February 2015 - Leapfroglog

John Boyd for designers

The first time I came across military strategist John Boyd’s ideas was probably through Venkatesh Rao’s writing. For example, I remember enjoying Be Somebody or Do Something.

Boyd was clearly a contrarian person. I tend to have a soft spot for such figures so I read a highly entertaining biography by Roger Coram. Getting more interested in his theories I then read an application of Boyd’s ideas to business by Chet Richards. Still not satisfied, I decided to finally buckle down and read the comprehensive survey of his martial and scientific influences plus transcripts of all his briefings by Frans Osinga.

It’s been a hugely enjoyable and rewarding intellectual trip. I feel like Boyd has given me some pretty sharp new tools-to-think-with. From his background you might think these tools are limited to warfare. But in fact they can be applied much more broadly, to any field in which we need to make decisions under uncertain circumstances.

As we go about our daily lives we are actually always dealing with this dynamic. But the stakes are usually low, so we mostly don’t really care about having a thorough understanding of how to do what we want to do. In warfare the stakes are obviously unusually high, so it makes sense for some of the most articulate thinking on the subject to emerge from it.

As a designer I have always been interested in how my profession makes decisions. Designers usually deal with high levels of uncertainty too. Although lives are rarely at stake, the continued viability of businesses and quality of peoples lives usually are, at least in some way. Furthermore, there is always a leap of faith involved with any design decision. When we suggest a path forward with our sketches and prototypes, and we choose to proceed to development, we can never be entirely sure if our intended outcomes will pan out as we had hoped.

This uncertainty has always been present in any design act, but an argument could be made that technology has increased the amount of uncertainty in our world.

The way I see it, the methods of user centred design, interaction design, user experience, etc are all attempts to “deal with” uncertainty in various ways. The same can be said for the techniques of agile software development.

These methods can be divided into roughly two categories, which more or less correspond to the upper two quadrants of this two-by-two by Venkatesh. Borrowing the diagram’s labels, one is called Spore. It is risk-averse and focuses on sustainability. The other is called Hydra and it is risk-savvy and about anti-fragility. Spore tries to limit the negative consequences of unexpected events, and Hydra tries to maximise their positive consequences.

An example of a Spore-like design move would be to insist on thorough user research at the start of a project. We expend significant resources to diminish the amount of unknowns about our target audience. An example of a Hydra-like design move is the kind of playtesting employed by many game designers. We leave open the possibility of surprising acts from our target audience and hope to subsequently use those as the basis for new design directions.

It is interesting to note that these upper two quadrants are strategies for dealing with uncertainty based on synthesis. The other two rely on analysis. We typically associate synthesis with creativity and by extension with design. But as Boyd frequently points out, invention requires both analysis and synthesis, which he liked to call destruction and creation. When I reflect on my own way of working, particularly in the early stages of a project, the so-called fuzzy front end, I too rely on a cycle of destruction and creation to make progress.

I do not see one of the two approaches, Spore or Hydra, as inherently superior. But my personal preference is most definitely the Hydra approach. I think this is because a risk-savvy stance is most helpful when trying to invent new things, and when trying to design for play and playfulness.

The main thing I learned from Boyd for my own design practice is to be aware of uncertainty in the first place, and to know how to deal with it in an agile way. You might not be willing to do all the reading I did, but I would recommend to at least peruse the one long-form essay Boyd wrote, titled Destruction and Creation (PDF), about how to be creative and decisive in the face of uncertainty.

A Battlefield of Disorder

In the first post of this year I started out with a bit of video by Adam Curtis, which mentions Russia’s use of “nonlinear war” to create confusion in its enemies. I said it reminded me of the ideas of John Boyd, because he talks about mismatches a lot: The importance of minimising mismatches between your perception of external reality and its actual nature, and maximising same for your enemies.

After writing that post, Alper shared an article criticising Adam Curtis. In it, Dan Hancox says Curtis imposes his (overly simplistic) world view on us, while dressing it up as revealing journalism. Along the way he mentions this LRB article by James Meek on the British campaign in Afghanistan’s Helmand region. It makes for an intriguing read. To mention two things:

Meek talks about how there was a mismatch (my words, not his) between the concepts that made up the British doctrine, and the nature of the reality they encountered. For example, they were unable to account for a large part of the population resisting them.
Meek also talks about the British army’s inability to learn in peacetime. There seems to be a lack of interest for intellectual analysis and the development of new ideas.

The same day I finished reading Meek I watched Restrepo, a documentary about a US platoon in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley. One of the things that stood out for me was the apparent mismatch (again, my words) between how the US forces we follow in the doc conceptualise their opponent, and what we know about their true nature. They often talk about Al-Qaeda as if it is some well-organised army mirroring their own, when as with British in the Helmand, we can see that more often than not they are being resisted (while sometimes simultaneously being exploited) by a local populace who does not consider them bringers of freedom and prosperity.

The feeling crept up on me that part of what is going on with those US soldiers may also be wilful ignorance, because for them that almost seems the only way to be able to keep fighting. (They go home broken men regardless though, it is terrible to see the change in them wrought by such violence.)

All the same, conceiving of your opponent as a well-ordered force which can at some point be decisively defeated, plays into the enemy’s hands. It also misunderstands the nature of contemporary warfare, which isn’t a contest of technology, but a war of ideas. This is also what is mentioned in Curtis’s film, when he talks about Surkov’s nonlinear war.

I later dug up a Foreign Policy article which delves even deeper into the nature of Russia’s approach to warfare. Reading it, a picture emerges that the Kremlin may very well understand nonwestern perspectives on the current world order better than the west does, which they leverage to their benefit. Or, if this understanding is present in the west, then the Russians are simply better able at acting in accordance with it.

Peter Pomerantsev, the article’s author, says we can compare the Kremlin’s view of globalisation as a sort of corporate raiding, “the ultra-violent, post-Soviet version of corporate takeovers.” Even if Russia is weak, technologically speaking, through nonlinear war it can leverage its relative weakness. And if we think Russia is isolated, we might be too eager to stick to our own view of globalisation as (again) a liberating influence which brings prosperity to less developed nations. According to Pomerantsev, BRIC countries see the “global village” as a rigged game (justifiably so, I would add), thus they have no issues with Russia not playing by the (that is to say the west’s) rules.

In short, Russia seems to have a more sophisticated grasp of contemporary warfare as a war of ideas than the west does.

Circling back to Boyd, in the final section of Osinga’s book on the Mad Major he refers to a 1989 article by Bill Lind, one of Boyd’s associates, which talks about idea-driven fourth-generation warfare. Its practitioners wage protracted asymmetric war. For these actors it is a political, not a military struggle.

Lind says the battlefield has shifted from one of order, to a battlefield of disorder. But western military organisations are still organised on first-generation principles, operating in an orderly fashion, in stead of being structured so that they can deal with and leverage disorder.

Osinga also talks about Van Creveld, who makes the point that for these 4GW practitioners, war is an end, not a means. Western rules do not apply to their conception of the struggle. War does not serve a policy, it is policy. In addition, war is not fought in the technological dimension but in the moral dimension.

All of this leaves me even more conflicted about contemporary warfare than I already was. (And let me say here that my interest in the subject comes not from bloodlust but an almost naive desire for world peace, or at least an ever-increasing diminishment of suffering. But I try to face reality regardless.) Perhaps one of the most troubling implications is that for us to have a chance at “winning”, we need to abandon our old rules of conduct.

This is the type of essentially illegal war being engaged in by the US, as documented in Dirty Wars. I was and still am appalled by the practices of remote warfare described therein. But having read all of the above it now also makes a perverse kind of sense. If you’re at war with non-state actors, you are at a severe disadvantage if you must adhere to international laws and the sovereignty of states.

The alternative—if we accept that for us war is a means towards an end but for our adversaries war is an end in itself—is to exercise a much larger amount of restraint as nations, even in the face of all manner of terrorism, than we ever have before. Sometimes Obama’s drone program is framed as this more restrained, controlled response to terror, but I can’t help but think that any kind of violent response plays into our enemy’s hands, as today’s drone strikes clearly do.

And anyway, remote warfare misses the point about the shift from technology to ideas: We’ll never “win” if we don’t start to make convincing arguments about the morality (but not moral supremacy) of our way of life to those populations effectively being held hostage by those actors benefiting from perpetual war.

Because, if we hope to win by abandoning things that made us who we are (the rule of law, democracy, economic and social justice) in many ways we are already defeated.

Adams Systems, an addendum

So after the previous post, Alper asked for a concrete example of the loop, and Boris asked for a drawing of it. I figured both would be useful exercises to see if the Adams Systems idea holds any water. (Yes, I’ve decided to name these intrinsically motivated systems of decision and action after Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert.)

A Diagram…

Yes it’s messy and maybe illegible in places but I do think this shows two important things: One is making a conscious effort to reflect on action outcomes and in particular to make intrinsic outcomes (more) apparent to yourself. The other is to adjust actions based on the perceived odds of expected and unexpected outcomes happening.

… And an Example.

OK. Let’s say we are interested in blogging. The intrinsic motivation for this is, we enjoy the process of articulating our thinking, and processing ideas that we’ve encountered elsewhere. An (arguably extrinsic) motivation might be that we get recognised by others for our ability to come up with new ideas.

One desired outcome of the blogging activity would be posts, which we produce at some frequency, and which make sense and are interesting to read, and which take ideas from others and recombine parts of them into interesting new ones. Such outcomes would satisfy our intrinsic motivation to blog.

An additional outcome might include questions, comments and encouraging words from readers, which would satisfy our extrinsic motivation for recognition. However, this particular outcome is much more out of our control than the previous one.

Increasing the odds of outcome number one could be done by ensuring there is time for the occasional blogging to happen. It would also help to keep track of things we read, and to record interesting quotes that we might want to use in future posts. We might in addition set a low bar for what qualifies as a blog post, and to force ourselves to write in one go. All of these things make it easier for the writing to happen in the first place. The appearance of a blog post satisfies our intrinsic motivation, and thus increases the likelihood of us settling down to write another one at a later point in time.

Outcome number two is harder to control. Increasing the odds of this happening might include deliberately picking subject matter which is popular or controversial. It might also include formatting our posts in such a way that they read easily and invite a response. The danger of doing these things is readily apparent, because they can easily conflict with the things we need to do to blog regularly, such as setting a low bar.

It would therefore be advisable to put more effort in making Outcome One apparent to ourselves, and to not obsess too much over Outcome Two. Sheer volume in posts also increases the odds of reader response, after all. But if we start obsessing over readers statistics and comment counts, we might lose sight of the things we wrote in the first place. However, by re-reading old posts we remind ourselves of our past thinking, which serves to bolster our confidence in staying the course.

…

So two addenda to the Adams System idea. I think I’ll leave it at this for now.