don't like and all that. So you don't do the things they don't like, because that's how you got to get promoted or not, as the case may be. And so what becomes the focus of your activities is what's going to help me rise through the bureaucracy.

Mike Jones (37:09)
Mmm.

Chet Richards (37:25)
which leads me to a thing I call Richard's Third Law, which is in any hierarchy, the people who rise in it are those who become good at rising. In other words, they study the system. There are very, very famous Broadway stage show and at least a couple of movies called How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying,

Mike Jones (37:34)
Mmm.

Chet Richards (37:40)
But anyway, that was the whole premise. Just learn what it takes to rise in this organization and do that. And you will rise. Don't worry about products or things like that, unless it becomes critical to pass a certain level that you

Mike Jones (37:41)
what?

Yeah.

Chet Richards (37:54)
that you'd be associated with a successful program. And then the trick is to figure out what program is going to be successful by looking at maybe the bureaucratic powers of the people that are running it, that sort of thing. So you're something, but it makes sense. But after a while, more and more and more of the company energy goes into that sort of thing because the people running the company, that's how they came to power. And that's how they're to promote people. So nature's recycling mechanism.

Mike Jones (38:13)
Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah. And you see that they lose all focus on context. Like, what's actually happening in external environments? What are our customers wanting? What are they changing to? What are the early warning signs for change? All this stuff to help reorientate, to make sure that we are updating. Yeah.

Chet Richards (38:22)
yeah, yeah.

Mm-hmm. Yep.

Exactly. Absolutely. But you got to want to do it to get the answers

to those questions. You have to want to ask them and you have to want to be told bad news because I think I've said in certain women bad news is the only kind that's going to do you any good. Paraphrasing Andy Grove again, but very, very, very few senior leaders, a few CEOs, perhaps because they're not there's no operational management above them, particularly if they're also chairman and CEO and do about what they want.

But to get down levels below that, gets to be very, you people just taking risk is typically not what gets you promoted. We used to have a saying back in the 80s and 90s, it's a one mistake Air Force because it was peace time. There was no, yeah, there was no objective way to really say who was doing better than anybody else. So what they would do when they were looking at OERs at promotion time, they had certain things that offered automatically throughout.

One of them was, for promotion to Colonel, had you had Air War College? If the answer was no, then you weren't even going to be considered. Maybe if you had shot down five Migs over Hanoi, they might make an exception for you. But that would be about the only thing. And then they looked at other things that were considered absolute no-nos. And all it took was one of those anywhere in your OER. And you might even have a block all the way down the

you know, excellent all the way down the line. But when you read some of the words, it was easy to tell that it was trying to say, you know, this guy, this guy just didn't play the game properly. So, it's one mistake Air Force. So people don't take risks. People don't take risk in that sort of thing.

Mike Jones (40:01)
And I suppose that's where they don't,

and you just then start make models of the business that are creating the bureaucracy, the entropy inside where we want people that mental agility, that initiative to understand what we're trying to achieve as a business and then think about how we can do that, how we can shape to change the circumstances.

Chet Richards (40:15)
Yes.

And of course, the big paradox there is that people that are capable of thinking like that are probably also capable of going out and starting their own business. So how do you keep these people in your organization

helping to row your boat, help you go faster, without having them go out and become either competitors or start their own business in some other field where you lose their...

Mike Jones (40:42)
Alright.

Chet Richards (40:50)
So how do you keep these good guys motivated? Or as we used to say in the military, what do you do with the General Patton in peacetime? Totally uncouth, but in you really want him. In peacetime you really want him to stay out of sight.

Mike Jones (40:56)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, I think that's what I saw all the time in the military and you see now in organisations where in peacetime when things are going well, you need to challenge those people and give them maximum freedom of action to do things, to try new things, encourage that, take risks. As soon as you constrain them too much, then they're not being challenged. And then they go, well, why do I need to be here?

Chet Richards (41:16)
Mm-hmm.

Yes, yes.

Right. And if they're any good,

they'll go somewhere else. Yeah. Yeah. Quite true.

Mike Jones (41:31)
It'sBeen great having you here. if you could leave leaders with one thing to think about, what would you, what would that one thing be?

Chet Richards (41:37)
Lord, that's a tough one. I think I would go back to that initial quote that you did from Certain to Win, which is that it's your job fundamentally before everything else to keep your organization's orientation accurate. Given that you can do that, most of the rest of the stuff is gonna be pretty straightforward, pretty obvious what you should do.

Well, you it comes back to Andy Grove. First thing is you have to want to do it. And the second thing is then you have to spend, and I think I mentioned this in certain to win, you've got to spend a reasonable amount of your time and effort, look, not only looking outside, but being outside. So, and this is one I got Tom Peters said, everybody in your company back from the person that sweeps the floor to the CEO should make two customer visits a year.

Co-CEO will make a lot more than that, of course. Nowadays, you outsource the floor sweeper jobs. They're not really part of your company anymore, you don't work. But the idea was that now, all throughout your organization, people begin to develop a sense for what it is they're doing, what people think about their product, and eventually where their livelihoods are coming from. So that's a good one. The other thing is, use your product and use your competitor's product as closely

Mike Jones (42:21)
Hmm.

Chet Richards (42:45)
as you possibly can to the way that the customers use them, product or service. So if I were going, I remember the way I knew that Zune was going to be a disaster, the way, somebody interviewed Bill Gates right after it came out and he was talking about this, this and all the wonderful things going on. Someone said, Hey, do you have an iPhone? Gates said, no, don't, I don't, I don't use the iPhone. Okay. I knew right there, the thing was gonna, it was gonna be a total disaster. And it was cause he had no Fingerspitzengefuhl for why people, it's an iPod rather than iPhone back then.

Mike Jones (43:07)
Yeah.

Chet Richards (43:13)
and the things why people are doing this, he couldn't internalize, he couldn't empathize, use Boyd's term, why people were buying this, you know, this device. Yeah, well, I'll just make a little thing. That's a hard drive edit plays music. Okay. And how did that work out for you, Bill?

Mike Jones (43:27)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. You

know, that's awesome. There's so much to take away there and I love that story.

Chet Richards (43:33)
Yeah, not a lot of respect for Bill

Gates. Don't get me wrong. I'm just I'm picking on him here because that was such a delicious example.

Mike Jones (43:39)
Yeah, it's

so true and that's a lot of good things that I'm to take away from this around the harmonization, the mental agility. And I think you really touched on a good point about that fingertip feel. think having that...

Chet Richards (43:50)
Mm-hmm. That's where you

typically start. If again, think of your military training. You walked in day one, they didn't say, all right, now we're going to have a squad level attack on this and such and so and so. A team's got to be the, there's, you might as well have been speaking Swahili to you. I don't know if you speak Swahili or not, but they might as well have been. And you start out with simple things and you get good at, and you get pride in doing simple things and you build in off of, off of that.

Mike Jones (44:05)
Yeah, yeah.

like that.

Chet Richards (44:17)
And that's not a bad, so you build Fingerspitzengefuhl And once people get pride at being able to do the sorts of things that they're going to be doing on an everyday basis, then you can start expanding into tactics and operations and strategy and all that kind of stuff. And they'll actually be able to do it. So, so that would be my everybody should be really proud of how well they can do their job.

Well, all right. Thank you so much.

Mike Jones (44:37)
Cool. Yes, I best let you go.

Thank you very much for coming. If this is haven't read already, please read Certain to Win by Chet Richards. I highly recommend it.

Chet Richards (44:45)
Excellent suggestion, by the way. I second that. Thank you very much.