Francis Bacon, Top Guns, and the Breakfast of Champions

Military fighter pilots are a remarkable breed. They are very bright, focused, and knowledgeable; and typically effuse a strong and confident sense of purpose. These are high energy people who often accomplish missions that border on magical. They succeed because they have the right DNA, have the courage and will to execute difficult acts, have been prepared with the right knowledge, skills, and tools. They rest on the shoulders of people like Francis Bacon, Walter Shewhart, W. Edwards Deming and, John Boyd. John Boyd was a fighter ace, the rest were not. Yet, the legacy of these men have an unmistakable thread that many of us learned about in Junior High School (now called something less cool, a Middle School … sounds like a Navel Academy to me..).  It started out as The Scientific Method, and then became the Shewhart Cycle, the Deming Wheel, and John Boyd translated it into the OODA Loop.

While the OODA Loop may sound like a kid’s breakfast cereal, it is far more super powerful than that. It does turn great pilots into super ones. Its application can turn good-to-great performers (individuals or organizations) into super ones. Bacon through Deming taught us to have a methodology designed to create new knowledge and with that knowledge move performance forward with fact based improvements. Virtually every improvement formula today has those principles at their core. Good stuff. Boyd supercharged the principle and added agility, real time agility, and that principle revolutionized how fighter pilots win life and death encounters. I am going to leave the OODA Loop here as live bait for us who actually are curious. There are many sources that are rich in insight and details. Among my list of must-reads is Robert Coram’s book, “Boyd, the Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War.” This book is for leaders and they need not be in uniform to benefit greatly. Boyd was a real hero who went against the tide of inbred thought and truly changed the world.

Boyd taught people who were in split-second decision situations how to learn from competitors, do so very quickly, make changes in performance and succeed. I want to repeat that his lessons were about “doing it on the fly”, literally. It worked for them and it works now for us. His methods are part of core curriculum, many owe their lives to it, and many more have lost theirs from it. This is about our enterprises as much as it is about Top Guns. The Top Guns are living proof that change is not hard when the alternatives are ugly. Business competition has evolved from traditional trench warfare with lots of repetitive processes and predictability to synchronized dog fights. In synchronized dogfights we must get out collective acts together and individually perform with agility to succeed. That means that success today is different than yesterday and will change again by tomorrow for the quick of wit and quick of foot. Today, agile beats big, and agile means change.

• Is learning important in our enterprises?
• Are there consequences when we don’t learn? Are there rewards when we do?
• Do we have a way of measuring our rate of applied learning?
• Can we tell if we are decaying in capability?
• Do we have rules that restrict learning and adaptability?
• How often do we hear, “Oh no, we can’t do that! It takes months to get permission to try that…?”
• Do we believe in luck, or do we create it with preparation?

It’s time for breakfast. I’m having a bowl of OODA Loops, a true Breakfast of Champions. Want some?