Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business

by Chet Richards

The Germans, or some small fraction of them, were able to execute and sustain fast decision cycles, even against the friction of war, because they had instilled an organizational climate or culture that mitigated friction’s effects. More important in Boyd’s view was that by accelerating their OODA loops, they could generate those unexpected, abrupt, and “jerky” transients, such as when they suddenly appeared in force in the south (Map 4), that enabled them to pump up friction on the allied side. It wasn’t that the Germans were smarter than the French and British or could peer farther into the future. No, their secret of success lay in that organizational climate, which enabled them to better exploit the chaos that would come, and in fact that they were helping to create.