One More OODA Loop Through the IOHAI Hoop

In a previous article I wrote about IOHAI - John Boyd's leadership model. I used Intermediate Objective maps to deconstruct IOHAI in a manner consistent with the ideas in Boyd's essay Destruction & Creation.

A friend told me it was the most incomprehensible essay I had ever written. I regard that as a challenge to make one more OODA loop through the IOHAI hoop. (Though I should warn you I write to comprehend, not to be comprehended.)

In the previous article I mentioned there was another way to decontruct IOHAI. Actually, there is an infinity of ways. Here is one, created under the assumption that Orientation means "good Orientation". Under that assumption, Insight becomes a prerequisite for Orientation. I have also made Orientation a prerequisite for Harmony. We cannot achieve Harmony if we are no good at Orienting ourselves:


Now let's look at Initiative, hanging there all by itself. Initiative is a personal property. Some people have more, others have less. It is a bit more complicated than that though.

Initiative is heavily influenced by training and environment. Thus, lack of training, or the wrong training, will inhibit initiative. So will an environment that punishes initiative, for example by punishing failure. I did a webcast about the effects of fear in organizations awhile ago:



Using the information in the webcast (which is assembled from a variety of sources) and combining it with the IOHAI IO map, we get:

At this point, we do not have purely a prescription for good qualities in a leader. We have connected IOHAI back to the environment.

In other words, we need a fear free, failure tolerant organizational culture in order to grow good leaders according to the tenets of IOHAI.

Mission Statements Ackording to Dr. Ackoff and John Boyd

I just read an article about mission statements by Dr. Russel Ackoff. The article is old, but Ackoffs views are certainly worth thinking about.

Compare with Boyd (Patterns of Conflict, slide 144):

Unifying vision

A grand ideal, overarching theme, or noble philosophy that represents a coherent paradigm within which individuals as well as societies can shape and adapt to unfolding circumstances—yet offers a way to expose flaws of competing or adversary systems.

Looks like we can take elements from Dr. Ackoff's article, and use it to better understand what Boyd meant. Or, we can use Boyd's ideas about organization in order to understand the importance and relevance of Dr. Ackoff's ideas about mission statements.

Deconstructing again, and I haven't even drunk any coffee today.

Deconstructing IOHAI

In 1976 John Boyd wrote a famous essay, Destruction & Creation. The essay is essentially about how creativity works. Boyd's idea was that a body of knowledge in the human mind can be likened to an island consisting of connected information. Creativity is the process of destroying the connections between the pieces of information, and constructing new patterns by assembling the knowledge in different ways.

Sometimes we just break a single body of knowledge apart, and reassemble it again. Sometimes we insert pieces of information from other bodies of knowledge. This process of destruction and construction of patterns of knowledge is sometimes called analysis and synthesis, but there is a simpler word: deconstruction. (In case this article gets too heavy, check out the Babylon 5 episode The Deconstruction of Falling Stars.)

Boyd deconstructed military strategy in his Discourse on Winning and Losing. (Scroll about half-way down the web page to find the Discourse.) Of course, learning from the Discourse requires deconstructing it.

In this essay, I have used two tools to deconstruct Boyds IOHAI concept, his Theme for Vitality and Growth. The first tool is The Logical Thinking Process, the second tool is lots of coffee. (I may have overdone the latter, and not used enough of the former. You tell me.)

Unfortunately, Boyd himself did not write much about IOHAI himself. If you are interested in what he wrote, as he wrote it, you need to check out Patterns of Conflict, slide 144, and Organic Design, slides 12-17. You can also use a shortcut. Chet Richards has put the IOHAI concept together.

Boyd contended that organizations are prone to growth pains that can get debilitating or even lethal. (See Organic Design, slide 20) I have deconstructed his argument in the form of a Current Reality Tree:



The diagram above doesn't give you any information you cannot get from Boyd's presentation. The one possible advantage is a better overview of the idea. (Then again, translating an idea from its original format to a new format may introduce distorsion, so perhaps you should check Organic Design, just to make sure.)

From Boyd's argument about complexity limiting the ability of an organization to adapt, he evolved a model for an organization that can grow without becoming increasingly rigid. Again, translating Boyd to a Logical Thinking Process tool, we get the following Intermediate Objective map:


The IOHAI concept (yes, I know, I still haven't told you what it is), is meant to enable organizational unity of purpose. That is, it focuses on the following part of the organizational model:
The connection between IOHAI and the organizational model isn't new information, it is there in Boyd's presentation. It is not all that obvious either, so maybe we have already gained some insight.

Now for some serious deconstruction. The first step, again, is to translate the IOHAI concept to an Intermediate Objective map:

You'll find IOHAI in the bottom row of boxes. (Click on the picture if you want to see a larger picture.)

IOHAI is a set of Necessary Conditions for leaders at all levels in a Boyd model decentralized organization. (If you haven't read the boxes in the picture yet, now is a good time to do so.)

Grabbing information from Boyd's, and Chet Richard's, slides is itself a deconstruction process. The main advantage is that we can now make the deconstruction process very explicit.

First, let us focus on the part of the IOHAI model directly concerned with the organizational model, like this:

Now we have a little more focus than before. We are ready to destroy the connections between IOHAI and organizational unity:

Looking at our five pieces: Insight, Orientation, Harmony, Agility, and Initiative, is there any way to rearrange them in a manner that still makes sense?

Seems to me Insight should be a prerequisite for Harmony. We can't very well perceive and create interactions between seemingly disconnected events and entities unless we understand how things, and the connections between things, work.

Orientation, on the other hand, stands by itself. It is just a description of how we work. The orientation process exists as long as we are alive, even if we are completely disconnected from reality. Therefore, neither Insight, nor Harmony, can be prerequisites. We don't need much Initiative to orient ourselves, so Initiative can't be a prerequisite either. (You may wonder why Orientation isn't a prerequisite for Insight. It is. I didn't make that connection until after I uploaded the diagrams to the blog. I'll fix it the next time I deconstruct the diagrams.)

Agility, on the other hand, is about shifting between patterns we perceive or create using Harmony, so Harmony is a prerequisite for Agility.

Initiative is necessary to get things moving, but we can imagine Initiative without much direction. (As in fad of the month management imperatives, for example, or random requirements changes in projects.) Thus, well let Initiative remain where it is.

Reconnecting the entities in the diagram to reflect our new understanding we get:

We didn't change anything above the Pursue a Noble Vision box, so we can broaden our perspective again:
There you have it: IOHAI deconstructed. What, if anything have we gained?

For one thing, we have a starting point. Organizational unity must begin with insight into how systems work.

The act of translating IOHAI to the IO map format does itself give us an insight: each intermediate objective is necessary to overcome some obstacle.

Why is that important? It is important because we can go from this:

to this:

That is, we can use an IO map as input to a Future Reality Tree.

What does this buy us? It is a transition from a necessity logic based structure to a sufficiency logic based structure.

Orientation done using necessity logic and sufficiency logic are very different things. they yield different results. One tells us what is necessary, the other what is sufficient.

We now have two possibilities, either:

We have gained insight into how IOHAI is connected to Boyd's organizational model, and where to start when implementing IOHAI in an organization. We have also gained new insight allowing us to improve on how to deconstruct Boyd in the future.

or

Maybe I should cut back on the coffee.

Knowledge Associates

I do not advertise much in this blog, not even my own services. Sometimes I make exceptions though:

Knowledge Associates is a new Theory Of Constraints consultancy in Victoria, Australia. If you live in the neighborhood (i.e. the Southern Hemisphere), and want a problem solved in your organization, why not talk to them? They might be able to help. They certainly do have an attractive offer.

While on the subject of advertising, if you live in the Northern hemisphere and want a similarly attractive offer, there is only one place to go that I know of.

And now back to our regular programming.

IO map for Strategic Methods

The IO map above describes the Necessary Conditions that must be fulfilled in order to have an organization that can create and execute strategy effectively in a fast changing environment. The idea isn't mine. Originally it is Colonel John Boyd's idea. William Dettmer translated Boyd's Maneuver Warfare into a civilian version, Strategic Navigation.

I have added some of the obstacles (hexagons) that an organization must overcome in order to create and execute strategy effectively.

The map is interesting both because it explains what it is that makes Strategic Navigation and Maneuver Warfare effective, and because it provides a simple way of evaluating any strategic method.

If the necessary conditions aren't fulfilled, then the method, even though it may have great strengths, also has weaknesses that will keep it from being as effective as it should be.

You may have read critical studies that show strategic methods often do not work. Boyd worked out why some methods do work, and others don't. If you study the map, you will see that most strategic methods fail in the execution stage. They do that because the strategic methods fail to address the issue of how to organize so that the strategies can be carried out effectively. (See According to Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths & Total Nonsense, by Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton.)

If you are interested in the topic, please do comment on the map. It isn't quite "dried out" yet, so I expect to change some things. What do you think?