In 1992, John Boyd released his last major presentation, Conceptual Spiral. Coming in at 38 slides and just shy of 3,000 words, it is roughly 10 times the size of his next and final presentation, The Essence of Winning and Losing (TEoWL).
While his presentations through 1987 concern armed conflict, Conceptual Spiral displays 18 “outstanding contributions” to science, from Sir Isaac Newton to Chaitin and Bennett (1985), and similarly 39 from engineering.
In trying to understand Conceptual Spiral, it is important to keep in mind that although the slides can be read as a stand-alone document, Boyd generally did not give out hard copies to people who hadn’t sat through the presentation. Many of the slides are complex and present challenges to figuring out what Boyd intended. Fortunately there is a complete recording of Boyd giving Conceptual Spiral to an audience at Air University as part of an Air Force project, SPACECAST 2020 . The folks at AGLX have captured this presentation and transcribed it into written form, with Boyd’s slides embedded, which you can download as a PDF from their site. We also did a podcast on Conceptual Spiral.
I was heavily involved in Conceptual Spiral. Boyd would call and go over alternative phrasings for the various slides, asking what made the most sense, which alternatives read better, and so on. Even with this, I got a lot out of the transcript.
For example, you will notice that Boyd is still describing the OODA “loop” as a real, sequential loop. If, however, you read the transcript carefully, you can detect that his concept of the “loop” is showing the first glimmers of change. He is beginning to realize that the OODA loop he talks about here (he doesn’t use the term “OODA loop” in the text of Conceptual Spiral itself) is incomplete. As he concluded as far back as “Destruction and Creation” (1976), all theories for describing reality must be incomplete, so this fact came as no surprise to him. He takes a step in remedying this in his next briefing, The Essence of Winning and Losing.
This realization, though, does not invalidate the conclusions of Conceptual Spiral. The loops of Conceptual Spiral are the engines that power the OODA “loop” sketch of TEoWL because, as Boyd explains in Conceptual Spiral, they not only “change reality through novelty,” they are also what changes our orientations to correspond with that dynamic reality. As he makes explicit on the first slide of TEOWL, their operation also allows us to create and employ the implicit guidance and control feeds of the “loop.”
If your organization does not continuously generate new product ideas and new strategies, as well as improving the processes for introducing them to the external world, every passing day leaves you more open to competitors who will.
Even if you have read the text of Conceptual Spiral and even if you have heard Boyd give the presentation, studying the transcript will repay your investment in time.
[Be sure and check out the Q&A section at the end. Although the recording did not capture the questions themselves, you’ll be able to infer their gist, and Boyd’s answers are clear.]