Science, Strategy and War: The Strategic Theory of John Boyd (Strategy and History)

144 See, of the books on management in his bibliography, in particular Masaaki Imai, Kaizen, The Key to Japan’s Competitive Success (1986), and also William Ouchi, Theory Z (1981), Rafael Aguayo, Dr. Deming (1990) and Richard Tanner Pascale and Anthony Athos, The Art of Japanse Management (1981).

145 This is adapted from David A. Garwin, Learning in Action, Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2000, p. 10.

146 Henry Mintzberg, Joseph Lampel and Bruce Ahlstrand, Strategy Safari, New York: The Free Press, 1998, p. 229.

147 Garwin, op. cit., p. 9.

148 Chris Argyris and Donald Schon, Organizational Learning: A Theory of Action Perspective, Reading, MAs: Addison-Wesley, 1978, pp. 38–9, 143, 145.

149 Garwin, op. cit., pp. 28–43.

150 Adapted from J. Edward Russo & Paul J.H. Schoemaker, Winning Decisions, New York: Doubleday, 2002, pp. 227–8.

151 Capra (1991), op. cit., pp. 328–33.

152 Piaget (1971), op. cit., p. 34.

153 Boyd, Patterns of Conflict, p. 144.

154 Boyd, ‘Strategic Game of ? & ?’, p. 28.

155 Boyd, Organic Design, p. 20. See also ‘Strategic Game of ? & ?’, p. 41.

156 Boyd, Patterns of Conflict, p. 184. Note how Boyd uses the Clausewitzian concept of friction not in the mechanical sense, as Clausewitz did, but in the thermo-dynamical sense, indicating that for Boyd friction refers to disorder.

157 Ibid., pp. 12–13.

158 Destruction and Creation, p. 3.

159 ‘Organic Design for Command and Control’, p. 13.

160 Ibid., p. 16. Underlining in original.

161 Ibid., p. 15.

162 Ibid., p. 18.

163 ‘Strategic Game of ? & ?’, p. 10.

164 Ibid., p. 45.

165 Ibid., p. 58.

4 Completing the shift

1 James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science, New York: Viking Penguin, 1987, p. 304.

2 Jeremy Rifkin, Time Wars, The Primary Conflict in Human History, New York: Henry Holt & Co, 1987, p. 185.

3 ‘Organic Design for Command and Control’, p. 20.

4 This list was provided by Hammond.

5 Adapted from Eric B. Dent, ‘Complexity Science: A Worldview Shift’, Emergence, Vol. 1, issue 4 (1999), p. 8.

6 Fritjof Capra, The Web of Life, A New Understanding of Living Systems, New York: Doubleday, 1997, p. 85.

7 Ibid., pp. 86–9.

8 Ilya Prigogine and Isabella Stengers, Order Out of Chaos, London: Bantam, 1984, p. 287.

9 Capra, op. cit., p. 180.

10 Boyd, Strategic Game, p. 18. On page 19 Boyd included a section from Looking Glass Universe by John Briggs and David Peat which once more describes Pri-gogine’s concept of dissipative structures.

11 John Horgan, The End of Science, New York: Broadway Books, 1996, p. 182.

12 See Glenn E. James, Chaos Theory: The Essentials for Military Applications, Newport, RI: Naval War College Press, 1995, for a good concise description.

13 Capra, op. cit., p. 123.

14 Murray Gell-Mann, The Quark and the Jaguar, Adventures in the Simple and the Complex, New York: Freeman & Company, 1994, p. 26.

15 This description is based primarily on Prigogine and Stengers, op. cit., Chapter V.

16 Several of the books Boyd read use this illustration. See for instance Coveney and Highfield (1991), p. 166; John Briggs and F. David Peat, Turbulent Mirror, An Illustrated Guide to Chaos Theory and the Science of Wholeness, New York: Harper & Row, 1989, p. 143; and Ian Stewart, Does God Play Dice?, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989, p. 200.

17 Jong Heon Byeon, ‘Non-Equilibrium Thermodynamic Approach to the Change in Political Systems’, Systems Research and Behavioral Science, 16, (1999), pp. 286–90. See also Kenyon B. Green, ‘Field Theoretic Framework for the Interpretation of the Evolution, Instability, Structural Change, and Management of Complex Systems’, in L. Douglas Kiel and Euel Eliot (eds), Chaos Theory in the Social Sciences, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997.

18 Capra, op. cit., p. 183.

19 G. Nicolis, Introduction to Non-linear Science, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, p. 96.

20 Capra, op. cit., p. 95.

21 Ibid., p. 98.

22 Ibid., p. 267.

23 Ibid., pp. 218–19.

24 Ibid., p. 266.

25 Ibid., p. 220.

26 Gareth Morgan, Images of Organizations, New York: Sage, 1986, pp. 235–40, in particular pp. 239–40. See also Stuart Kauffman, The Origins of Order, Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993, in particular Chapter 1.

27 Capra, op. cit., pp. 265–70.

28 Boyd, Organic Design, p. 16. Note the title of this presentation, which once more indicates Boyd’s frame of reference.

29 In Briggs and Peat, op. cit., Maturana’s ideas are discussed in some length.

30 See Strategic Game, pp. 16–17.

31 Ibid., both on p. 16.

32 Ibid., p. 28.

33 Peter Watson, A Terrible Beauty, The People and Ideas that Shaped the Modern Mind, London: Phoenix Press, p. 747. Watson refers to James Gleick’s Chaos, Making a New Science. See Mitchell Waldrop, Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos, London: Viking, 1993.

34 See for a brief discussion of what complexity science is, also Kurt Richardson and Paul Cilliers, ‘What is Complexity Science? A View from Different Directions’, Emergence, Vol. 3, No. 1 (2001), 5–22.