John Boyd presentation

Chet Richards notes

Boyd is best known for his work on war, but he had always intended that Patterns of Conflict apply to all forms of conflict

In his next two presentations, Organic Design for Command and Control and Strategic Game of ? and ?, he investigated the nature of orientation, leadership, and strategy

He became fascinated by similarities between his blitzkrieg culture and the Toyota Production System, and this led to consultation on the early drafts of what became my book, Certain to Win (2004).

With Conceptual Spiral, he cut himself loose from war--science, technology, and engineering were now his framework. From my notes of telephone conversations, he started building the charts that compose Conceptual Spiral in mid-1990.

Where he left off

In a sense, Boyd returned to where he left off in 1976 with “Destruction and Creation.” That paper says nothing about war but talks about the general problem of survival on our own terms in a competitive world. He insisted that we must always strive to increase our capacity for independent action because, otherwise, constraints on our activities could limit our options and decrease our ability to survive in a way we find desirable. In order to increase our capacity for independent action, we need a set of concepts that describes how the world works, and we use this set of concepts as a mental model for decision-making

at some point, our ability to continue using our old system of concepts degrades to the point where we will need to change our model to allow us to better predict the effects of our actions

Where do we get our new system of concepts? Boyd suggested a “dialectic engine”

One way to do this is to analyze concepts into constituent parts

The constituents do not have to come from the same “domain”--area of knowledge--that we are working in

Eventually someone will have an “aha!” moment by combining various bits of understanding in a novel and elegant way that allows a new synthesis, a new understanding, a new system of concepts for representing reality

Boyd’s approach, rather than trying to establish some thesis by marshaling anecdotes, data, quotes, and arguments to support it, produces a product built from the elements he has collected. These products could be considered as the -A models, as in F-15A and F-16A, of the solutions he creates. He does not claim that they are the ultimate answers--that would violate the conclusion of “Destruction and Creation”--and he keeps insisting that it’s the method not the product that’s important, but he would argue and he did argue that his new conceptions were better than what came before him.

In Conceptual Spiral, Boyd returns to this theme but draws on his years of experience with the study of conflict

He who can handle the quickest rate of change survives. (24) Conceptual Spiral completes the task of answering what this means.

In the grand scheme of things

Why did Boyd write Conceptual Spiral?

Frans Osinga (2005) did not have a high opinion of Conceptual Spiral, suggesting that it is merely an affirmation of “Destruction and Creation”

Boyd claims that when you put these two soporific statements together, something magical happens: By exploiting the theme contained within this passage and by examining the practice of science/engineering and the pursuit of technology, we can

"evolve a conceptual spiral for comprehending, shaping, and adapting to that world." (p. 5) Voila: The Meaning of Life!

The meaning of life?

Conceptual Spiral ends with “insight, imagination, and initiative” as the prerequisites for survival and growth. With his nearly contemporaneous revision to chart 144 of Patterns, however, Boyd suggests that “vitality and growth” demand IOHAI: insight, orientation, harmony, agility, and initiative. He was using both concepts as late as 1992, so it’s not that one replaced the other. Are these two equivalent? Or is Boyd making things more complex than they need to be? Or something else?

(more tk)