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

by Chet Richards

A mission order can be thought of as a virtual contract between superior and subordinate. If I am your superior, and I order you to disrupt and delay enemy forces east of XYZ River, you have two choices. You can accept, in which case enemy forces east of XYZ River are disrupted and delayed. There is no excuse for anything else, even if you and all your people get killed trying. Note that how you accomplish the mission is up to you, within any constraints that I put into the order. Your other choice, if you believe that you do not have the resources to carry out the order, or that it is just plain dumb, is to challenge it. The German system encouraged this, but once agreement was reached, the superior could assume that the mission would be accomplished. Now this sounds brutal, a caricature of Prussian discipline. Such a contract, though, is effective only as part of an overall cultural milieu that includes such other elements as mutual trust and an intuitive sense of strategy. If we have built sufficient trust based on mutual experience, I know what you are capable of, and I trust you to do it if you agree to it. You trust me not to order you to do something that you cannot do or that will endanger you for no important strategic reason. How do we all know these things? Because we have trained and fought together over an extended time and earned this level of trust. We can make these decisions rapidly and accurately because of our intuitive competence.