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More thoughts on Boyd, Satir, and Influence

Boyd's model is surprisingly similar to Satir's change model. Boyd's premise was that every action is initially triggered by some observation. We see something, hear something, or feel something, that sets off a chain of reactions and responses that he referred to as the OODA loop - Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act.

The act of observation is, of course, filtered. We usually see what we expect to see, not what is actually taking place. And, what we do manage to observe is colored or tinted by our past experience.

Once we actually observe something, our brain attempts to orient itself to the new information. Does it match our past experience, or our cultural background, or our genetic makeup? If not, is it powerful enough to significantly change our view of the world? One way or another it becomes a part of our new reality.

Then we decide what to do about it - to take some action, or just ignore it, and what type of action to take. And then we act.

Infants have almost no accumulated experience, no filters, and seem to spend 150% of their waking hours observing and integrating.

Older people - older that is in terms of their spirit and interests as opposed to calendar age - tend to minimize their observations, attempt to reject things that don't match their established world view, and as a result take fewer and fewer decisions and actions.

Each step in the OODA loop takes time. For all practical intents and purposes, it seems to be a serial process. Some rare individuals may be able to transit multiple OODA loops simultaneously, but the vast majority of people plod through the loop, step by step.

Of course, this process seldom takes place in total isolation. The model's most interesting and most effective use is when we apply it to human interactions. When two people, two competitors, two armies, interact the OODA loop always comes into play and can provide us with tremendous insight.

Interaction.

Ping pong.

Action, response.

A says something, B responds.

A fires a missle, B responds.

Each volley, each action triggers a response loop that has an inherent time lag. Time becomes a key factor, a tool, a competitive advantage.

One to One, or One to Many - Word Mapping

Since I'm a native English - or at least native American English speaker - I have some knowledge of word roots in English. I'm not an expert by any means, but I do know some of the connections and etymology. In helping one of my clients to understand an English word I happened to explain its history and origins going back to what is believed to be the original Indo-European roots. He found it very interesting, and as a result, he learned quite a few related words.

That caused me to think about how we typically increase our vocabulary - either in our own native language or in a foreign language we're studying. The most common approach is pure brute force rote learning. We take a word and learn its counterpart. Then we move on to the next word. It's slow, and often painful - at least for me. More importantly, I find it extremely difficult to remember words that don't have any logical framework. They just don't fit for me, and I quickly forget them.

But what my client and I did, quite frankly by accident, was to journey from the initial word to its counterpart in English, then to that word's root, and from there to a long list of related words that often share a common theme.

A good example is the word "stand." It's easy to visualize and grasp the connection between "stand" and "stand up", "stand by", "stand for", "standard", and the like.

So, the challenge for me is to figure out how to apply this concept to my own study of Japanese language.

Boyd and OODA Cycles

Letters are not email

Letters are not email, and emails are not letters. Yet habit leads us into handling them as if they were. When a new technology is first introduced, we tend to use it in the same ways that we used whatever it is replacing. A good example is the horseless carriage. In it's first few incarnations the horseless carriage was basically a carriage without a horse, so the base of the 'carriage' was positioned above the wheel axles. This resulted in somewhat of a bumpy/jerky ride, but people were so excited about experiencing the new technology that it didn't really bother them.

Then, after several incarnations and about twenty years (a generation), designers, manufacturers, and customers started thinking about the horseless carriage in totally new and unique ways. The carriage base was lowered so that the body's center of gravity was below the wheel axles, and suddenly the driving experience became a pleasure instead of bonejarring.

Quite a few decades and several generations later, email hit the scene. As might be expected, its first incarnation resembled written letters in many respects. It was an easy metaphor - easy to explain, easy to gain customer acceptance, and relatively easy to implement.

Unfortunately, just like the horseless carriage, the letter/email metaphor not only brought all the good points of mail along with it, but also the bad points. In many ways it made the bad points several orders of magnitude worse. In the old 'letter' world when I opened the mail box in front of my home, I would find lots of envelopes. All of them were 'created equal' in that I personally had to look at each and everyone of them to decide if I wanted to open them, or just toss them into the trash. If I opened them, then I had to read the contents and make a serious of other decisions. Did I need to follow up? Did I want to file it? I had to setup a filing system (old shoebox perhaps), and commit to some sort of periodic review. And, more often than not, my mail would be chock full of junk mail.

What a pain. I hated it, and as a result, I was an extremely poor coorespondent. I would have to force myself to write a letter, buy a stamp, and eventually mail it. Junk mail was even worse - and most of it went directly into the trash, or into the fireplace.

I was actually very positive back in the early 1980's when I first started using email. No more stamps. No more trips to the post office. No more junk mail.... It was fun. In some way I probably felt almost the same as one of my ancestors did when they took their first ride in a horseless carriage.

But email is not a letter. It may resemble it in many ways, but it is not the same - far from it. Yet here we are, opening every email, spending countless hours weeding through it, and almost drowning in a sea of email spam.

So, I keep asking myself, when are we going to make the transition to the next email incarnation? I have this extremely powerful PC sitting on my desk (or on my lap), and what do I use it for? A very expensive virtual letter simulation! Kind of bizarre really.

I used to write letters by hand, put them in envelopes, mail them, open the letters than came back, read them, trash or file them. When I wanted to check on a past letter, I would open my files and search through them, trying desparately to remember who wrote to me, and when they wrote. If it was an on-going exchange of letters, then I might spend hours searching through stacks of correspondence.

Now, thanks to the wonders of modern science, I can do exactly the same thing on my computer screen. I can create a virtual set of file cabinets, create and label files, etc. Of course I can do it with less stress and pain, but basically what today's email systems to do is to act as a letter emulation system.

What do I want?

First, and foremost, I want my computer to do the vast majority of the work for me. I want it to deal with junk mail, and to search, sort, file, and alert for me with a minimum of effort on my part. I want to be able to read an email and automatically find links to other correspondence that I've received. I want it to know the difference between 'trusted' friends and relatives versus someone that it has never seen before. I want it to clean up the trash and deal with the ever increasing flood of spam.

I want it to allow me to deal with my email in terms of 'views' instead of files. I want to create views of my emails that are based not just on simple keyword searches, but rather on conditions that I can define. I want to be able to ask for all the emails received within the past two weeks from trusted friends that include the word 'investments', for example.

Above all, I want it to be based on the metaphor of communication instead of the old letter metaphor.

Learning and Mastery

The Discovery Engine

I do a lot of consulting with Japanese and American business people, trying to help them structure business plans, presentations, and negotiate business relationships. Invariably we become involved in a long drawn out discussion about logical thinking - both the Japanese and the Americans insisting that the other party is not being logical. Of course, there are many reasons for their belief, and usually while they say, "They don't think logically" what they are really trying to express is, "They don't think the same way I do." Often they want me to wave a magic wand and 'fix' the other party - i.e. transform their reality and logic so that it matches the way my client thinks. Unfortunately I don't have any magic wands - at least none that work that particular type of magic. However, I can and do teach them how to discover and understand the other party's logic system and view of the world.

It's interesting that they always want to fit "logical thinking" into a box. Many of their questions center around trying to categorize the other party's logical style into some neatly organized process - something that would be easy for them to understand and relate to. "What are they thinking?" "How do they arrive at that conclusion?" "Do they think deductively or intuitively?" Of course they seldom if ever ask the same questions about themselves.

Life, at least life in the piece of the world that I happen to inhabit in this incarnation, isn't that simple and straight forward. Life is messy. People are messy.They jump from thought to thought, premise to premise, almost like bees flitting from flower to flower in the spring.

So we usually talk about the classic models of deduction and induction, how they can be put to good use, and the pitfalls of sticking to them too rigorously.

Somewhere along the line they begin to draw connections and make associations. For example, they typically want to classify Westerners as deductive thinkers and Japanese as inductive. Like all gross generalizations, these also turn out to be wrong and misleading.

To arrive at something of practical use in the real world, they have to learn how to do a version of mental origami - to fold the academic, ivory tower, models back on themselves, turn and twist them around to the point that they almost squeal, and make them 3 or even 4 dimensional.

From a "logical thinking" perspective, what they end up with is more of a "discovery engine" than anything resembling a text book process.

Great minds think alike

Virginia Satir, probably the most famous family therapist, had a very simple model to explain how change and the related learning actually take place.

People, left to their own devices, tend to establish a status quo environment. They know what everything is (or at least what it appears to be) and how it fits into their world view. Surprises are minimized if not totally eliminated. Often even the 'surprises' are built into their system and are only allowed to take a limited, predictable form with known outcomes - kind of like the rides and Disneyland that may excite us and get our hearts pumping even though we know the whole time that we are totally safe.

Then something totally unexpected happens. Some stimulus enters their world from the outside. It might be an oil crisis, or major earthquake, or the sudden death of a close relative. It doesn't have to be negative - positive stimuli work too, though for some reason human beings seem to respond much quicker and urgently to negative stimulus.

Their whole world is thrown into a state of chaos. They know something is wrong but they have no idea how to deal with it. Often they panic, flapping around like a fish that is suddenly jerked from the water and finds itself on the pier. Eventually, sometimes sooner, sometimes later, they calm down and start to deal with the stimulus. It becomes real to them. They can usually give it a name and ascribe characteristics. After a while they can actually describe what it is, and how it behaves. They are learning about it and how to deal with it.

As their learning progresses it becomes second nature to them. It passes through four basic phases-

• unconcious incompetence
  
• concious incompetence
  
• concious competence
  
• unconcious competence

At the final stage of unconcious competence, they no longer have to think about it - they just do whatever it is that they do to deal with it. They have mastered it completely.

And, what has happened, is that they have established a new status quo. They have stopped learning.

Satir, and others, realized that learning only takes place when people find themselves in a chaotic state.

Boyd, the fighter pilot who developed the OODA concept that has transformed modern military and business tactics, found the same thing to be true. His OODA model is based on some of the same observations and perceptions emphasized by Satir. Since they were contemporaries it's quite likely that they knew of each other, and perhaps even studied each other's work. Even if they never met, or heard of each other, their conceptual models are very similar.

Both of them believed that-

• Stimulus is necessary for meaningful change
• Stimulus has to come from outside
• People only learn when they go through a state of chaos
• The process can be accelerated
• Going through the process is positive and healthy

So, the question is, should we deliberately put ourselves in "harm's way" - throw ourselves into a state of chaos - so that we can learn continously?

As unnatural as it may seem, the answer is probably a resounding yes.

Generations

I'm reading one of the biographies on Thomas Jefferson and was really impressed by his concept (I'm paraphrasing) that what works well and feels right for one generation shouldn't be imposed on the next generation.

Right now I feel as if I'm right in the middle of a long chain of generations stretching back into the past and forward into the future. As the oldest child in my family, I was fortunate enough to have spent a lot of time with three of my grandparents, and was able to talk via phone with my other grandparent. All four of them had a tremendous influence on me. In some ways I learned more from them, or was impacted at deeper levels, by them than almost anyone else in my life. Their stories - the ones that they told me, and the ones that they kept hidden in the closet, became a part of my life experience, threads meshing together to form the fabric of who and what I am and will be.

Yet their experiences, their environment, their world view, was totally different. Their parents and grandparents grew up during the Civil War and the Reconstruction. My grandparents, during their early years, used steam locomotives, stage coaches, wagons, and horses for transportation. Going from Washington D.C. to New York was a major undertaking. When my paternal grandfather worked for the Department of the Interior he was assigned to an indian reservation in Montana. They took a train across the country, then a stage coach, and finally a wagon to get to his post. For cooking and heating, they used wood stoves. In fact, one of my aunts died as a three year old child when she accidently fell against a wood stove and was severely burned.

My parents and their siblings grew up during the Great Depression. Their motivation, their objectives, their hopes and desires, were totally different from their parents - naturally enough. It happens, generation after generation.

And the technology surrounding and enabling all of us, has changed and evolved generation after generation. When I visited Texas last December my sister and I swapped memories, and she happened to comment on how dark our grandmother always kept her apartment. It was almost like a cave. For us, as children, it seemed totally depressing. I really enjoyed the time I was able to spend with her, but always dreaded the evenings when she would close everything up and make me go to bed soon after the sun went down. Yet it must have seemed perfectly natural to her.

Why? I think the answer is simple enough. When my grandmother was a child household lighting was extremely expensive. Only the best homes had it, and they used gas. The house that my grandfather and grandmother bought in Anacostia had gas fixtures for lighting, but didn't have a bathroom - there was an outhouse in the backyard for that. From my grandmothers perspective, her view of the world, lighting was a luxury - something that you didn't use casually and never took for granted.

I suppose that many of my habits and preferences will be viewed the same way by my grandchildren and their children. That doesn't bother me at all. I don't have any nostalgia or ties to the past, nor any vested ego to defend. I welcome the change, and am really looking forward to seeing what the next generations come up with.

Motion and Emotion

Motion and emotion are deeply connected - linked a levels way, way deeper than we can ever begin to imagine. There are very valid reasons why they share the same language roots - the same core 'meme', yet most people go through life as if motion and emotion were two totally separate and distinct concepts.

Does emotion, more specifically our emotional state, stimulate or limit our motion?

If so, can we then reverse the process? Can we use motion to stimulate emotion?

Can we conciously change our emotional state by deciding to take action - to put our body into motion?

And, if we can, do Newton's Laws then apply? Does a body in motion tend to stay in motion? Does a body in emotion tend to stay in emotion?