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.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Waterfall vs. Agile: Battle of the Dunces or A Race to the Bottom?

Image
The major software methodology wars since the mid 1950’s. Someone was wrong on the Internet, so here we go… In a recent HBR article, It’s Time to End the Battle Between Waterfall and Agile , the author sets up a false premise: There is a war between Waterfall methodology and Agile. The war must end. And finally, you can combine the approaches to get the best of both worlds. This sounds good, but the article is based on a misunderstanding of both Waterfall and Agile. Also, there is no war between Waterfall methodology and Agile. There can’t be, because Waterfall methodology does not exist! Waterfall is a name for large projects that failed in the 1960’s. Waterfall was never a methodology, but a failure to apply the methodologies that existed back then. As I will show towards the end of this article, at least one of the “successful” Waterfall projects mentioned in the HBR article was neither successful, nor a Waterfall project. I got invaluable help from Alistair Cockburn. He fact che
Read more

Performance Evaluations, Business Strategy, and Agile Methodologies

Image
It is performance evaluation time in many companies. This can be stressful, both to the people being evaluated, and the people doing the evaluation. In companies adopting agile software development methods, the tension can be extraordinary. Individual performance evaluations run counter to agile philosophy, which emphasizes team performance over individual performance. However, managers and corporate leaders need to take a few steps back, and consider the impact performance evaluations have on the organization as a whole. Especially now, in the midst of a recession, it is important to look at a companies current policies to see if they can be improved, or if they are actually holding the company back. So, how can a manager evaluate policy? Performance evaluation policies can serve as an excellent example. I'll confine myself to discussing the so-called ‘rank and yank’ methods. These are performance reviews were employees are ranked using a forced ranking system. It usually looks so
Read more

Agile Requirements Structures, Part 1

Image
If you have worked in large Agile projects or programs, you may have noticed that there is often quite a bit of confusion about requirements, what the requirement types are, their purpose, how to write them, how to use them, and above all, what not to do with them. There are many causes for this confusion. Here are some of the more common I have seen: Nobody in the organization has read up on the requirements model it is using, so everyone makes their own interpretation. The organization deviates from a standard requirements model, but nobody knows which standard model the organization is deviating from, and/or there is no agreement about how they deviate from it. The organization has not documented its own requirements model very well. The organization mixes two or more different requirements models, often without realizing it. The organization has documented its requirements model, but finding the documentation is an epic project in itself, on par with when Henry Sta
Read more