Strategy Meets Reality Podcast

Orientation is Everything: Mark McGrath on Boyd’s OODA, Disruption, and Strategic Adaptation

• Mike Jones • Season 1 • Episode 13

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What if the most powerful lever in strategy isn’t action—but orientation?

In this episode of Strategy Meets Reality, Mike Jones is joined by Mark McGrath—Marine veteran, strategist, and expert in John Boyd’s OODA loop—to unpack how orientation drives adaptation, shapes perception, and rewires how organisations respond to disruption.

Mark takes us deep into Boyd’s legacy, revealing why strategy is less about linear plans and more about continuous learning, destruction and creation, and evolving faster than the environment. From Wall Street trading floors to boardroom transformation, this episode is a masterclass in fighting inertia, rethinking time, and breaking free from the guardians of decay.

🔍 In this episode:

  • Why orientation—not action—is the true source of advantage
  • How destruction and creation enable real adaptation
  • Understanding time, tempo, and disruption
  • What it means to lead with curiosity and humility
  • Why small shifts create exponential effects
  • How to challenge entrenched assumptions and power

🎧 Keywords: OODA loop, John Boyd, strategy, orientation, disruption, decision-making, leadership, complexity, learning, strategic advantage

📘 Learn more from Mark at: https://substack.com/@markjmcgrath

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🔗 Full episodes, show notes, and resources: https://www.lbiconsulting.com/strategymeetsreality-podcast

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💬 Connect with host Mike Jones → https://www.linkedin.com/in/mike-h-jones/

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (00:00)
Your orientation implicitly guides and controls how you make sense of the world, how you form decisions and how you act on those decisions.

Mike Jones (00:00)
in the apps.

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (00:08)
conflict is everywhere. It's going on whether you like it or not. And if you don't orient yourself, someone's going to do it for you. And if your competitors are doing it for you, then you're in a lot of trouble.

Mike Jones (00:50)
Welcome back to strategy meets reality podcast. It's great to have Mark McGrath today as my guest. Great to have you on the show, Mark.

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (00:56)
Yeah, thanks for having me Mike.

Mike Jones (00:58)
Just for our listeners, do you mind giving a bit of an intro about yourself and a bit of context of what you've been up to lately?

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (01:04)
Yeah, sure. I live over across the pond. It's the first place you'd hit one of them. Manhattan. I live in Manhattan. I was a I was a Marine officer. And then I spent just over 15 years on Wall Street and the asset management end of Wall Street as a external wholesaler. And I grew up Army brat. My dad was a

Army officer, so I lived all over the world. And then as a Marine officer, I lived all over the world. And what I figured out when I got out of the Marine Corps, was an officer in the Marines for six years active duty. I was a field artillery officer. I learned really quickly in the civilian world that the Marine Corps had taught me a lot more than what the Marine Corps teaches, right? Warfighting.

that there were higher applications, that there were broader applications. And I started on this journey of just challenging everything that I had learned in the Marine Corps, knowing that what they taught me was really powerful. And I had this internal sort of bodily sense that there was a lot more to what they taught us. Like there was deeper stuff behind it. And it primarily focused and centered around the work of John Boyd who

Mike Jones (02:11)
Hmm.

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (02:18)
was extremely influential to the Marine Corps, who I first came into. I first learned of John Boyd when I was a midshipman in the Naval ROTC program, where I went to university at Marquette in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. our Marine officer instructor was a major and he was talking about the Boyd cycle, know, OODA, the Boyd cycle. And we were learning about patterns of conflict. Now, this was in 19...

Mike Jones (02:18)
Yeah.

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (02:44)
Late he was due the late 94 early 95 and actually Boyd was still alive and you know when you're a 19 year old kid It just goes over your head and you learn it and you learn how to take the test on it But looking back to think that I was learning about Boyd when he was actually still alive for another two years I wish I could go back in time and like go to go to find him and sit down with him In a lot of ways, I feel like I have it we can get into that but anyway

Mike Jones (02:50)
wow, yeah.

Yeah.

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (03:15)
I feel like what we learned was how to do things. They're really good at telling us what to do. And being very contrarian and having been educated by Jesuits who love to question things and challenge authority and love open inquiry, I really started asking more and more questions because if something was taught to me to thrive in the most adverse, chaotic, complex, friction-filled scenarios,

of say combat, why wouldn't it work anywhere else? And what I realized was that the Marine Corps taught us how to be really good complexity thinkers. They taught us how to be really good systems thinkers if we did the extra work and start to not just know it, but understand it. I basically, I guess, dedicated my life. I started to do this as soon as I got out. I got out my first job before I went over to the capital markets world.

Mike Jones (03:50)
Yeah.

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (04:07)
was in medical sales and I just started realizing that things looked different to me than they did to everybody else. And I wanted to know why.

Mike Jones (04:14)
Yeah.

That's good. Boyd's work is pivotal. just before we got onto the show, I think we're talking about, don't think Boyd gets a lot of credit for the work and how he's influenced strategy. When I say strategy, mean, not the orthodoxy of strategy that we're seeing at the moment, strategy that we know works in complex environments. So when you think about it in Boyd's work around orientation,

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (04:34)
Mm.

Mike Jones (04:44)
That's a critical factor, the whole thing gets sort of misunderstood. But I think in particular, orientation. why is that important? And also, where do people get wrong when they think about orientation?

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (04:51)
Yeah.

this is great. So we're going to go to the big part first. We're going to go to the most important part first and then we'll fill in the rest. So I came to the realization, and this is actually how I met Ponch and how we sort of have become collaborative creative partners on working on these things. But I came to the conclusion that the way that they were teaching OODA loop was complete garbage. that

Mike Jones (04:59)
Yeah, yeah.

Mm.

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (05:21)
that something else was going on. And as I would examine Oodaloo's sketch, this was especially when after Franz Ossinga's book, Science, Strategy and War came out, which I highly recommend to everybody. You can see my copy. I've had it since it came out and it's taped together and underlined like crazy. But I realized that, yeah, exactly.

Mike Jones (05:38)
yeah.

That's the sign of a good book.

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (05:46)
And it goes with me literally everywhere. Everywhere. I just was telling you, I just got back from Canada. Well, guess what went to Canada with me? That book goes with me everywhere. Orientation, I started thinking of it in a bigger context because like the more that you examine OODA loop sketch, which is the only way Boyd ever illustrated the concept of OODA, you start to realize that orientation is not a phase. It's not a step.

It's something, right? We could describe it a lot of ways, but the way that I mostly teach it is it's your cognitive operating system. It's how you make sense of your world and your reality. And your orientation is who you are, what you think, what you believe. It's your operating system just like on a phone. You have an internal operating system that has to be updated and revised in order to stay relevant.

Mike Jones (06:22)
Mmm.

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (06:37)
the same thing with your mind. Your cognition has to be updated. And what was the breakthrough for me was on the OODA Loop sketch, okay, I figured out what orientation was and that had reminded of philosophical and theological and historical stuff that I had been taught at my university. My undergrad was in history and my master's degree was in economics. I started realizing that

Mike Jones (06:39)
Yes.

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (07:00)
Okay, that this all this all makes sense. Like this is my essence, my being and it shapes or implicitly guides and controls as it says on the interloop sketch, how I make sense how I come up with decisions, how I act and how I loop back and learn. And it all flows from orientation. So it hit me. And like I said, there were there were there were things along the way that helped those thing, the work of John Robb, the work of Chet Richards, and then

Mike Jones (07:14)
Mm-hmm.

Yes.

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (07:26)
my collaboration with those two guys over the last several years, which has been crazy. It hit me that. Yeah, you've had yeah, you've had chat on. Yeah, he's been on ours two or three times. but what it it what it made me realize was that I didn't know enough. There was more to Boyd than they taught us. And there was more to war fighting than they than they taught us. And I really needed to go deep.

Mike Jones (07:31)
We had a chat on the on the show previously

Yeah.

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (07:51)
on it and that's the realization. So when you read our work and you go on our sub stack, you'll get the sense, is the central component and everything flows from that. And if you're misoriented, the whole entire thing falls apart. Whereas some of the folks we were talking about that are teaching it in a linear way,

Mike Jones (08:04)
Mm.

He

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (08:13)
as if it's a mathematical formula that can be applied anywhere objectively. It completely undermines the work that Boyd was doing around complexity. And it doesn't prepare you for the nonlinear reality that you deal with on a daily basis. So, so we're adamant about teaching orientation and how your orientation implicitly guides and controls or shapes how you sense make

how you decide how you act and how you learn. And once you get that, then you can really start to empower yourself and your team and those that you lead in a way that your competitors likely are not, they're likely not doing.

Mike Jones (08:56)
Yeah.

You see like a vast amount of work and energy being put in it, on a psychological level of assessing you to understand a bit of self-awareness. And that's an element, that internal understanding of yourself. But I think a lot of the time they're missing the the adaption, the reorientation that needs to happen with the external environment you're coupled with and how

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (09:08)
Hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Mike Jones (09:21)
we can be shaped quite easily by predominant narratives, or if we're not careful about the information we're being fed, we can quite easily get misorientated or lose that connection with reality.

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (09:36)
Yeah, it's totally. Yeah, that's it. mean, basically in a competitive scenario, you're trying to disconnect your opponent's orientation from reality. So they lose their understanding of what's going on and what's happening.

where you had mentioned when we look at OODA loop linearly, I think that's what ended up happening is our orientation becomes completely disoriented. And that's how we become subject to having the script written by somebody else, not us. We don't have control over our own.

Mike Jones (10:05)
Hmm.

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (10:07)
our own sovereignty, our own actions, our own capacity for action. In fact, I was just playing today, you can look at our sub stack, it's the world of reorientation and the tagline had been clarity for complex systems. But then I thought, no, that's not powerful enough. What are we really empowering people to do? What are you empowering people to do when they understand orientation and they understand how orientation implicitly guides and controls how they deal with reality? Well, you're helping them escape the script.

and you're helping them win the war because the war's going on, know, conflict is everywhere. It's going on whether you like it or not. And if you don't orient yourself, someone's going to do it for you. And if your competitors are doing it for you, then you're in a lot of trouble.

Mike Jones (10:35)
Hmm.

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (10:49)
Now, there's a flip to that. When you're orienting your competitors the way that you want them, then you're going to write the script for them and you're going to win the war.

But that only comes, I think, with an effective understanding of what Boyd was actually saying.

Mike Jones (11:06)
Yeah, you get this, because we are coupled with the external environment, we're getting shaped by something. And you can either, unconsciously you can just go with it and you're gonna be shaped, or you can try to reorientate and understand the nature of that relationship and think, do I shape that relationship? But that gets very much into strategy. So, how is...

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (11:13)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Mike Jones (11:31)
How is the idea of boyd's work and orientation? How's that really important to strategy in your perspective?

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (11:37)
Well, I'll start with how he defines strategy, which you and I were talking about, and we put in the chat. He defines it as a mental tapestry of changing intentions for harmonizing and focusing our efforts as a basis of realizing some aim or purpose in an unfolding and often unforeseen world of many bewildering events and many contending interests. Most people don't think of strategy that way, right? That's a definition of strategy that says, okay,

Mike Jones (11:59)
No, that's the problem.

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (12:03)
The world is nonlinear. The world is complex. We need to think about it differently than everybody else is doing and how everybody else is doing. And certainly here, predominantly in the Western world, they're thinking of it linearly, formulaically, objectively, like an engineer might, maybe a math teacher. And we're going to take templates and solutions and we're going to put those on every, every situation we can, we can find.

And the world doesn't work like that. So if I have a strategy, you know, my intent is going to change, right? Our intention change changes as time advances. Why? Because everything's in a state of flux. You know, whatever, whatever was is no longer, it no longer is anymore. It doesn't mean that we can't come together and coordinate action together. It doesn't mean that we can't come together and, you know, build widgets or whatever it is that we're doing for the, for the world. But if

Mike Jones (12:42)
Yes.

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (12:56)
If our intention stays the same without changing or without having the ability to change and if we can't harmonize around that and focus those efforts, you know, in light of that change, that's how you become defeated. And that's really what he was saying strategy was is because we're going to evolve. How do we know that? Because things are going to evolve. know, I hold up the iPhone earlier. Well, this is a very different iteration of this device from when it first came out 12 years ago.

Mike Jones (13:07)
Mm.

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (13:22)
It's changed a lot. I remember the first year the iPhone came out, I think it changed like three or four times. You're still communicating on it, you're still using it, but it's changing. It's constantly, and what's happened since, so many things have changed structurally, internally, externally, because everything's in a state of ceaseless flux.

Mike Jones (13:27)
Mmm.

Yeah. And just even on that, know, Apple are probably trying to reorientate now with the news or the unfolding unforeseen circumstances that Sam Altman and Johnny Ives, the person that helped with the iPhone, have now combined. So that's the point to go, well, okay, now this is happening. what's unfolding? What's different or what could be different to what we're expecting?

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (13:56)
Mm.

So our orientation as Boyd illustrated it in OODA Loop Sketch would be our cultural traditions, our genetic heritage, our previous experience. we would understand the fourth thing, new information in light of those three things. And then the fifth thing is analysis and synthesis. How do we break things down? How do we build up something novel that didn't?

Mike Jones (14:23)
Hmm.

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (14:32)
that didn't previously exist. And quite frankly, that's really the component of Boyd, think, that in addition to just orientation, just orientation is not enough, understanding the concept of analysis and synthesis, which is from his core paper, which I find that people teaching Uta have never read or even heard of in some cases, Destruction and Creation. If you haven't read it, if you don't know it and you don't understand it,

Mike Jones (14:40)
No, yeah.

It crashed.

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (15:00)
You're not teaching OODA, you're teaching people linear formulas that are going to make them prey and targets for their competitors. But what Boyd is saying is that we have to be able to constantly destroy and reconstruct our mental understanding of the way the world is and the way the world works, the way the market works or whatever it is. And if we don't do that, we're going to lose our capacity for free independent action. And why? Three things. One was entropy.

Mike Jones (15:17)
Yeah.

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (15:29)
⁓ Two was uncertainty and three was incompleteness that things are always generating disorder and entropy, all systems, particularly closed systems. The world is uncertain. We can't fix two points between A to B as Heisenberg taught and then incompleteness. A system cannot verify its own efficacy within itself. In other words, we have to constantly be destroying our understanding and creating a new understanding.

Mike Jones (15:29)
Mm.

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (15:51)
because nothing is certain, nothing is clear, nothing is ever complete, and nothing is ever, ever escapable of entropy. Entropy is always gonna be present. It's a matter of if I open my system and I'm learning and I'm creating and destroying models effectively enough, that I'm not gonna get consumed by entropy as fast as those that are closed.

Mike Jones (15:59)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah. And you see that, know, boy talked about internal entropy. we create the, um, bureaucratic nature that we spend too much time, um, feeling internally that we miss what's happening externally. We, well, we lose the ability to, um, to handle what's changing, um, externally. And you see this where you're talking about some really good stuff about analysis synthesis, about how do we destroy and recreate, um, our own mental models when

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (16:38)
Mm.

Mike Jones (16:43)
the structure, especially around strategy becomes such a bureaucratic thing that it becomes a cycle. It is an actual cycle of, right, we come to the end of year, we need to get the latest financials done, the latest projections done, we need to go get it signed off by the board. What are we gonna do next year or the next five years? Well, let's do what we did this year, but plus or minus 10%.

it doesn't really give people the freedom to do what you say.

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (17:12)
Yeah, I think it can be mitigated by having a good understanding of destruction and creation and then then expanding on that. So the trajectory, like when I say when people ask me like, well, what's the what's like to get to the point where I'm at? I was like, well, I'm the point that I'm at is I'm going to still I'm still in a constant state of learning because

one of Boyd's closest friends told me himself, and he would say this if we bought it. He's been on our show. His name is G.I. Wilson. He's a Marine officer. And G.I. says, I first met the guy in 1979. I interacted with him virtually daily until he died in 1997. And ever since then, I'm still learning something new from him. And I tell people like you don't just

Mike Jones (17:42)
Yeah, yeah.

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (18:00)
get Boyd and then that's it. You have to constantly keep getting Boyd so you can apply it. Anyway, what I was saying is that there's a, if you took the over sort of overarching trajectory, the way that I describe it, and you know, this works for me is like, I have to start with destruction creation, and then I have to understand conceptual spiral. And then I have to understand the essence of winning and losing, which is where he drew the OODA loop sketch. And the other ones are important, yet they all kind of stay on that.

Mike Jones (18:04)
Mm-hmm.

Yes, yes.

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (18:29)
they all kind of stay sort of, you know, adjacent to that path or along that trajectory. So basically conceptual spiral builds on destruction creation and then essence of winning and losing visualizes through the loop sketch. Now that's also one of the smallest briefs and people say, well, I'm just going to read that, you know, because it does summarize, it summarizes everything. I was like, good luck. And people read it like it's five pages long and I have no idea what the hell it just said to me.

Mike Jones (18:49)
Yikes.

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (18:57)
And I said, yeah, you gotta break it down and do it the right way. I learned from, so Chuck Spinney was his closest collaborator and I got a chance one time to spend like three or four hours on a call with him, which was insane. But Chuck has a thing called epistemology, evolutionary epistemology. It's his understanding of destruction and creation.

Mike Jones (19:01)
Yeah.

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (19:19)
And when destruction and creation, you it's only 11 pages or whatever and it's dense. And I would read it and reread it and reread it and walk away saying, I have no idea what the hell Boyd is trying to say. I mean, this all seems to make sense to me, but I don't understand destruction and creation. Well, evolutionary epistemology, I think is sort of the codex, if you will, the Rosetta Stone for me anyway, on what destruction and creation is actually telling us. And then once I got that,

then conceptual spiral made even more sense, then OODA loop made even more sense. So that's an important, it's all over our sub stack. I've cited that so many times. We actually put out from AGLX, we put out a transcript of, I sent you the link, people can sign up for it.

Mike Jones (19:53)
Yay.

Yeah, I'll put that on the

show notes so people can do that. And also link your sub stack, because there's a lot in your sub stack that I think really gets the heart of Boy's work. it's one of those things, Boy's one of those ones, it's frustrating at a point, because like you said, you think you've got it, but then you haven't got it. And I think it took me a while to realize that I don't need to get it yet. I just need to...

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (20:10)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Mike Jones (20:35)
I just to carry on being curious and keep understanding it. And the more that I apply, not just boyd's work, but when I more apply systems thinking, more apply complexity theory, more I toy with what really is strategy and pulling it apart, then I can go back to it and go, right, that makes sense because I've seen it. I've been involved in it.

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (20:56)
Yeah, I was going to say too that when you read about his life, so the biography of Boyd by Robert Corum, you realize that Boyd, didn't stop. He never thought that he got it. And this is why I never think that I get it. I always think that like, like he did, you have to keep destroying and revising your model, which is why he never really published anything because

Mike Jones (21:09)
Mmm.

yeah.

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (21:21)
He thought, well, once I publish it, it's obsolete. You know, I'm gonna have to go to the get to the next thing. And he would call these guys as acolytes, many who we've had the privilege of collaborating directly with like Chad, Chuck and G.I. Wilson. He would call them at two in the morning and say, I've just had a breakthrough. and listen to this and he'd read something for like an hour and then like the guys on the other end.

Mike Jones (21:24)
Yeah, yeah.

Hahaha!

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (21:46)
But what he was doing was he was constantly challenging his assumptions. I had one yesterday, she's downstairs, but my soulmate Sarah would tell you, if you had heard me yesterday, I came to this epiphany. A lot of my work has been, as my master's an economist, like,

Overlaying Boyd with economics and Boyd had a degree in economics, but but trying to fuse the two things Specifically around the the work of some very specific thinkers. I talk about in a sub stack a lot like FA Hayek or whatever but then yesterday something just hit me like a ton of like it was standing in front of me for years and then I Took took one book that I was very familiar with and you think you got it, right? And then I was

Mike Jones (22:12)
Hmm.

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (22:36)
matching it up with something that Boyd was saying about time, that it was around time as structure, not time as money, but time as structure. And then all of the sudden, it just started going like boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Now I've had a master's in economics for many, years. I've been reading this shit for many, many, years. And then all of a sudden it just goes click like that.

And I was euphoric, you know? But that kind of stuff happens all the time, I think, if you're doing what he said, you know? Because you're basically trying to arrive to a place of understanding, which ultimately hopefully gets you to wisdom. I don't think I'm at wisdom yet, but I think I have a lot more understanding of Boyd and what he was trying to teach us. What exactly he was trying to teach us and what exactly he was thinking and feeling, which he took all the way to his deathbed.

Mike Jones (23:05)
Mm.

Yeah.

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (23:28)
you know, that's left for us to develop and find out. And I think that that's why when people present like a, a templated formulaic version of Boyd and his work, that's it's total garbage and you should run because it's training you to orient ineffectively because would, you know, Boyd saw something so much bigger and broader than what he's known for. And, you know, even on his deathbed, he was talking about evolutionary biology.

So like it was just it's like what do I keep doing? What do I how do I keep building on this? And I think that that's really our challenge and that's the intent of the podcast and the the website and our professional work that we do with clients You know that we're co-creating value and we're co-learning we're learning as much from them as we are from as they are from us And I think that that's what that's what boyd's ultimately telling us to do

Mike Jones (24:13)
Yeah, if it's well-defined, it's a strategy that unfolded enough to unforeseen world. There's always going to be new developments. There's new connections to be made. And think it's right to put leaders in the more curious sense to try new things, look, to have that courageous point to reorientate into...

to say, I don't really know if I'm gonna learn, try and find some information here or try to learn, where I think we sort of get stuck in this just formulaic thing that we look at something, we know it straight away, we apply it and then that's it, we just keep applying it. Yeah.

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (24:44)
Mmm.

Yeah.

Yeah, you double down. You, you, you double down. mean, people are really good at this because usually what they double down on is what they think they know. And they double down on what's comfort, what's comforting to them.

Mike Jones (24:53)
Yeah.

Hmm.

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (25:08)
because they don't want to challenge their assumptions. They don't want to update their models. They don't want to revise. They don't want to think that they were ever wrong. And a lot of the thinkers that I'm attracted to, like Boyd, course, Marshall McLuhan, I put an article out yesterday about Malcolm X, who would have been 100 this year. These were men that evolved. Yeah, they evolved. They changed their thinking. They came in

Mike Jones (25:23)
Yes.

Yeah, I restacked ⁓

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (25:34)
contact with a new understanding, they got rid of the old and on with the new. That's destruction creation. And I think that that's what most people don't like to do. And that's what people that actually do that, Boyd, McLuhan, F.A. Hayek, Malcolm X, you name it, Steve Jobs, they become off-putting. They become scary. They become...

know, like the radical child, you know, that's just crazy and, oh, he's always doing this. And we just wanted to just take it easy and just take it slow. But I think that those are the people that recognize that things are always changing and that you have to update. I think that that's really important. That's what we have to do. And that's certainly what Boyd does. Do ever see the big short? The movie, the...

Mike Jones (26:20)
Yes, I did. Yeah, it's a really

good. Yeah, yeah, yeah. ⁓

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (26:24)
Do remember

the opening quote? It's attributed to Mark Twain. I've seen Will Rogers sometimes, but it's like, ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you're absolutely sure of that turns out not to be true.

Mike Jones (26:38)
It's true though. just trying to find the quote that... I'm not very good at substacks. I'm trying to find the quote that you put with the Malcolm X thing because I think that's really key.

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (26:40)
Totally.

yeah, and those three quotes that I picked were by design because, you know, you can go through his, again, this is what people think they know about Malcolm X and then, you know, what they do or don't know about him. But sifting through his quotes, the three that I put up with the images, you know, I love to make images for the articles.

But the three quotes that I found as you read them, they have nothing to do with race. They have nothing to do with religion. They have everything to do with time, improvement, reorienting, and things that Boyd would talk about. it's kind of something else I say. Everybody's doing this. And people that are remarkable and memorable, like a Malcolm X, they're doing it well. And when you stop and you really examine, why is it that we remember him? And why is it that...

If we de-categorize him out of the boxes that everybody wants us to put him in and we think about him in a different light, then we come to a new understanding. And then we come to the new understanding that opens up lot of doors about other things that we may not have been aware of. it isn't just limited to what the things that he was talking about. Those concepts can break down barriers that we have.

in other disciplines or domains. And, you know, we say it all the time. stuff that Boyd's talking about, it only applies where humans are present. Which is everywhere. Yeah, you know, there's a really nice universal aspect of this stuff. So.

Mike Jones (28:14)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah,

I think it's great. I couldn't find the, the, the quote I was looking at, but it was one that you are top of. yeah, that's terrible.

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (28:24)
Malcolm X? Well, were two.

One that he had about time and one that he had about, so there's no better teacher than adversity. Every defeat, every heartbreak, every loss contains its own seed, its own lessons on how to improve your performance the next time. And that's Malcolm X. mean, tell me that's not a John Boyd quote. I mean, that's perfect. Every lesson to improve your performance the next time. Well, that's what we're doing when we're constantly

Mike Jones (28:40)
Hmm.

Yeah, yeah.

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (28:52)
reorienting. The other one was, in all our deeds, the proper value and respect for time determines success or failure. Time is radically misunderstood. think Boyd does a really good job of helping us understanding time's structure and context. Marshall McLuhan does. The economists like Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises really help us have a better understanding of time. Because ultimately, what

Mike Jones (29:04)
Mm.

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (29:17)
One of the applications or one of the ways that we find with UTA, as time advances, it's time-based competition. We're constantly competing against time. And as Malcolm says, in all our deeds, the proper value and respect for time, and I would say that includes the understanding of it, that determines our success or failure. I think that's a pretty John Boyd-y quote.

Mike Jones (29:39)
Yeah, and you do see this.

You do see this. I think there is respect for time. Definitely when you look and I look at a lot of strategy documents and what people have put down strategy and time and he really gets a play in to say that this is our vision for the next five years or this is this. I think it really takes into consideration about actually time and dynamics of time and

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (29:50)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Mike Jones (30:08)
what opportunities time does give, especially in, not just in competition, but just in general with how things are moving around. There's certain opportunities that can be seized just by increasing your own cycle rate of decision-making or capabilities that you have. It's often missed.

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (30:28)
Well, then like you saw, if you see that other the last quote that I had, was power in defense of freedom is greater than power in behalf of tyranny and oppression. Now that's power, freedom, tyranny, oppression. Like most people would say, yeah, that's what Malcolm X was talking about. But then listen to the rest of the quote, because power, real power comes from our conviction, which produces action, uncompromising action.

Well, the power that's producing your conviction is your orientation. Your orientation implicitly guides and controls how you make sense of the world, how you form decisions and how you act on those decisions.

Mike Jones (30:59)
in the apps.

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (31:07)
again, people that are doing it are doing it well. Now, I don't think that Malcolm X knew, clearly he couldn't have because he is sort of the proto example of this.

He didn't know that he was applying points theories or theories that that boy would talk about or certainly OODA loop sketch, which wouldn't be written till another 21 years, 31 years after his death, guess. But what Boyd is observing and talking about are things that we're all doing and people that are doing it well. Once they understand it, then that's where they have the geometric results. That's what we tell. That's what we tell clients. I mean.

Mike Jones (31:21)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Hmm.

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (31:42)
You don't have to understand this, if you don't and your competitors do, they're going to get geometric results on you and you won't get them.

Mike Jones (31:50)
That's how, as a soldier, we got taught, Boyd, and probably the same as you, we got taught good insight into Boyd's work, but there's a lot more to it. We all associated it with the enemy and how do I get inside the OODA loop of my enemy and disorientate them, which is a fine example of you could do, but there's definitely a lot more to it, and there's a lot more about yourself and your own.

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (32:05)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Jones (32:16)
ability to, like you said, reconstruct construct and your analysis of synthesis to have that conviction in your decision making. All stems from your orientation or how congruent you are with reality.

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (32:30)
Yeah.

that we influence, in the example you were describing, we can influence the enemy's orientation to get them to observe, decide and act the way that we want them to. That's quote unquote operating inside the other person's OODA loop. And a really good place for people to also understand, they're not wrong when they say, well, read patterns of conflict. Boyd talks about a linear OODA loop. His original understanding of it,

unevolved was yeah, we observe we oriented we decide and we act and then as he kept digging deeper, he realized that there's a supremacy of orientation. And when the orientation is supreme over another, that orientation is going to win. Well, what is that orientation doing differently than the other orientation? It's a lot more than just being faster. Because if you can be faster than your competitors in the wrong direction, and you've lost it won't

Mike Jones (33:04)
Mm-hmm.

Yes.

Yeah.

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (33:25)
It won't matter. You could be number one at everything in every category and then suddenly wake up the next day and you're completely obsolete. The blockbuster example, it's still hard to find a better example, but they were number one in every single category around home entertainment across the board. And they were very arrogant about it they were very comfortable about it and they're very at ease with themselves.

Mike Jones (33:33)
Hmm.

Mm.

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (33:47)
And Netflix gave them a pretty clear signal that they need to change and shift their orientation. And they didn't. And they were misoriented. And that's why nobody goes to Blockbuster anymore. We should talk about that. A mentor of mine from the Marine Corps said that there's three Ds that shift orientation. And the first one is drift. So my 49-year-old self

Mike Jones (33:55)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (34:08)
beyond passing 20 years sees the world differently than my 29 year old self. I mean, it's hard to believe that was 29, 20 years ago, but just drifting of time because 20 years ago we didn't have iPhones and we didn't have, you know, whatever. And the second one and the third one are kind of what Boyd is talking about Cheng and Chi destroy, create or whatever. It's disruption. So again, they all begin with D. So drift, then disruption and design.

Mike Jones (34:12)
Yeah, yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (34:34)
And

if I disrupt your orientation and we're competing, then I want to meet that with design to channel you into whatever it is that I want to do. You know, or if I'm trying to get you to stop using, you know, product A and I want you to use my product, have to disrupt your orientation and affinity to that product and meet it with my design. So it's like a constant balance of

Mike Jones (35:02)
Yeah,

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (35:02)
disrupt design,

Mike Jones (35:02)
yeah.

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (35:03)
disrupt design. But I thought that was a pretty good explanation.

Mike Jones (35:06)
Yeah, I do read like that. I'm to remember those. And that's a thing. But it's also thinking about person themselves that how willing is leader, know, all group willing to disrupt their own OODA loop, their own orientation. You see it with, like you said about blockbusters, they weren't willing to have their orientation disrupted. There's a different way and there was going to be a different

perspective a different way to stream videos. They were just then looking only for things to confirm their belief that what they were doing was going to be resolute all the way through this. And you see this a lot with businesses. Definitely if they'd been doing well, then certainly that's it. I've done well, I've got money in the bank now, we've got structure, we've got that QDOS that we wanted, that we've strived for.

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (35:33)
Yeah.

Mmm.

Mike Jones (35:56)
And it's almost as if their orientation is only holding on to that and they would dismiss anything that would say otherwise. And then they get comfortable in that, that rut and that drift, drift happens slowly, but they is almost a guard against any narrative that's going to disrupt their own orientation.

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (36:03)
Mmm.

That's the guardians of decay. If you've been reading my work, that's the guard. It exactly does that. It guards. They're the guardians of decay. ⁓ They don't want to change. They don't want to, they want to defend the status quo. They want it the way it is. And if you're a board member at Blockbuster or you're a senior level executive at Blockbuster and you have a house,

Mike Jones (36:17)
Yes, yeah.

Mm.

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (36:41)
You have one on the beach, you have one on the beach in Florida, one on the beach up here on the shore of New Jersey, or you got one over there in apartment in Manhattan, and I have a ski lodge up here, and I got great stock options and whatever. I don't want to upset that apple cart because I'm biased to my current situation. That's a word we should talk about is bias. if there's that chart, that famous chart of like the, I think it's like 188 different cognitive biases that we have.

Mike Jones (36:59)
Yeah.

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (37:09)
All of that resides in your orientation. All of your biases reside inside your orientation. Well, confirmation bias is what you're talking about, or like surroundings bias or lifestyle bias or whatever. That could have a direct impediment on how I see the world. Because remember, I'm filtering the world through my lens, my orientation, bias is definitely a strong part of that.

Mike Jones (37:20)
Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, I see this because we do a lot of work around strategy and all design. Things got to change because they change because like you said, know you said it in the before we spoke at the start or during the show, but you're talking about your iPhone, your iPhone asks you to update because the external environment is changing. So your iPhone then,

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (37:43)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Jones (37:58)
updates to be able to handle the changes. So we've got to, that's the same orientation. And I find this a lot that we're trying to do things and the bias for the status quo is so strong that they'll dismiss it. And I understand it because, they like what their life is now and they don't know what it will be beyond this change because it's unforeseen, it's unfolding and it's trying to get them to realize that, you you've got to, you've

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (38:01)
Hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Mike Jones (38:26)
you've got to break down that orientation. You've got to, like you said earlier, you've got to be able to destroy that orientation to reconstruct something because otherwise you are going to be shaped. And it's far better in a situation to try and help shape it rather than to be shaped.

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (38:37)
Yeah.

somebody's going to write the script for you and Netflix rewrote the script and Blockbuster could only stand there and watch as they fell off a cliff. If you remember that story, I think that the CEO that they brought in ran 7-Eleven, which is a retail convenience store, and they wanted to capitalize on Blockbuster's retail store experience. They owned a lot of real estate too, so they're biased towards that.

Mike Jones (38:46)
Mm.

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (39:08)
We're a retail store. We have a lot of real estate. And I remember going to Blockbusters vividly. mean, they had popcorn popping and they had all these great movie posters and displays. And think it may have been the first time I ever saw a flat screen TV was like, you know, like the advertisements and previews and Blockbuster. yeah, it was a great like date night. Like, let's meet a Blockbuster, pick a movie, you know. they don't have what we have. well.

Mike Jones (39:08)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. I just love going blockbusters. Yeah, it's fun. Yeah.

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (39:35)
get the next one or whatever. But yeah, you can't even imagine, you can't even imagine, I don't know, try to explain that to a 12 year old today. Like they can't even fathom that. like, what? And it really wasn't that long ago, you know?

Mike Jones (39:47)
know? No

and it's like with my children I've got a 12 and 14 year old and I remember we were somewhere I had to be the old phone the old phone where you dial it actually dial they didn't understand it they could not work it out and this is what blows your mind you think about reorientation that they haven't got that past experience to have that.

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (40:02)
Hmm. And they couldn't Yeah.

Yeah. I'm

trying to think of one lately was, what were we talking about lately was, when I was in college, I was going to, I went down to Mardi Gras with, we would go down every year with the ROTC to do a drill team thing and march in a parade. And then we basically had three or four days to hang out and party at Mardi Gras.

and I was gonna meet a friend down there. Now this is in 1996, five, six, and you think about it, okay, I have to call her at her college before I leave my college and fly all the way down to Louisiana. I have to call her and say, I'm gonna get down there and I'll find a place to meet or whatever. Then I call her mom collect and I say, hey, meet us at whatever at one o'clock and then she knows or whatever, but.

And then I go there and I stand there with my buddy and we wait for like two hours and she never showed up. Well, she never made her flight. She missed her flight. And there's no way I would have known that. Like I'm down in New Orleans and she's flying from Chicago or whatever. Like how would I have ever known that somebody would have missed her flight in 1996? She had to call her mom.

in whatever state she was living in and tell her mom who had to call my mom, then I called my mom and I found out that she had missed her flight. But that was like normal business. Now you think about it, you're like, I just would text, like, I missed my flight or hey, I'll calculate her flight or whatever. I'd know in like a second. We were kind of joking at the beginning about, know, Fourth of July coming up and that's the celebration of where I'm sitting right now in Manhattan is no longer a

Mike Jones (41:34)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

text you.

Mm.

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (41:56)
part of the United Kingdom.

Mike Jones (41:58)
Yeah, our king never went to visit you.

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (42:00)
But think about

this though, if I'm a British officer in Manhattan and I need to report back what's going on in Manhattan to London, how long would that time take for me to write it out, put it on a ship, send it over to, you know, that's fast communication, right? Look at us now, you're sitting there and I'm here, like I'm in Manhattan and you're in UK, what are we doing? We're talking in real time, you know.

Mike Jones (42:20)
Yeah.

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (42:29)
And you explain that to people and they just can't.

Mike Jones (42:32)
And that's what led to the defeat of Napoleon in the end because he was disconnected and he wanted information to make decisions that were happening in Spain, I believe. But this is right. you're around, we're talking around our own mental models and how they've been disrupted and how they've evolved over time. You think that generation from sort of early 2000s to now is probably being a huge disruption.

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (42:49)
Mm-hmm.

Well,

this is where one of the things I think that really differentiates our work is this is when we start talking about Marshall McLuhan. I really, I started to understand McLuhan more than, he's known for the term the medium is the message, just like boy does the OODA loop and then you stop there and you're not supposed to look at anything else. Well, when you dig into McLuhan, you realize that medium is the message. He's not just talking about media like,

Mike Jones (43:14)
Yeah.

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (43:25)
the media like the news, you know, their social media or film or whatever. He just defines media as all technology and all environment. And medium is just the plural of the Latin word media, right? So so our, you know, our devices and tech and our phones and everything, you know, all of that is the message, not so much the content of what we're of what we're talking about, because what he says is that medium

Mike Jones (43:34)
Mmm.

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (43:51)
media medium are extensions of us. And if you notice what we talk a lot about lately around the like the 5T protocol and fifth generation warfare, we use McLuhan's quote and John Robb was the first one that I saw use this in a piece that he had called McLuhan on war. Marshall McLuhan said in 1968 that World War III is not will be is

Mike Jones (43:55)
Mm-hmm.

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (44:19)
a guerrilla information war where there's no distinction between military and civilian participation. And he was saying this stuff because of the amalgamation and the pervasiveness of electronic media. Now think of electronic media in our day versus his day. And he was able to see this crystal clear. But what he said about electric media is interesting, like we're using right now. Those are extensions of our

All technology is an extension of a human function or human human sense. Since electronic media is an extension of our central nervous system. So when you think about all the garbage that's out there and how, how you were talking about how people are getting oriented by, yeah, it could be news or bias or whatever, all that's directly affecting your, your nervous system physiologically. That's insane. And that's so what, so what I started

Mike Jones (45:08)
Yeah.

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (45:13)
realizing is that and I said, I followed off of what what John Rob showed, because John Rob, he's a guy you should get on the show. I mean, you talk about guy that knows Boyd. I never thought of applying McClough in that way. But Boyd even says it on the Zootaloop sketch unfolding circumstances within our environment. Well, that's the medium. That's the medium. That's the medium is the message. And that has a direct impact. So the technology that say our

Mike Jones (45:22)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm. Ready?

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (45:40)
a 12 year old has versus a 49 year old, the understanding orientation, Boyd, but then the effect of what that has, McCloughan, there's a synergy of those theories that I think bring us to different understanding.

Mike Jones (45:55)
Yeah, yeah, it's gonna affect you, because especially now with the information, just as your story with your friend that you could meet, the pace of the messaging and stuff back then was a lot slower and a lot less, where it's increased and there's always, I never looked dystopian at things, there's always benefits and there's always issues with the stuff. But you think about affecting your...

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (46:09)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Jones (46:20)
your nervous system or your beliefs, your ability to synthesize that stuff tainted by what you're getting. And you see this a lot with leaders when you're trying to do stuff. You ain't gotta go far, you ain't gotta go on LinkedIn. It's like a doomsday story. know, it's all going, the future of work is doom and gloom. know, all this stuff is doom and gloom. We must do all this stuff. And you wonder how much this is sort of penetrating

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (46:27)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Jones (46:48)
leaders' minds and starting to shape their orientation into more a dystopian view which causes an unhelpful perspective on what's happening.

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (46:56)
Mmm.

Yeah, I also think too that it, the more you get into this stuff, you realize that even the smallest actions can have the biggest effects throughout, throughout, throughout time in history, even like small, you like you're talking about like Napoleon wasn't able to make a decision or made a wrong decision and just came down the one thing. The impact of that, it's just exponential beyond.

Mike Jones (47:07)
Mmm.

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (47:23)
You know, back to my example, you know, I could joke about it now. It's so long ago. But well, that's why I never married that woman, you know, because like we weren't we weren't able to connect in New Orleans, you know, and whatever. But but really, when you think about it, like those little those sorts of things were like, like, like a messenger's car broke down or I don't know, the power went out or whatever. It's not so much as simple as something happened. Now we got to fix it.

If something happened, and whether it gets fixed or not, or how long it takes or whatever, there's a whole chain of events that's gonna perpetuate throughout time because of that action is not, it's not insignificant.

Mike Jones (48:03)
And that's the thing when you look back on Boyd's, um, quote about our strategy, which I love is, is that, um, you're realizing your aim and purpose and unfolding, um, um, often unforeseen, um, world. And it's that thing that we don't necessarily understand that us doing this action will have this effect. And that's where the, the observation.

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (48:19)
Yeah.

Mike Jones (48:30)
needs to happen to ensure that when this is happening, we're not just looking at the surface level thing, have we done this, is what we need to fix, but it's also looking at, well, what's happening there? And now that's happened, who else might be interested or who else may act or how would they act and how would we know they're acting?

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (48:49)
Hmm.

Hmm.

Yeah, I had a thought on that and it just escaped my mind as quick as it came in. But oh, I know. So I mean, ultimately what you're talking about, I think lines exactly up with Boyd that Oodaloo sketch is just an illustrative abstraction of how we learn as humans. And if we don't learn,

Mike Jones (49:09)
Mm.

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (49:13)
effectively, if our learning, if our ability to understand, in other words, our ability to orient is not aligned with reality or is not harmonized with reality in our environment, which is always changing, then that's how we become obsolete. That's how we become defeated. We can't adapt. I can't adapt unless I'm learning. If I'm able to learn, then I'm able to adapt.

Mike Jones (49:39)
Yes.

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (49:42)
We tell people all the time, the better you get at this, that's how you thrive. It's one thing, our natural instinct as humans to survive, that's one thing we have to adapt in order to survive. But you also have to accelerate that and have a deeper understanding of that in order to thrive. And people aren't hiring us to survive. If they're hiring us to survive, it's likely too late because we got them there in the first place. We're likely not gonna be able to get them undone.

Mike Jones (49:58)
Mm.

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (50:08)
you know, people that are very successful and they're stuck or people have done really well, but they're just not getting to the next level. or they're in,

sort of a recapitulation phase, like they've gone up, now they're like plateauing. If they're willing to take the time and understand how it works, then they can be very successful and they can learn how to thrive because they've already done it at some point. Anybody successful is already doing this or has done this. It's when they take the time to really learn what's behind it and how it all works. And I think that that's where they get really good at.

Mike Jones (50:35)
Yeah.

And it's quite easy to see organizations that are just happy to survive. You see this by what they do, the artifacts that they produce. they're the ones that will produce these lovely purpose statements and stuff and, sound. They're all very performative. It's all performance, branding. Yeah, yeah. But those ones, you can easily tell that the ones that are wanting to adapt.

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (50:42)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, that's the guardians of decay.

Mike Jones (50:58)
because they're more curious, they want to learn. They are trying to see, you know, they're not fundamentally trying to change themselves. They're trying to keep coherent, but adapt within that. And there's a huge difference. And they're the ones that aren't so much bothered around performative stuff. They're really interested in the maneuvers they have to do and, are willing to accept the structural changes that need to happen to...

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (51:01)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Mike Jones (51:25)
enable them to adapt and try to do it quicker.

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (51:27)
Yeah.

I think, you know, for, know, from an organization standpoint, we're talking about gardens of decay. There's a, there's a quote that I came up with that I've been playing with and it does have a foul word. So I'll just say F-ed, but there's nothing more false, fragile and F-ed than an individual idea or institution that believes itself beyond intellectual scrutiny because the moment it rejects inquiry,

It begins to rot from within and it's sort of a guardian of decay law, I suppose. But I think it hits on what you're talking about. These organizations that don't take the time to learn or whatever, then they're going to hit those three Fs, know, false, fragile and F'd because they're competitors. If they're doing the stuff that we're talking about well, they're going to smell blood in the water. They're going to see that it's like walking around with a giant bullseye. You know, it's just like

Mike Jones (52:05)
Hmm.

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (52:21)
come and compete with me and clean my clock because I don't know what I'm doing. The system is perpetuating itself. We have no idea where it's going. has no soul. It has no direction. It has no focus. Do you know the story? His name is Nick Leeson, the rogue trader for Bearings Bank. Yeah.

Mike Jones (52:33)
Yeah

Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. You got jailed, didn't

you, for a long time?

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (52:43)
I have a different, and I've said this on podcasts before, but I kind of have a different take on that. So yeah, I broke the rules or law.

But my suspicion always has been that an institution organization like Bering's Bank that had been around for 400 years or whatever it was, that this guy didn't just by his actions as a rogue trader ruin a perfectly healthy, well-oriented company that was cycling through John Boyd's OOPS sketch better than their competitors. I don't believe that.

I believe that he probably lit a fuse inside something that had already been systematically rotting over generations by entropy and apathy and bias and guardians of decay and people. And all it needed was a guy like that to do something what he did. Again, I'm not apologizing or saying what he did was right because it wasn't. But all it needed was just like a catalyst.

Mike Jones (53:23)
Yeah.

It's like a little,

yeah, it was a Tinder box and he was the Matt, yeah.

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (53:45)
Yeah, that's my suspicion is that

if you did an organizational study, that would be my guess. And why? Because of the patterns of organizations like that.

Mike Jones (53:52)
I think

Yeah,

but when things go wrong like that and, know, in organisations, people go on and they go, well, the report's always the same. they had a culture of this. And, but I think what you're getting at with the Guardians of Decay, and I think external to organisations is a bit more nefarious, but in organisations, it's, you see it because it's performative.

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (54:06)
Mmm.

Yeah.

Mike Jones (54:17)
They have

this narrative that they want to put out and they got the best internal branding teams. put this stuff out, the narrative that we're doing this and they, they, they put down any sort of descent to that. So anything that is slightly descending to that, saying that actually this is my experience in this role, ⁓ that gets shut down and they almost, I've seen it in organizations. They get people to go, well, we want to see this thing is happening. So it's almost stage managed.

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (54:33)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Mike Jones (54:44)
people are going around doing stage photos that, look, we're doing what you said we were gonna do. Yeah.

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (54:49)
Totally performative. So

that goes back to that example that we were talking before we came online is that when we're in competitive situations in a group like ours that's small deployable, decentralized, adaptive team that's going to help you sustain and build change from within internally is so much different than

Then some New York Times bestseller that comes and drops off their book, gives a keynote speech and takes a bunch of pictures with people and then leaves. I think that's the difference. That's just performative. See, we did this. We handed everybody this book. Effectively applying it was never on the cards. We just needed somebody to come in and entertain us and we had $100,000 in the budget.

Mike Jones (55:30)
Yeah.

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (55:38)
One of the things that I put in the chat just now, you can share with your audience, it's a transcript of patterns of conflict. It's 170 pages and it's one of the better ones. And it's John Boyd interacting with Marine officers at the Command Staff College in Quantico in the late 80s. One of the guys there is Colonel Mike Wiley, who was the guy that ultimately brought Boyd into the Marine Corps.

One of the voices I'm positive in, there's no confirmation, but it's General Paul Van Riper, who's famous from Millennium Challenge 2002, if you look that up. I just know his voice so well, I'm positive it's him. anyway, Boyd talks a lot about in those books about, in that transcript about certain books by a guy called Andrew Kropenevich that wrote a book called The Army in Vietnam. And of the things that he talked about in that transcript was about how, well,

Mike Jones (56:15)
Mm.

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (56:28)
We come to these lessons learned and we're gonna redo things, but all we ended up doing is just slapping a new coat of paint on something, the same old stuff without even trying. We're never gonna employ a radical like a John Boyd to really fundamentally change things so that we can not only survive, but thrive. We're just gonna get together. We're gonna find scapegoats, know, like he talks about in there how...

Mike Jones (56:35)
Yeah.

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (56:52)
You know, we're going to blame the media, you know, we're going to blame the hippies or going to blame whatever for our failure in Vietnam. We're never in a million years going to say it was, yeah, it was effective applications of guerrilla warfare and Sun Tzu that in our over reliance on technology, we didn't do the things that boy talked about, people ideas, things. They're never going to say that. So you get a bunch of scapegoats. You have a blue ribbon panel, you know, like a blue ribbon commission to go in and investigate. they're going to slap a new coat on things, but nothing.

Mike Jones (57:17)
Yeah.

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (57:21)
nothing fundamentally changes.

Mike Jones (57:23)
No, and that's where we think about the law of sufficient complexity is that if you want to emerge new behavior, you need to change structurally sufficient enough to emerge that new behavior. You can't.

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (57:34)
That's see there.

So yeah, that's what punch always says is systems drive behavior. But that's another way what you just said is just another way of Marshall McLuhan. The medium is the message. So so the the environment and the technology are going to drive the behavior because those have an effect on the human sensing on those are the extensions of the of the human. So if we build the environment that way, why would we be shocked when we get crap results? You know, like, why? Why is anybody ever shocked? Yet they always are. And that's the

Mike Jones (57:51)
Mm.

Yeah.

And that's the performative.

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (58:05)
But that's the first mover

advantage, though, I think that Boyd's trying to get people to get break out of. And when you break out of that script, you become pretty powerful and pretty pretty lethal.

Mike Jones (58:14)
Yeah.

And that's the performative nature that you see people do. They're bringing stuff in that looks good in its, but it only focuses on, on behavioural, like a belief system that is not supported by anything. And they wonder why then it sort of just disappears. Um, that's good. But, I've, I've really enjoyed the conversation.

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (58:27)
Yeah. Yep.

Mike Jones (58:35)
So what would you like to leave

listeners with to think about from this podcast?

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (58:39)
I would have them take a look at our article that I put out today, John Boyd one on one, and they could start there. And basically, Brett McKay and Kate McKay that keep the blog the art of manliness, and they have a subset called the dying breed. They created articles in 2014, which were baseline Boyd. So he once called the Dow of Boyd, and the other one's called John Boyd's roll call. And for

people ask me all the time to say, well, I don't know anything about John Boyd. Where do I start? I'd say start with Brett McKay or start with the art of manliness, Brett McKay and Kate McKay and the article, the Dow of Boyd, which explains who Boyd was and what he what he thought. And then Boyd's roll call, which is his famous to do or to be to be speech. And that's ultimately what we're trying. We're trying to do not be. And we're trying to get people to, you know, sort of follow that fork in the road.

So that's probably a really good place to start. ⁓ We have sort of, we are going to ramp up our podcasting. We've kind of taken a couple of weeks where we've just been not putting out as much podcast content as we have written content on the Substack, but we have more podcasts coming out. ⁓ But yeah, I would start there at the Substack, the world, substack.com.

Mike Jones (59:35)
Awesome.

Nice. Yeah. And I'll

you for joining me. I've already enjoyed this and I hope people are starting to get to grips or start to understand the importance of boyd's work and how it can really help.

deal with strategy, especially in this changing world, know, how do we get strategy meets reality? And if you've liked this podcast, please share amongst your network, like, and please follow Mark's work. It's fantastic, especially on the sub-stack. But again, thank you, Mark, for joining me. It's been an absolute pleasure.

Mark McGrath @nowayoutmoose (1:00:25)
Thanks for having me, Mike.

Mike Jones (1:00:27)
See you in bit.