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**Gerhard Lazu:** That makes perfect sense. And the ops people, the dev people, the DevOps people, mostly individual contributors - they tend to be at the lower tactical side, the people doing the actual work. Then you have the more strategic ones at the top, which is your senior staff -- is it staff? No, it's not staf... |
**Ben Ford:** \[24:11\] Yeah, so I guess like your VPs and directors, or the middle tier... I mean, it depends how big the company is, I guess. If it's a startup, then the lead developer is that person in the middle, and maybe they're the marketing, or something like that. But that middle layer is the integration of a ... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Okay. And how do the components in the OODA loop map to the high-level, and how do they map, like, OODA loops within OODA loops as you go down through the levels, all the way to the tactical, the day-to-day? |
**Ben Ford:** So we've got the traditional OODA loop, the full John Boyd diagram. One myth in the OODA loop is that Boyd never drew that simple circle with OO and D and A on it. He never drew that. He drew the version which is, I guess, the next level down that you come to, which is observation feeding forward into ori... |
And then there's these two other funky little lines called implicit guidance and control, which are how your orientation shapes your observation, and how you can sometimes by-pass decisions with direct actions when you're in a domain of familiarity. So how does this map to the different levels that we've just talked ab... |
If you think of a company as an entity, almost like an organism - I'm just gonna call it an organism, because actually organization and organism back in the 15th century were the same word... So let's consider this as kind of like a biological entity that's separate from its environment, so it needs to take energy - an... |
So the strategic OODA loop of a business is observing the macroeconomic conditions, how the environment is changing, how the tech ecosystem is moving, how customers are changing - all of those things, all of those form the observation. And then how the results of your products are services are landing with the market. ... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** The way I think of actions, it's almost like the -- well, one of them would be shipping. You're shipping value all the time, which - it's almost like at the end of taking that action, unless whatever value you have built, you're getting it out there so that people can use it - customers, end users can... |
**Ben Ford:** Yes. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** \[28:02\] The more you can act, the quicker you can act, the better off you are. But it's not just the action part, is the loop as a whole has to be complete, because it's not sufficient to act. But there's something really important which I took away from your course, which was "Don't start with the ... |
**Ben Ford:** So when you dig into -- bearing in mind that Boyd passed away in 1997 and he was the most active during the '80s and '90s, I guess... And you consider how far science and understanding of cognition and complex systems has moved on since then, it still absolutely astonishes me that the OODA loop maps so we... |
So the reason I say we should start with action is because that's how cognition works. You and I are sitting here, and we are seeing each other because we're looking at screen, we're seeing the diagrams that I've written, feeling sensations as we sit on chairs and whatnot... And all of those sensations need action in o... |
So if you're sat in an environment and you're sat absolutely still and you're not allowed to touch anything and you're not allowed to look at anything - well, you can't learn anything about that environment. You have to take action in order to kind of set off the ripples that you then start to detect in the rest of the... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** So to those that are listening to this - just listening to this, something's missing, right? You feel like "Where's this diagram? What are you talking about?" So unless we publish the diagram, unless you look at the show notes, unless someone drew the diagram, you couldn't really imagine what we're ta... |
Of course, we've shared the diagram, so look at the show notes if you wanna see it... But more importantly, it proves a point, in that if you can't see it, is it real? Does it even exist? Maybe we're talking about an imaginary diagram... Which we're not, by the way. It's real, and it's very good. |
**Ben Ford:** Yeah. And actually, Boyd's OODA diagram - from my understanding, he was kind of pushed to draw this. Someone said "Look, you need to write it down." So Boyd transmitted most of his learning through an enormous six-hour lecture that he used to go and give to generals. And that encompassed the history of mi... |
\[31:56\] As I've mentioned before we started, I'm playing around with some 3JS so I can really properly dig into how these interactions work... So in some ways even the original diagram that he drew was an abstraction. It was an incomplete picture of everything that he was talking about. You read into many other peopl... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I think that's super-powerful, and I'll take it one step further. First of all, you have this static thing, stuck in the 1950's. The best it could be for the time given the constraints. Then we have your diagram, Ben, which really is a work of art; you have to see it, it's amazing. There's so much inf... |
Now, let's take that a little bit further. This is me dreaming. Five years from now, ten years from now. It may never happen. What if you could see these loops happening in an org, and the actions being mapped to these things, so you can almost have an appreciation of how the different parts of an org interact? Imagine... |
**Ben Ford:** Yeah. And that's the thing - if you look at the business through this lens of abstraction that we're talking about, you have the opportunity to build something like that, because you can express those abstractions. I've given presentations about how similar the OODA loop is to things like event sourcing. ... |
Likewise, the left-fold of the events that create state in event-sourcing systems is an orientation of a form, right? It's "How do we integrate the observations or events that we've seen in our environment, and how do we integrate them with the state or internal orientation that we have, and turn them into a change in ... |
So I actually think that with the rise of event-driven architectures, and you mentioned Kubernetes in the chat before this - all of that data flowing through the systems that we have now, it is actually within the balance of possibility that we could have a real-time 3D time-based picture of the internal workings of ou... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Statement of facts. Things that have happened, with certain properties, and deriving relationships from those properties and visualizing them in a compressed format - that's what an OODA loop is. You zoom in, you zoom out, you have the high level, you can dig into specific things, even individual even... |
\[36:17\] And then you have your UNIX tools. It's all based in the pipes. Combine them. And the relationship between the different -- not just the individual blocks, but also imagine the links. They don't have to be straight, they don't have to be solid. You can change the shape of them, you can make them thicker, thin... |
You love functional programming... Well, I love Erlang. I haven't tried Haskell. I should check it out, for sure... But I can see the intersection of all these things. And isn't it nice to explore and experiment? What should work be, Ben? What do you think that work is, at a very low level, at a very basic level? |
**Ben Ford:** That's a great, great question. And just to build on your point earlier about Erlang - we look at this from a technology and a developer-centric viewpoint of pushing code out and shipping... And that's the decision and action of an organization's OODA loop. But there's a whole load of people who also look... |
So as much as our CI and CD reflects how we think about shipping code, you can use exactly the same abstractions to think about sensing the organization's effect on the environment as well. And what work should be is that system understood as a cohesive system. |
As a developer, you shouldn't be constrained to thinking that you're done when you ship. You should have a visceral, embodied understanding of what happens to that piece of code, what difference does it make to your customers. What ripples do you send in the environment once that feature or that change lands? How does ... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** That's right. A comprehensive understanding, feeling that what you do matters, understanding "Where does it fit what you do?" Experimenting. You're not working, you're experimenting. You're trying to figure out how what you do works. And a very, very small slice of that is shipping. But I would even s... |
\[40:13\] I really like your diagram - this is another one, about perception; the ripple effect. And it applies so well to this, because it's really difficult to understand and to map your action to something that someone else does, like your end users do. |
**Ben Ford:** Yeah. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** You have a better way of explaining this... Maybe we'll put that diagram as well. You know what - maybe at this point it'd just be easier to join the course, right? I think it'll be easier, because there's so many other things; I'm picking and selecting, but it's so compressed. It just makes sense as ... |
**Ben Ford:** It's a very intangible thing, isn't it? We've got a bunch of individuals, a bunch of people there, with their own energy and their own experiences of that day, and that creates an intangible -- we compose those people together in a group and then we have a discussion, and that creates an intangible kind o... |
**Break:** \[42:07\] |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Talking about diving in and exploring - we are going to talk about the recommendations that Ben has around the books, the videos... Basically, all the follow-up material that you may want to look into, that goes really well with this conversation. So we can start with books, or YouTube videos... Where... |
**Ben Ford:** Cool. Let's cover books first. One book that I'm overdue a re-read on actually, which is really the book that started -- well, it didn't start me on the journey, but it really made some links fall into place for me was Team of Teams by Gen. Stanley McChrystal. That is just an incredible, nuanced overview ... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** \[44:15\] I had to. |
**Ben Ford:** Yeah. It's a great book. And the follow-up one -- so Team of Teams is the conceptual "Why this is important." It's about the dynamics. And then the follow-up, One Mission, is a bit more about the specifics. So those two are very good. Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink is a must read as well. |
The Fundamental Principles approach I agree with. I'm not sure I completely agree with the principles that they've picked out as the most important. |
Turn the Ship Around is also very good, on servant leadership and mission command... Although none of these books mention the concepts that I talk about by their kind of conceptual names. They have their own models and whatnot. |
Red Team Thinking... You know, the whole point of the course is that leadership is as much of a system as it is a skill, and Red Team Thinking is a fantastic set of tools for doing the strategic leadership system. It's a bunch of communication protocols and practices that mean that you get this better situational aware... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** And there's another book which I would like to mention - it's by Ben Ford, which is "The OODA Loop according to Ben Ford." \[laughter\] That will be a self-published book, I'm sure. Maybe Gumroad. I'm really looking forward to that... Which will be the print version of the course maybe. |
**Ben Ford:** Someday. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Someday. |
**Ben Ford:** It might be a live, online, 3D diagram illustrated version of the course perhaps... But yes, I definitely have something like that in me at some point. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Yeah. I'm really looking forward to that. In the meantime I'm going to read all the other books. That's my plan. That's what I intend to do; talking about turning the ship around... Which is, by the way, a great book; I read it and I can definitely recommend it as well. |
In the meantime, if you're not into books, Ben has some amazing YouTube videos. So if you think this is good, which it is - again, let's be honest - some of the videos that Ben has are really good. You have also a show, The OODA Loopers, or The OODA Something...? Can you tell us more about that? |
**Ben Ford:** So one of the things that's come out of this exploration for me is meeting other people that are interested in the OODA loop across a variety of different fields, including serving police officers, and firefighters and whatnot... And the way we've been interacting has - luckily, for everyone - been in the... |
So I've been collecting some of the best resources that I've found and conversations that I've taken part in into a YouTube playlist which is probably about eight hours' worth of video by now... Because at the end of the day, no matter how much you listen to somebody that knows what they're talking about about any subj... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** \[48:08\] So if someone wants to start doing, implementing all the learnings, all the principles, where would they start, or how would they actually start? Step number one. Step number two. |
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