Speed Kills In Business Strategy | Alex Vohr

Strategy falls apart in the messy middle between plans and execution, and that is exactly where we spend our time with Alex Vohr, author of Speed Kills: Leveraging John Boyd's OODA Loop to Build Organisations That Win. Alex brings a rare mix of experience as a US Marine Corps logistician, a commander in Iraq, a leader in disaster relief operations, and now the president of OneLNG an energy startup building small-scale LNG infrastructure. We use that lens to explore why “strategy meets reality” is not a slogan, but a daily operational problem.

We dig into John Boyd’s OODA Loop as a practical model for decision making in complex adaptive systems, not the oversimplified four-step circle most people quote. Alex explains why orientation drives everything, how assumptions create risk, and why a decision should be treated as a hypothesis that only becomes true when action and feedback confirm it. If you care about organisational agility, learning organisations, and faster strategy execution, the takeaway is clear: improve how you observe, how you make sense, how you decide, how you act, and how you learn.

We also challenge the “false god of efficiency” and the comfort of linear planning. Planning, red teaming, and after-action reviews are not bureaucratic theatre; they are tools for reducing surprise and building a relevant, effective tempo. We talk about incentives, the “zero defects” mentality, and why big organisations drift into entropy when they stop listening to the edges of the system.

If this conversation helps you rethink how your team learns and executes, subscribe, share it with a colleague, and leave a review so more people can find the show.

Find Alex here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-vohr-83b38767/
Get his book: https://amzn.eu/d/01B56POu

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Transcript

Strategy Meets Reality Setup

Mike Jones 0:00

Most people do think of strategy that way.

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Developing a new strategy.

Mike Jones 0:04

Strategic blind spots. When strategy meets reality and innovation in the strategy world.

SPEAKER_00 0:09

Drive their strategic goals.

Meet Alex Vaug’s Background

Mike Jones 0:10

And welcome back to Strategy Meets Reality Podcast. And welcome back to the Strategy Meets Reality Podcast. I'm delighted today to be joined by Alex Vaug, all the way out there in the United States of America. So it's great to have you on, Alex. Great. It's super to be on. I really appreciate the opportunity to speak with you. Oh no, it's a pleasure. When we connected, um, and I saw your book, which hopefully you'll talk about in a moment. I thought it would be a great opportunity to get you on. So just for our listeners, do you mind giving a bit of background about yourself and about uh a bit of context about what you've been up to lately?

SPEAKER_00 0:43

Sure. So I grew up in uh in New England where I I actually am recording this from right now. I'm visiting my my parents. They're still still alive up here in New England, and uh so it's a little bit colder here in the States up at this part. But um I went to the to the Naval Academy in the early 1980s. I was commissioned um a Marine officer in in 1988. I served for 25 years as a logistician for the Marine Corps, and I I fought in uh Desert Storm and I uh participated twice. I went to I went to Iraq twice, once for the um March to Baghdad, and then I I commanded a unit in the uh Second Battle of Fallujah in November of November of 2004. I was there then and was there for the very first Iraqi elections in the winter of 2005. And then otherwise I also uh got involved in a fair amount of disaster relief type operations, both in in Puerto Rico following a big uh hurricane down there. I got involved in one big one in Haiti. Uh, earthquake killed uh 250,000 folks down there. I was the J4 at U.S. Southern Command at the time, so responsible for running all the logistics. And um, you know, disaster relief, if anything, is is is a logistics operation. That's what it really is all about is trying to use the military capabilities to provide some rapid logistics to people who really need it uh badly and quickly. But what's a couple things that were interesting uh during my Marine Corps career, and and uh you you mentioned my book, and really it was uh when I when I was commissioned in the Marine Corps in the 1980s, we were going through uh a little bit of a uh we were rethinking our our doctrine to develop the maneuver warfare doctrine that we that we have today. Both the Marine Corps and and the Army were in a really reflective time period. We were about eight or nine years out of our Vietnam experience. The Cold War was still on and we had tremendous uh responsibilities. We Marine Corps knew we were gonna have to fight uh NATO's uh uh northwest flank and that we were going to have to fight outnumbered and wins, so we needed to figure out what we wanted to do. And so it was really an interesting experience as the Marine Corps went through this entire new doctrinal development. And the book I wrote about James John Boyd Zoodaloop is uh John Boyd was a big influence. He's what I would call one of the few modern-day military theorists, and he was a huge influence on the development of that. But I retired from the Marine Corps in 13, and I've I've had about three or four, I guess, four commercial positions. I started with uh the Florida East Coast Railroad, and I got involved in the energy business there because they were converting their locomotives to liquid natural gas. And currently uh I'm the president of a startup in um Houston called 1LNG, and we're looking to build small-scale domestic liquefiers in the United States and perhaps abroad to establish virtual pipelines for people who need natural gas where there's no pipeline access.

Why Logistics Drives Outcomes

Mike Jones 3:50

Well, quite quite a history there. Um yeah, a few things really stood out to me. I I'm gonna probably basilize the quote now, but um I forgot who's who said it, but it said uh amateurs talk tactics and professionals talk logistics. That's true. Yeah. And I think I I don't know you said it now.

SPEAKER_00 4:12

That's amazing. I mean, if you look at just what we're doing today in in Iran, I mean, we're projecting power. The US is projecting power and sustaining forces halfway around the world in order to have this sustained campaign against Iran, and and you don't do that without logistics. No. You know, in the early 1980s, the Falklands War occurred, and that again was an enormous logistics effort to try to bring uh, you know, the the troops and and the uh warships and and the aircraft and all that stuff to bear that far away. And so you have to be able to project combat power and you have to be able to sustain it, and that requires uh logistics, and the U.S. right now has tremendous capabilities in that regard. So um it it it was it it was interesting. Oh, I think um and you need logistics in every single unit. I've served with infantry battalions, light armored reconnaissance battalions, I've served in Marine logistics groups, which are basically kind of an echelon above, providing logistics to all of the Marine Air Ground Task Force, and I've served with headquarters elements. I also was fortunate enough to get involved in heavily involved in the Marine Corps educational programs, and and uh I was able to attend a second-year program after our intermediate level school command and staff college. I was able to attend the school of advanced warfighting. And then uh I came back, I was a deputy director for a year, and then the director of that school as well. And that's an interesting course. We've we've had some Royal Marines that have served with us in that course. And uh it's we take a look at history from the American Revolution all the way through the current time, and we would look at it from a case study perspective. Clausewitz and and Scharnhorst worked during the re-invigoration of the Prussian military after they were badly beaten by Napoleon, and they they came up with the idea that you know there's two ways to learn. You can either gain experience by doing, or you can gain experience vicariously through case study. And most of the time, those of us who serve in the military hopefully we're not at war all the time, and so it's difficult to gain actual experience. So the case study approach where you try to put yourself in the shoes of the commander on the ground and understand the decision making that was made, given the information he had at the time, is a great way to learn vicariously.

Mike Jones 6:39

Yeah, that's the that's the approach that Von Mokter carried on and adopted with his generals to really hone mission command. So given in that sort of confidence through confidence through that. Your book, uh it's called Speed Kills Leveraging John Boy's Ood Loop to build organizations that win. What what are the key things do you think that because you said speed kills, that's really interesting. So because normally when people wrongly think about ood loop, they think it's just about speed, and that's it. That's right. You've got speed kills. So what do you mean by that in an organizational context?

SPEAKER_00 7:15

Well, the that particular phrase is actually that's what General Mattis said following the march to Baghdad. Yeah, yes, absolutely. And my role in that particular uh campaign was I was actually doing some battlefield observations, but I was doing it as an embedded observer working on one of the staffs. So I I had the position of really being in the know because I was working on the plans that we were executing every day, but I also was a little bit detached and looking at it from the outside because I was also doing combat uh observer work for the uh Marine Corps Combat Development Command. And so I was able, I was pulled out of occasionally I was pulled out out of the staff when they would get the generals together and and they would talk about what they've been doing. And at one point, that was one of the things, one of the comments that General Mattis said. What I've done with my book is uh, you know, there's been a tremendous amount written by John about John Boyd. John Boyd was very active in the late 70s and early 80s, and as I said, a lot of his thought was very influential in what the Marine Corps did with its uh maneuver warfare doctrine. And uh John Boyd himself did not write very much, he didn't he didn't put together formal papers or books about what he had done, and his work was mostly captured in uh continuously kind of updating briefs and presentations, some of which would take a very long time, you know, three, four-hour briefs.

Mike Jones 8:43

I I heard, yeah, yeah, I heard that he would stand there and give his briefs, and uh I heard there was even like less time for or not much time for any comfort breaks or anything like that. He was just pretty much full-on briefings.

SPEAKER_00 8:57

And he was also a difficult person to deal with in the sense that there were generals who asked him for a shortened version of a brief or a presentation, he wouldn't do it. He said, Hey, if you don't want to sit through the whole thing, then it's not worth my time was kind of his attitude about it. And so he and uh you know, I I I speculate a little bit why he didn't write. I think he was I think he was always learning and always uh looking ahead and trying to understand new things and learn new things. And sometimes when you write, what you do is you take the ideas that you've already thought about and you you polish those ideas into a presentation type format. And um you know, you you sharpen those ideas, you make them better when you write about it. You know, you haven't thought hard about something unless you've written about it, but I think he might have just been moving too fast to write. Yeah, yeah. Sure. But there's there's a lot written. There's there's a lot written about John Boyd himself and his life and his work and some of his ideas. Ian Brown, I don't know if you've seen his latest work called Snowmobiles and Grand Ideals. Yes. And uh that's another, you know, book about broadly about John Boyd's ideals, and Ian and and Franz Asinga have done a tremendous job in pulling that information out of where it's housed in the Marine Corps archives at Marine Corps University and put it into a format that's much more accessible for anybody who's interested in Boyd. So they've done the community a real service there. But m what I've done with my book is I focus specifically on Boyd's Oodaloop, which is you could kind of call it one of his capstone concepts, I guess. It was late in his career that he sketched this and he worked on this a little bit. But what so I focus particularly on that. And uh it's a theoretical model for what I say is is the activity that human beings either individually, you know, human activity on an individual basis or with in an organizational basis. John Boyd believed that you know the world is inherently competitive. And if you're not getting better, then you're getting worse if you're competing just against the environment, and if you're competing against uh uh, you know, it an opponent, then um, you know, it's obviously inherently competitive. And you can see that obviously in in war fighting, but also in the business world or in sports or anything. John Boyd's model is it's a theoretical model. And what I tell people is once you look at the model, it it'll change the way you you think about the world. It'll it'll update your orientation, and you'll find yourself weighing that model across situations, case studies that you see, and it you'll it'll it'll help you understand what's going on there.

SPEAKER_01 11:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 11:37

But it is a theoretical model. Yeah. And in that regard, it's hard, it's hard to apply a theoretical model, right?

Mike Jones 11:44

Yeah, you've got to really understand it. And I think that's the problem because what the model we're talking about is the the proper model where it's got the feedback, fee forward loops and all that lot. Yes. Not the one that most people, if you Google it now, you'll see, and it'll just be um observe, orientate, decide, act in a circular, linear fashion.

SPEAKER_01 12:03

Yeah.

Turning OODA Into Organisational Design

Mike Jones 12:03

But that's not the one we're talking about, we're talking the actual one, which when you look at it, it's like when I'm a big fan of Stafford Beer's work and the viable systems model. If you first see that model, you're thinking, What is this? Because it's like those are lines going off everywhere. But once you actually understand it, definitely when you start to pick out the the importance of the connection stuff, especially when you think about the feedback loops and stuff, and um an orientation, actually, what we actually mean by orientation, it opens your eyes and you can start to then apply that to organizations where it can be used for. I use it a lot for stuff like uh understanding agility, a lot of key things like that for organizations. Yeah, what what what what what is the thing that that you find really useful for for organizations?

SPEAKER_00 12:52

Well, what what I've done with with uh the OODA loop is is um you know, one of the elements, the five elements of orientation that you know Boyd said shapes the way we look at the world, one of them is is an is analysis and synthesis. So when you analyze and synthesize something, it's actually kind of a linear construct that you might think about with complicated systems, but not complex. And what I mean by that is analysis is breaking a system down into its component parts and understanding each component and then resynthesizing, and by doing so, you kind of understand the way the system works. Now, that works for complicated systems. You can do that with an automobile engine, for example, because that's a complicated but not complex system. It doesn't work with complex adaptive systems, which is what I say most hu well, all human organizations are complex adaptive. Yeah. But still, it's a useful approach for understanding or for providing a level of understanding for systems. So what I do in the book is I break down the elements of the OODA loop. I break down observation, orientation, decide, act, plus feedback loops, and then implicit guidance and control. And I say if you look at each one of these elements, how does your organization observe things? You know, how do you bring in data and information? Do you do that in a deliberate manner or is it haphazard? Do you even know what you're looking for? What data and information is important to your organization? And as someone with a military background, you understand that accessing information it's it's expensive because in in military organizations, it generally requires using assets, whether that's satellite assets, drones, whether reconnaissance teams, there's a cost. And so you have a limited capability of performing observation. And commercial organizations should think about it in the same way. There's a cost to the information and data that they bring in about their environment and the competition, but they they should think deliberately about how they do that. And then when you move over to orientation, it's the same thing. How does your organization then make sense of the information and the data that you have? You know, what what is the lens? What biases are there? How do you ensure that you're ferreting out assumptions that you might be making that can be dangerous because assumptions are what we do when we're missing, we make assumptions when we're missing facts, and we need to we need to have that fact to continue planning? And if if you leave that assumption into place through execution, that brings risk. So you know, how how do you how do you make sense of the world? And then how do you make the decisions in your company? Does your CEO or you or a coach in a in a sports team make all the decisions? Do do you make decisions in a collaborative manner? How does your organization think deliberately about making decisions? And when do you decide that you've had enough, you have enough information and you've made enough sense to make a decision? And then I do the same with action. Sometimes it's very, very hard to turn decisions into action. In the Marine Corps, we we talk about the troop leading steps, and the last troop leading step is supervision. Supervision, you're supervising the action that's occurring because it's very difficult to turn decisions into action and to follow through. And then, you know, the last thing, not the last thing, I also talk about implicit guidance and control, which is one of the most fascinating pieces of the UD-loop to me. But feedback is another important thing. Most most organizations, and I'm talking commercial organizations, certainly don't think about how they incorporate feedback and how they become learning organizations. Because that's what the feedback's all about.

Mike Jones 16:37

If they don't they don't know is because I know they should, but when you so if I if I went into an organization now and I said, Oh, what feedback are you getting? Probably at best they'll point to a 360. They'll go, oh yeah, we're getting free, we're getting um feedback from our customers through this form, or we're getting feedback from our employees through this engagement survey. Sure. And you know, this is not this is not feedback in a sense that we we need. I want to know from the edges of the organization what is what has happened to the assumptions that we've made. What has actually happened? How how is our decisions meeting reality and what what's the the difference between what I expected to happen and what's actually happening?

SPEAKER_00 17:22

That's absolutely correct. And and what you just said was important there because you said what you expected to happen. And you know, Boyd labels that decision, he labels it a hypothesis.

SPEAKER_01 17:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 17:32

And then you test the hypothesis through the action. And the hypothesis is if I do this, these are the results I expect to see. And if you don't, then you have to change the observations that you're making, the information that you're looking for, and you also have to change the way you look at the world, you have to change your orientation. Because if you don't do that, then your decision you want to make so you want to get so that your hypothesis become more and more accurate as time goes by as you cycle through the OD loop. Yeah. What I say is you want to shrink the gap between reality and perception. Your orientation is your perception, and reality is what is what is truth. You want to continue to shrink that gap, you want to minimize the surprise.

Mike Jones 18:19

Yes. Because even going back to what you're talking about, observation. So you know, if I this is interesting because if I go uh and say to people, well, what what are we what are we looking at? Like what what are we actually looking at? And I'll probably get fragments. I'll get fragments from the leadership, and none would be wrong, but there will be fragments, and it'd be fragments from their perspectives. There isn't much found other than you know a few power BI boards, but there is no sort of understanding understanding of the terrain like what you know, what is the external environment that we're looking in, and how have we how we modeled that in a way that we can have something to observe? Because it's I've done this with some with clients where we model it, but we know that first model, coming back to our idea of surprise or closing that gap or making it smaller, is that we'll model it, but that won't be a perfect model because it's gonna be incomplete. Yes, incomplete for information, but at least we know uh essentially what we don't know. So we go, this is our assumption that these are doing this stuff. Okay, cool. Let's go find out, right? You know, that team go find out about this from about these sets of uh competitors or clients or suppliers, and that information comes back and it makes it richer. So over time, this model you're using to observe, and I'm not necessarily saying it has to be a physical model, but you know, anyway, which way it works, but over time that gets more detailed, more real, yeah, which then improves your orientation um because you're you're synthesizing richer data to then improve your your decision making.

Planning To Reduce Surprise

SPEAKER_00 20:07

Yes, you know, i uh when you say that, you know, we like we talk about how companies don't I mean they don't even if you sat them down and said what data and information is important to you, you know, what's the most what's the biggest opportunity that an organization might look for in either the environment or with the competition? You know, almost doing a little bit of a kind of a SWOT analysis on it, you know, um uh and look for um look for opportunities, look for threats, look for weaknesses, look for strengths. The strengths are obviously understanding yourselves, the weaknesses are understanding yourselves, and the opportunities and threats you're looking external to the organization. And just spending a little bit of time talking about that, and that refines you know what information is important to you and what what you need to be looking for is a good exercise, but most organizations don't do that.

Mike Jones 21:00

No, and I think that that really important thing around I would say you you must start with reality because too many people look at aspiration. I would love to do this, or we'd love to be this. So they look through that lens rather than what what you highlighted there is about uh understanding ourselves, our organization. So what what what are we actually capable of? What is our strength? Because that then makes sense of the external environment around what is actually an opportunity or threat, because you can look at something and you can think you know, context-free, that's a threat, or that's a but actually to our organization, that's not really a threat to us because we we've got the capability to handle it. So we always have to think about the the context and about ourselves and how do we use our our current organization in a way that can open up opportunities or shape uh shape the terrain to our advantage.

SPEAKER_00 21:58

Well, you know, you can Um it you can look, uh Sun Tzu said you have to understand yourself and you have to understand the enemy, right? And that's that's a paraphrase. But I think that's that's important. And and um what strengths do you have, what weaknesses do you have? And and then there again, what are you looking for that you'd want to jump on quickly if you recognized it was developing in the commercial world? The other thing that I think both military organizations and commercial organizations do is they they focus on what they are going to do rather than thinking about the environment or the uh or the your opponents or your your opposition. So it's you know, this is our plan, but they do it in a little bit of a vacuum without understanding what what uh might be happening out there that that could cause challenges for their plan. So um, you know, that that whole exercise is important. And and my other experience with commercial organizations has been that um two things. One is they differ from from the military that I'm used to in the sense that most of the time commercial organizations have a deep bench of um of uh experience and uh uh capability within their domain, because you have people who've worked for years and years in that. You you contrast that with the military, where, for example, 75% of the Marine Corps is is on their first four-year term, enlistment term. So there's a there's a there's a difference there in terms of skill sets. The other thing I found in commercial organizations is there's a real hesitancy to try to do any planning. And if planning is done, it's not done the way you and I would think about it. You know, the planning is done where they're just trying to make revenue projections and then do some reverse, reverse engineering back to what they're going to do to meet those those revenue goals that they've set for themselves. Yeah. But that isn't isn't really planning the way you and I think about it, right?

Mike Jones 23:50

No, they won't they won't slow down to speed up. And I suppose when you think about definitely your your title being really apt for this, speed kills, is that they often see planning as as a cumbersome activity that takes time, it's going to slow themselves down. Well, really, you're thinking actually if you could take that time up front like we do, you you the um plan, it's like uh um I forgot the general's name now. Before they went into Venezuela, he said that you know, his last part of his speech that he gave, he said, We rehearsed, we rehearsed, we we we adapted, we learned, and or something he said this thing, and it was all about that planning. Yes, and it was all about actually we weren't there to get it right, we were there to understand how to adapt when it doesn't work, and and that's the thing, yeah, yeah. And I think that's the thing that they where they avoid the planning and they go through this very linear thing that this is this is gonna happen, and it even comes back to what we were talking about there about surprise. Actually, you're gonna get surprised if you don't do the planning, you're gonna get surprised, and then you're gonna get stuck, and then you're gonna send more time trying to figure out how you're gonna recover from this point. But the planning gives you that ability to to execute, and then when it doesn't go right, and you do get those surprises, it doesn't stop, it carries on, they just adapt and they move on to the aim.

SPEAKER_00 25:18

Your plan in my my world, the things that are most important about planning obviously are developing, you know, your what it is that you want to do, your goal, and identifying that. And you and I both know that that takes more effort than most people would think. When you sit down with an organization and really talk about, hey, where do we want to be next year? What do we want to look like? What is our goal? If you develop that goal right, then that goal will endure through the chaos in between. If you've decided that's what what you want to be or where you want to go. And then the other part about it is exactly what you said. You know, it's it's what you learn about your environment and about the competition during planning that then allows you to adjust when changes need to be made. They inevitably will need to be made because, as you said, nothing is linear.

Mike Jones 26:09

No.

SPEAKER_00 26:10

And uh yeah, so that's that's what it's all about.

Mike Jones 26:13

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you you brought up a really good point earlier around um how I I I think we're guilty, or definitely civilian organizations are guilty of seeing the external environment as a as an unintelligent static beast.

SPEAKER_00 26:31

Yeah.

Mike Jones 26:31

But as you said earlier, we're in a complex adaptive system, and that you know, when we when we do observe, orientate, decide, and react, that the action that we take will potentially emerge something that is useful or not useful to the fact that all these actors, be it competitors, be it customers, be it suppliers, will react to what we've done. Hopefully, in a way that we want to, but yes, inevitably not. And we have to prepare for that.

Tempo, Poker, And Decision Quality

SPEAKER_00 27:05

Well, let's let's talk a little bit about, you know, we you mentioned earlier on that a lot of people kind of incorrectly think about the ODA loop in terms of just speed, and my title might even throw that off a little bit, right? But you know, I I borrow an idea from from Annie Duke. I don't know if you're familiar with her or not. Annie Duke wrote she wrote two books. She's a she for 10 years or maybe a little bit longer than that, she was a professional poker player. She'd been working on an advanced degree, and she kind of ran out of, I think, motivation on putting her dissertation together. And her brother was playing professional poker, and she went to visit her brother, and she sat in, I guess, on some games and found out that she really enjoyed it and kind of was good at it. So she wrote a book, two books. One is called Thinking and Bets, and the other one's called Quit. And what she says is that the world is not like a chess board. You'll hear people talk about strategy in terms of chess. She says it's like poker because poker has uncertainty associated with it, much more uncertainty. Chess is bounded. There's only a limited number of moves you can make on a chessboard, but poker is unbound and uncertain. And she says that good outcomes in poker and in anything else depend upon three factors. Either number one is you make correct decisions more often than not. And when I say correct, I'm not saying good or bad. I'm saying you make the right decision, the correct decision, given the information you have at the time. Yeah. The other way you can uh well, and actually, this is mine, not so much Yannie Dukes, but the other thing that you can do is you can move faster than your competition. And when you move faster than your competition, you and I recognize that as having served in the military before. Moving faster is basically you've seized the initiative. And as you said, the environment and your competitors are now reacting to you rather than you're driving the action. And sometimes you can create your own reality when that happens. And so you can either make more correct decisions, you can go faster than your competition, or you can just be lucky. Those three things. And you know, you can make bad decisions and have good luck and have a good outcome. You can make but bad decisions and do them fast and have a good outcome. And the opposite is the truth. Also, you can do everything right and have bad luck.

Mike Jones 29:25

Yeah, yeah. And that's the thing, is like that there is luck, and I had um uh a guy called Lassie uh Johanneson here, and he he was talking about you know, a lot a lot of times it's luck, it is and that's cool, but you know, understanding Oogaloop, you know, you could take advantage of luck if you're looking. Yes. Um if you're not looking, then often luck often gets missed um in there. And and I love the idea about moving faster because it's the viability principle, which means you've got to be able to move as quick or go quicker than um the external environment or competitors, or you cease to exist, which is key.

SPEAKER_00 30:08

That is true, you know, but the speed, I I talk about it as more as tempo and it's relative tempo, and it has to be relevant as well. It can't just be speed for speed's sake that doesn't make any sense in the context of what you're doing. It has to be it has to be speed that is is relevant and effective. And you know, if you think about the ODA loop in terms of making correct decisions, really the OODA loop is also a model for this for the scientific method where you make observations, you make sense of those observations, you s you develop a hypothesis, you test it, and you incorporate the feedback. And so, as you and I talked about easy earlier, it's an approach to making better and better decisions the more you engage with the environment, the competition, and the more you learn about it. You you make better and better decisions, so more and more correct decisions. And if you can move that decision cycle faster relative to your competitor, then they're reacting to you.

unknown 31:01

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 31:01

It oftentimes, sports is always a great place to look at that. American football will have the no-huddle offense where the the offense will will call a play very quickly without taking the time to huddle up, they'll line up, they'll get set, and then the defense can't uh react to them. They don't pick up all of the all of the all of the right people that they need to defend against. Maybe the the defense won't be able to be swapping players on and off the field quickly, they'll get caught with too many players on the field. You know, they'll always be a step behind in their reaction. And uh when they when they find they're a step behind, it starts to get into their head. And you and I both know that you know the you know what's going on inside your head is is more important than anything that's physically happening on the battlefield, and they'll begin to panic a little bit. And when they do, it makes them feel it makes them worse and worse, right? They they fall even further and further behind. And so speed is important, correct decisions are important, and sometimes you know you just get lucky.

Mike Jones 32:04

Yeah. Well, if you look at that and just dissect that for a moment with with organizations that fall foul of this. So Boyd talks about incestuous amplification a lot, so that in that internal inertia, but not just that, it's that um echo chamber essentially we create. So if you think about the internal inertia, you got organizations that take forever to make a decision.

SPEAKER_00 32:29

Yes.

Mike Jones 32:29

Like I'm horrendous, I've just been in with with with an organization, I mean say who, and the the level, the amount it took for a um a decision, it was quite a simple decision, was months. Months. And then the the the information they were using to make that decision was uh insular, only into the team. So no one had gone and actually really understood what the problem was um on the ground. Uh I did, so I knew what was going on. So when I heard the conversations, I was like, this is not quite right. There's something missing here. And it in turn that they were just making their own assumptions of what the problem was. Yes. Not actually what the problem was. So you you think there you that compound that's gonna compound the problem. So it's gonna create errors, and then you're slow anyway, and then if if you've got a competitor or you've got an external environment that is making decisions quicker and better, they're just moving fast, you're always going to be on the back foot, which means you're you're going to be shaped. You're gonna be shaped into someone else's will rather than your own will, which is is never going to be a good outcome.

SPEAKER_00 33:45

Well, Boyd, Boyd said, you know, complex adaptive systems, if if they become close to external influence, become subject to entropy, and entropy is disorder. And so you're disordered in relationship to the environment and to your competition. So when you're disordered, you know, I use the example of somebody who perhaps might have been spent time in solitary confinement in a prison system. And so they're completely locked off from the outside world. And and that's one of the the cruelest type of of punishments there, because without interaction, you start to lose your your balance within your environment. You become closed off from it and you become disordered relative to the environment. And and organizations that have been around for a long time get the uh we've always done it this way approach. Yeah. You know, they they they become inflexible in changing what they're doing as the environment adapts. And you know, that that's that's part of what you always see in kind of the creation and destruction of companies. You get a company, you know, a cycle will be it'll be a young and agile startup and it'll be very tuned into the environment, flexible, able to move quickly, able to make decisions fast, able to move quickly. And then they get larger and larger and more and more bureaucratic, and more and more people who get into this, we've always done it this way syndrome. And pretty soon, you know, something is changing in the environment, and the business world is going in a different direction within their domain, and they they miss that. Yeah, and then some you know young agile startup will come on and it'll just kick their butts and and they they fall apart. It takes a long time though, because those big organizations have a lot of resources that they can expend before they collapse. So it takes a while sometimes. Sometimes they're they're it's spectacular, but some excuse me, sometimes it takes a while.

Mike Jones 35:34

Yeah, yeah. And you you see this over here in the UK with some of the new banks that uh appearing, like Revolute, Starlink, they they're new startups, all completely digital. Um it was you can see the modern banks trying to compete with that because they're neither digital, neither agile, and they've still they've still got that foot in the door of high street banks, and then the same with energy companies as well. Octopus Energy came up and challenged um a lot of the traditional ones because it's harder for them because it over time they created this you know, this big beast that's that's that's really useful for an environment. If that environment exists, that's really useful. You know, if it's not, then it becomes not all of it, but it starts to decay. There's elements that aren't. But that's where um Hadat uh wrote his paper destruction and creation, yes, which I I think must be a mandatory read for any um leader. But he talks about there where we need to be willing to destroy our own or orientation to create something new to see, yes, see where the opportunities. If we're just stuck in that traditional way that this is how we do energy, this is how we do banking, this is how we do you you're going to lose because your orientation is going to slip further and further away from reality.

SPEAKER_00 36:56

That's right. And and a lot of times within big organizations, big commercial organizations, the incentives are wrong to be a learning organization. People are incentivized in ways uh with bonuses and all that type of stuff, then incentivize them to keep doing things ways that have been successful in the past for them, and uh holding on to that type of stuff. You'd almost have to to um to destroy your opportunity for uh for making money to make that change, you know. I wrote a paper when I was a major and I was at command and staff college. I wrote a paper on um World War I. It was World War I Battlefield Observers. And one of the things I tried to to figure out was the U.S. Army, the American Expeditionary Force was uh was far, far away from being a professional organization. The the U.S. military had been the 16th smallest in the world in like 1916, and and a little bit over a year later, we had a million men and a million men on the ground in France. Well, those men weren't very, very well trained, but they also weren't hidebound. They also were not stuck behind the doctrine of we've always done things this way. So they made mistakes early on, but they adapted very, very quickly, and they weren't afraid to say, hey, we don't know what we're doing here, what can we do better? And to incorporate that feedback. And so by the time October, November of 1918 rolled on, the American army was very, very effective, was kind of grinding right through the Germans because we made the adaptations that we needed to make. Yes.

Mike Jones 38:29

That's that's such a good point because you're seeing it now in Ukraine with the Ukrainian military. Oh yeah, quite yeah, you know, gallant effort at the start, but you know, they're not a lot of untrained people, but they've adapted really quickly, especially around to the drone threat. They've created their own like counter-drone. But something came out la uh this week, I think it was a really interesting article, and it was challenging the the requirement of the Ukrainian soldiers to now be trained by NATO and not their own forces, because at the moment they they're always trained by NATO forces, mainly the UK and um France and people like that. Um and they're saying that why would that still be the case? Because Ukrainian soldiers now have got far more ex recent experience of battles than the the NATO ones there, and you're thinking, well, that's probably true. You know, you've probably got these soldiers, British soldiers and stuff that they're they're rightly sharing experience and the stuff that's useful, but it's it's their last experience was Afghanistan.

SPEAKER_00 39:35

Yeah. And and that's that's very that's very interesting. I've said before, I mean, you know, the Ukrainian army and the Russian army are probably the two best armies in the world right now because they've been fighting for about four years, and they have when we went to back earlier and we talked about those elements of orientation. I said the most impactful element of orientation is previous experience. That's what develops in a general officer, that finger spits and grafol, they talk about that kind of fingertip feel for what's going to happen next. The Ukrainians have been and and you know they they they didn't have a lot of of pride or or you know, as I said, they weren't hidebound. They're willing to learn and adapt and see what works and what doesn't work. And it was an existential threat for them, their very existence depended upon it. So all the uh everything gets pulled away except what works. And you're right, they should be training NATO forces, not the other way around.

Mike Jones 40:30

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think they can have to be the way things are going. And that's a interesting challenge for organizations in this, is that how do we and I suppose it's that that balance between stability and chaos? You know, if you think if you imagine that as like uh two ends of a spectrum, it's like you know, pure stability is really bureaucratic, you know, we're we're heavily governed, you know, it's probably not right, but I'm gonna use it for this example, um, and then all the way to chaos is that how how do we get it into the somewhere in balance where we've got enough stability for us to be adapt to adapt from? I think we're we're probably more guilty of going over too much the stability where we try to govern everything so much we become that high-bound organization that just won't or or can't learn to to destroy their own orientation to to adapt.

SPEAKER_00 41:29

Well, you you know what's interesting when you talk about stability and chaos and all that type of stuff. So in in you know the military, uh, we always talk about being able to thrive in chaos. Okay. Military organizations are designed to be effective organizations. Commercial organizations are designed to be efficient organizations, or it has to be some balance between effectiveness and efficiency because you're trying to make money. So you're trying to do things as efficiently as possible to squeeze out as much as much profit as possible. In the military, efficiency is important because it helps effectiveness, but you know, most of the time you're you're operating, at least U.S. forces fortunately are operating in kind of a non-resource constrained world, you're gonna pour on whatever resources you need to be effective. Yeah, yeah. And uh, you know, it's interesting when you think about building organizations too, because if if you want to uh have an organization that thrives in a chaotic environment, that's very expensive from a resources perspective. Um but if you have if you make it an organization that's very, very efficient and is squeezing every every dime out of everything that they're doing, they become very brittle and uh and sub and and and and um vulnerable to chaos uh because um a little bit of chaos that that that uh that finely tuned machine comes apart, right? And so you always have to have a little bit of a balance, you gotta decide where your organization needs to be, you know. How efficient do you want to be and and how effective do you want to be, and how much do you want to insulate yourself from the shocks that your environment might bring?

Mike Jones 43:12

Yeah, yeah. It's a great point. Uh I really like that, uh, effective and efficient. But we are, you know, civilian organization um worship the the false god of efficiency, and you know they ever think is efficient, but when you when you look around, they can't say no. So if you think organizations got limited um resources um that they need to project towards what they're trying to do, but then you'll get load of pet projects pop up, yes, and no one says no. Actually, you know, yeah, we do not have the resource for this, and that means they just they waste the resources and end up taking it away from where they need it. Yes.

SPEAKER_00 43:52

Well, and you and I both know, and in the military, the way we the way we get around that is we designate something as the main effort in the goal. Yeah.

unknown 44:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 44:01

And we resource that main effort and they're they're trying to attain that goal and they focus on that exclusively. They don't go chasing those little side opportunities and projects because it's not but you're right. And I tell you in the startup that I'm in right now, that's one of the things we we see opportunities, but we have limited resources and so we we have to really think hard if we're going to chase that chase that opportunity or not because it it costs us money, it costs us time, takes our takes our eyes off of the of the main goal. Yes.

Mike Jones 44:32

And I think that's where that you know using something like the UDOP is really important for that. And it's it's keeping that observation and making sure that you know your I suppose the maintenance of that aim is the right aim that we should be aiming for. Right. The the changing circumstances but then you you you can't spread yourself too thin. Start spreading yourself too thin trying to chase after everything you will you will break and I suppose that comes back to your point around Alan Duke you know it's you've got to take the bets.

SPEAKER_00 45:06

And you got to see through most professional poker players actually play very few hands. And so you have to know which ones to chase and which ones not to chase and that's her second book called Quit. You know when in in our society we value tenacity we value people who follow through and who persevere and she says sometimes you have to know when to quit you have to know when to stop following through and persevering. You need to know when you need to pour your resources in a different direction. And she had that experience obviously in her own life where she walked away from being almost done with a doctoral degree because to go play poker but she just she was kind of stuck in a rut. She wasn't doing well with it. She wasn't effective with it so she she quit doing that and went and did something else. But one of the things that's also an interesting concept in her book with with both Thinking and Bets but and and I think she talks about this a little bit in quit as well is that af after she would play poker she would sit down with this with this group of other poker players who were playing at the same time and they would talk through how they played the game and she would describe a hand that she had and how she played that hand and they try to determine whether she made the best decisions at the time given the information she had with that hand. That's how they got better. It was after action it was after action what you and I would call after action reviews. And in terms of feedback and understanding what went well and what didn't go well that's important. And then in terms of building plans or orientation on the front end I know you also understand the term red teaming and and and and fighting the plan before you actually put it into action to try to understand where things could go right and where they could go wrong.

Mike Jones 46:52

Yeah and there's such useful skills like you know when we're talking about this planning this red teaming and the after action reviews they're so useful such useful skills um to really develop um the thinking of the organization the learning of the organization but it frustrates me that they they are not really utilized beyond a couple of domains.

SPEAKER_00 47:20

And and a lot of times they're they're not in the commercial world because there's a a lot of a zero there's a zero defects mentality out there. And so there's nobody a middle manager or or or management type guy who wants to stand up in a meeting afterwards after something went wrong and said hey you know I really screwed this up it was all my fault because then when the hammer comes down you know well it said it was his fault you know and they'll let they'll let you go rather than trying to be to be a learning organization understand that mistakes are going to happen.

Mike Jones 47:52

And as long as they're well intentioned intended mistakes and nobody's done anything illegal unethical or immoral then you know you learn from those those well intended mistakes and you and and you move on right yeah and I and I read about this week about um the gap between strategy and execution there's always a gap and that's just strategy yeah always gap but it coming to your point in organizations they never talk of a gap because that's failure. Yes and they see it as failure rather than actually it's it's a natural thing. We just need to real reorientate and we adapt with them.

SPEAKER_00 48:35

Yes they if the plan comes off the rails if it doesn't follow that linear path that they laid out they believe it's a failure. But what's really going to happen is it's going to be a meandering path from where you are now to where you want to be and what everybody in the organization should be doing is nudging the organization towards that goal. And when I mean everybody, you and I I mean that means you have to share the plan all the way down at the lowest levels of your organization what it is that you're trying to accomplish to empower people through giving them the the authority to make decisions so that they can nudge the organization in that direction. Yeah and that that's we have to make sure that they're incentivized to do so the incentive structure has to line up with what you want to accomplish as well.

Mike Jones 49:18

Yeah yeah that's the whole organization there and I mean coming back to that putting my juke again about quitting actually sometimes you know with this strategy we start executing we need to realize when maybe our our hypothesis is wrong. Yes and yeah you know and we then we move to something else yes rather than this cuss sunk phallus that we just sort of carry on and carry on until we're forced to adapt by the environment.

SPEAKER_00 49:49

Yeah and you have to have organizations where people can stand up and say hey I think what we're doing is wrong. Yeah I think we're heading in the wrong direction you know and you have to have organizations where you can have those real discussions so and I think when you get to that point you've got a you've you've got a clear learning organization when you've got people who will need to do that.

Mike Jones 50:10

Yeah yeah I mean it's been absolutely fantastic to have you on but before before I let you go uh what would you like to leave listeners to think about from this episode?

SPEAKER_00 50:20

So you know let's let's circle back around to John Boyd's oodaloop so you know John Boyd's oodaloop it's it's a theoretical model as as we've talked about so and for that reason theory is is difficult to apply there we talked about a spectrum earlier there's a spectrum between theory on one end and dogma on the other and John Boyd's oodle loop is theory but between dogma and theory there's there's uh policies and procedures tactics techniques and procedures and then you move to doctrine and then finally dogma. And so the approach that I try to take is I try to have organizations that try to design to optimize their organization for each element of Boyd's OOD loop and then think in terms of the theoretical model when applying it. But if you optimize how you make your observations if you understand how you orient how you make decisions and how you turn those into action and then incorporate feedback if you think about deliberately how your organization does that and you can improve those things you're just naturally going to get better over that oodle loop. Yeah yeah yeah I think that's kind of the biggest takeaway if you will from my book that's kind of the the foundational approach that I lay out for readers.

Mike Jones 51:32

Nah that's fantastic and I'll um I'll link your book in the show notes that's great speed kills leveraging John Boyd's OODA loop to build organizations that win recommend people read it people on here always know I always talk about John Boyd Bob Molkter Katswitz yeah classic Sanzu well they do yeah they are they are the classics but you know it the impact of their thoughts persists until today and is still still relevant certainly yeah definitely is yeah honestly it's fantastic to have you on Alex and I look forward to staying in touch with you and for the listeners hope you've enjoyed it if you enjoyed it please like and subscribe and share to your network so that people can um get all the value from Alex's wisdom and and to get to read his book. Thank you Alex Thanks Mike I appreciate this I really enjoy doing this. Ah it's awesome to have you on love to conversation great