Turn key creativity for thought leaders | Col. John Boyd

OODA Loop by Purpleslog http://www.flickr.com/people/purpleslog/

If you have engaged my services in a coaching or consulting capacity, then you have no doubt heard me apply various theories of John Boyd to problems ranging from thought leadership marketing and design thinking, to global business strategy, and executive (or personal) action planning.

While I could go on and on, about Col. John Boyd, I want to concentrate on the implications of his “Destruction and Creation” paper for content marketers and thought leaders everywhere.

I intend to share one of my applications of this creation-destruction concept. Namely, how thought leaders can become prolific generators of transformational ideas in virtually any industry space by defining and mapping the frontiers of their knowledge domain, and then systematically attacking them to create new constructs.

But First…

In this brief (and easy to read) 8-page paper, Boyd draws from works in a wide range of disciplines to decompose the process by which the mind makes decisions in a fast-changing environment. He argues that in such a dynamic environment, humans try to comprehend the environment by continually destroying and creating meaning.

In other words, we map “whole picture” concepts, which are analogous to “meaning”.

Next, we break down these concepts into sub-domains and reconfigure these sub-domains into new “whole pictures” that embody new concepts.

He frames these concepts as “mental patterns” which can then be used as decision models. Here is a brief passage as he elaborates on the creation of mental concepts:

There are two ways in which we can develop and manipulate mental concepts to represent observed reality: we can start from an objective whole and break down to its particulars or we can start with the particulars and build towards a comprehensive whole. Saying it another way, but in a related sense, we can go from general-to-specific or from the specific-to-general. A little reflection here reveals that deduction is related to proceeding from the general-to-specific while induction is related to proceeding from specific-to-general.

In following this line of thought, can we think of other activities that are related to these two opposing ideas? Is not analysis related to proceeding from general-to-specific? Is not synthesis, the opposite of analysis, related to proceeding from specific-to-general? Putting all this together: Can we not say that general-to-specific is related to both deduction and analysis?

As an aspiring creator of new frameworks, concepts or thinking tools in your space, it is probably already obvious to you how you may apply this kind of thinking. If not, here are some hints:

What would you get if you have a car (whole concept), and then subtract the top (remove a sub-domain)?

You would have a new concept known as a convertible (new concept).

What would you get if you have a convertible (whole concept), and you add an automatic control for the convertible top (add a sub-domain)?

You would have a retractable top convertible (new concept).

This simple act of creation and destruction accounts for the vast majority of “new” innovation and creativity on the planet! It is positively Edisonian in its practicality!

Suppose we shatter the correspondence of each domain with its constituent elements? In other words, we imagine the existence of the parts but pretend the domains or concepts they were previously associated with do not exist.

-Col. John Boyd

It works with theory generation, concept formulation, book authorship, new venture creation, business model innovation, and much more.

Let’s move on to…

In your transition from upstart to accepted authority, you will have two hidden allies to work with if you use the principles I’m about to share with you.

• The first will be what I think of as the “Gravitational Pull Of Accepted Doctrine” (also known as dogma).
• The second is the recurring phenomenon I think of as the “Tyranny of Representational Models”

Dogma Is Your Friend
Organizations, communities of practice, and even whole societies often develop strong attachment to “current dogma”.

And with good reason.

Once upon a time, the community had a challenge, and the current dogma was once fresh insight (doctrine) that moved in to mitigate the challenge. However, this insight soon expands by necessity into doctrine, and then hardens over time into institutionalized dogma (when you watch the video clip above, take special note of Boyd’s description of how quickly doctrine becomes dogma).

Your job as an upstart, or an ascendant force in your industry, is to identify areas of over-reach, of obsolescence, or of dynamic change; Sub-domains that have slowly lost cohesion with newly accepted realities, that are just out-of-step, or that hold some internal contradictions, either in theory, or in practice (observed results).

In “Creation”, Boyd argues that because we use gestalt-type “whole picture” concepts to model reality, creativity (or the creation of new domains) must be preceded by a “destruction” of a previously held concept and that this is how our perception changes.

Organizations and professional communities who display an aversion to this “destruction” are often especially vulnerable to disruption from innovative new insights. In other words, those insiders who are smarter than you, more widely accepted than you, and more experienced than you are – who should have been making these discoveries – often have a “destruction avoidance” mental block.

Presumably, you do not… or at least, you will not after reading this article.

Models Are Your Friends
Before Einstein postulated his general theory of relativity, somewhat careless thinkers may have considered the Newtonian principle described as the “1st Law of Thermodynamics (or the law of conservation of energy), to have been some kind of “truth”.

It wasn’t. Instead, it was a model.

It was the most accurate model we had at the time for describing a much more complex reality. And like most effective models, in its heyday, it was co-opted as “truth” by many of the people who used and misunderstood it.

One of my favorite business thinkers and authors, is the Israeli Physicist Dr. Eli Goldratt. In the introduction to his masterful novel, “The Goal”, he indirectly alludes to this very tendency of “model as truth” when he said:

Science for me, and for the vast majority of respectable scientists, is not about the secrets of nature or even about truths. Science is simply the method we use to try and postulate a minimum set of assumptions that can explain, through a straightforward logical derivation, the existence of many phenomena of nature.

The Law of Conservation of Energy of physics is not truth. It is just an assumption that is valid in explaining a tremendous amount of natural phenomena. Such an assumption can never be proven since even an infinite number of phenomena that can be proven by it does not prove its universal application. On the other hand, it can be disproved by just a single phenomenon that cannot be explained by the assumption. This disproving does not detract from the validity of the assumption. It just highlights the need or even the existence of another assumption that is more valid. This is the case with the assumption of the conservation of energy which was replaced by Einstein’s more global – more valid – postulation of the conservation of energy and mass. Einstein’s assumption is not true to the same extent that the previous one was not “true”.

-Dr. Eli Goldratt, introduction of “The Goal”

Goldratt was attempting to counter the “model as truth” mental framework of his readers, before launching into his ground-breaking work which brought the “Theory of Constraints” model to the management world.

Consider the case of Einstein as a thought leadership model.

Einstein was largely an outsider during his glorious “miracle year” of 1905. Nominally, he accomplished his breakthrough by sacrificing the sacred cow of Newtonian physics upon the altar of his “relativity theory”. He reached his insights precisely because he tried to find a way to explain observations in the electromagnetic field that he felt were not explained by Newtonian mechanics.

Einstein had to mentally destroy the “Law of Conservation of Energy”, before he could create the “Law of Conservation of Energy and Mass”.

To the extent that the would-be thought leaders in your space are unconsciously wedded to “models as truth” (and they invariably always are), you have an opportunity to break these models and reconstruct them along the lines of your own observations.

In future explorations of concepts in thought leadership and thought leadership marketing, I will explore other insights arising from my study of Boyd’s Creation and Destruction paper and other works of his.

For every theory or model that exists, there is a real world application it does not adequately or accurately describe. Why?

…Because a model, by definition, is a “simpler” representation of a more complex reality.

By definition, it has to take some shortcuts – make some assumptions. By systematically examining the gap between reality and its cousin (the model, framework or theory), you greatly increase the chance that you will find a disconnect where the model does not fit, or even contradicts reality.Many fortunes have been made exploiting that disconnect. This is what I refer to as conducting an intellectual invasion.

In his paper, Boyd asks the reader to “imagine” the content domains as circles. Today you don’t have to imagine. I use simple mind mapping software to visualize and document new content domains I wish to research, understand, or define. Options like Xmind, Freemind, and TheBrain have free versions, and there are even more sophisticated information visualization-mind mapping tools that allow you to draw a web of connections between concepts you record.

Once you create these ecosystem maps of ideas in your space, you can begin to systematically examine the ideas (assumptions) that underpin them. Where are these assumptions shaky? Where do they falter in practice?

At a time when many financial planners were (and still are) teaching that everyday investors should consider their home an investment, Robert Kiyosaki came screaming that “your personal house is a liability” and that “anything that puts money in your pocket is an asset and anything that takes money out is a liability”. It was commonsensical.

He has built a massive publishing empire on the back of an insight that contradicted what most financial planners teach. He was proposing a “cash flow” approach to identifying assets and liabilities.

Think about taking some accepted framework in your industry or market niche, and see if you can use some of the ideas I have shared to create a new breakthrough. You don’t have to be correct because in this way of thinking, there’s no right or wrong.

Just consider whether the idea is defensible in the moment and context, or not. Of course, it is easier to defend and build on if it is rigidly logical and the sub-components of your own theories do not contradict each other. Your frameworks should be logical.

The concepts I explore in this article might seem a bit hard to grab for some people. However, it will make a lot more sense to you if you read the work by the late military strategist and systems philosopher.

1. Can you think of at least one commonly accepted principle (or practice) that seems to have no basis in common sense? seems illogical? or seems to be a relic of an earlier era but is ill-suited for the conditions to which it is currently applied?
2. Can you list the arguments, biases, or presumptions, that underlie its broad acceptance?
3. Do you know where you can find facts, statistics, theoretical frameworks, or anecdotal (commonsensical) insights that could authoritatively contradict these “commonly accepted doctrines”?
4. How can you make the insights above better or more complete? Is there any part of my case above you think I might have forgotten?