In this episode, Brian ‘Ponch’ Rivera, a retired Navy captain, entrepreneur, author, and expert in various strategic and operational systems discusses the OODA loop, flow systems, and decision-making in complex environments. Rivera shares insights on applying these theories in both military and business contexts to enhance agility, resilience, and overall performance. The conversation also covers the impact of technology, the importance of recovery and mindfulness, and the future of organizational efficiency.
Episode Highlights:
04:06 Decision Making in Complex Environments
16:03 The OODA Loop Explained
29:42 The Reality of Modern Work
31:10 Agile and Scrum: A Fighter Pilot’s Approach
31:47 Lessons from Boyd and the Toyota Production System
32:13 The Impact of Woke Culture on Business
34:33 The Role of Psychedelics in Therapy
41:26 The Importance of Recovery in High Performance
Brian “Ponch” Rivera is a decorated former Navy TOPGUN and published author who has become a leading expert in business agility, safety, and resilience. Drawing from his extensive background in complex air, space, and cyber operations, as well as leadership lessons from elite military teams, Brian immersed himself in Agile and Lean communities. Mentored by pioneers in Scrum, Lean-Kanban, and other methodologies, he co-created The Flow System and founded AGLX Consulting. Brian’s work extends to safety culture and high-performing teams, influenced by his role on a U.S. Navy team post-2017 mishaps. He holds an MBA, MA, and PMP, speaks globally on leadership, Agile practices, resilience, and more.
Episode Transcript:
00:32
Acta Non Verba is a Latin phrase that means actions, not words. If you wanna know what somebody truly believes, don’t listen to their words, instead observe their actions. I’m Marcus Aurelius Anderson, and my guest today truly embodies that phrase. Brian “Ponch” Rivera on The FLOW System in business and Wall Street, the misconceptions of John Boyd’s OODA Loop, Psychedelics to heal trauma, AGLX, and The No Way Out Podcast is a retired Navy captain.
01:01
entrepreneur, author, and grill dad. His areas of expertise are the OODA loop, flow, options, warfare, agility, lean strategies. His book is called The Flow System, The Evolution of Agile and Lean Agile Thinking in the Age of Complexity, Strength and Gratitude. He is a TEDx speaker. He also is the co-creator of The Flow System. He’s the co-host of the No Way Out podcast, which is with Mark McGrath. And if you haven’t listened to that interview, go check it out. He’s also the co-founder of AGLX Consulting.
01:31
You can learn more about that at aglx.com. And you can follow him on LinkedIn to find out more about what he’s up to. Paunch, thank you for taking the time. This has been a long time coming. I’m excited about this. Now I’m fired up to be here. Thanks for having me here. Yeah, I appreciate you. And we were discussing, I should have just hit record when we first started, frankly, because there was so much good stuff in there already. But this idea of this overlap and understanding the flow system markets.
01:57
coaching, how they all kind of come together. It’s almost like that Miyamoto Masashi idea of once you see it in one area, you see the way in everything. Talk to us a little bit of what that looks like and then how you see it from your perspective. So I wasn’t very familiar with flow growing up. I was in fighter aviation. We had motive flow. We learned a little bit about that. We’re like, that’s kind of cool. I didn’t know anything about that. And if you look up motive flow on online right now, you won’t find a lot on it. But firefighters understand that. Aviators understand that from their training.
02:25
Flow isn’t something I studied. It’s something that we lived and I think you live too. We all do. And it depends on your background. If it’s in coaching, if it’s in sports, if it’s in the markets, if you’re in a prayer, if you’re in the meditation or yoga, everybody has a way to look at flow. And at the end of the day, the way I look at it is when we take something like John Boyd’s observable insight in act loop and put a boundary around it, which you should have, you get a flow system. And.
02:55
That’s a really powerful way to think about things. And it’s what Mark and I have been doing lately is showing folks that when I show you the OODA loop, the wits, we think it’s meant to be delivered. You end up seeing things in one domain that carry over to another domain. And it reduces the energy required for leaders in organizations and people in organizations to create agility, to create resilience, to create safety, to follow the latest DEI initiative, to follow the latest leadership initiative.
03:25
It brings it all together and says, hey, as a holistic organization, when you look at it this way, here’s what you need to know. And now you start developing good practices for your context. And that’s something that we’ve been kicking around lately, but going back to your point about flow, that we can talk about the different types of flow too, from what we learned from the Toyota production system to Mihaly Csikcsemihalyi’s work, to what Steven Kotler is doing with the flow research collective now, which is absolutely fantastic and connects quite well to what we have in the flow system for organizations.
03:53
And I believe in 2025, after we get through this, whatever this looks like in the next six to nine months, Utopia is going to be all about flow. I absolutely agree. And there’s a point in there, cause I want to unpack all these things. You made a great point about how in business or in any organization, decision-making that is rapid and efficient is so key. And I think that there are some organizations that don’t see how much they’re losing or leaving on the table in the process of doing that.
04:20
My squad leader was a former Marine and he always talked about this 70 30 like idea of once I get the plan to this certain point and we’re up to this idea, now we execute and now we’re at this point of no return. But I think a lot of businesses like to spend time money to make it more complex than it needs to be. And you and I know that the plan can look perfect on the board. But once there’s contact, everything goes to hell in a hand basket quickly. So can you kind of expand on that?
04:46
Yeah, so let’s go back to what we learned in the military. I’m going to talk about effects-based operations. And that’s something I learned in about 2005, 2006, when I was at Staff College. And this is after executing on it in combat situations. The idea is you work backwards from the desired effect. And that’s not a bad thing to do, right? So if you can define the effect that you want, then you can work backwards from it and figure out the different approaches that you can use to do it, kinetic, non-kinetic, whatever it may be. You can do these things to create that outcome that you want.
05:16
It works quite well in some environments. It doesn’t work everywhere. And so right now that type of linear thinking, working backwards from the desired end state, doesn’t work in a complex environment. So think about developing a new product for a customer that doesn’t exist yet, right? We don’t know what that looks like. So you can’t define a smart goal, specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-boxed and then work backwards from that. Because in complexity, the relationship between cause and effect is only known in retrospect.
05:44
So here’s a key problem that we bring from the military. A lot of military themed organizations, consultancies, bring that effects-based thinking over to business. And by the way, when, I forget the name of the headquarters that was here in Norfolk, Virginia, led by a mad dog, forget the name of it was, but they got rid of effects-based operations at the strategic level, right? It doesn’t work. And we tried applying that in East Africa when I was a foreign area officer working at Africom.
06:11
doing the same thing and you just can’t define that future end state. You know, how do you get 40% increase in democratic ideals in Kenya? Right. I don’t know, but you can’t, you can’t do that. So closing the gap between a desired future state and where you are today is not how it works. A better way to do it is understand where you are right now. And this goes back to that 70 30 thing is knowing that your map, your strategy is wrong. So you, you develop a map, which is central to John Boyd’s
06:40
orientation, developing an internal model of the external world. And you said you had somebody gone talking about Wardley maps before. That’s what you’re trying to do is develop that map of the external world and execute against it. And by the way, you’re wrong from the minute you start executing and you update your orientation, you update your map as you go, because you’re learning. So this is that type of thinking that I think, you know, people like John Boyd have known for a while and that’s why Simon Wardley picked up on it was.
07:07
No organization has a map. So Simon Wardley came up with the idea of Wardley Maps named after him, where he has the five components of a map. And I’m sorry, I don’t have those memorized right now, but one of them is a anchor movement and, um, I forgot to do three, but anyway, I can bring that up here in a second. So absolutely key 70%. Give me a map or strategy that’s about 70% right. And let’s execute on it and we’ll adapt as we go. That’s what we want. We also create that adaptive capacity.
07:34
inside of the organizations. How do you adapt to a changing environment? And that’s the world that we all came from in the military. No plants are fired, first contact with the enemy or Mike Tyson, everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face. Right? So that type of thinking needs to be instilled in organizations in complex environments. Now, when you’re building a house, there’s some complexity with that, but you can’t come up with a desire at end state and build backwards from that. So it’s contextual, right? Yeah. And this is that true VUCA environment.
08:02
I don’t think people understand also that having evolved an unknown, complex and ambiguous environment that people that are in the organization will unintentionally help create that. So we can have a perfect plan, but it’s executed by imperfect people. And then even if the plan is perfect and the people are executing it perfectly, it’s in an imperfect world. So we can only do so much in the process to get into that point. So like you said, until we take that initiative and the actual step, that’s why I’m always
08:31
We see people that are just paralyzed from analysis saying, well, I need more of this. I need more of that. Listen, if you get to the point where you have 100% of a plan, that thing is already obsolete. Some of the data has changed. The targets moved, the environment’s changed. And I think you and Mark both talked about Jamie Diamond with the JP Morgan component, how they are understanding how important this agility from the OODA loop can be, tell us more about that. Yeah. So after further review, saying something and actually doing it are two different things. So the same doing gap is there. It’s.
09:00
Very possible that it’s a cocktail back-to-the-dapkin conversation that Jamie Dimon is using there to say, hey, we’re using this. And the truth is all organizations are going through John Boyd’s oodledoom right now, whether they know it or not. The whole point of it is to improve the quality of the orientation so you can make better sense of the external environment, make better decisions, and take actions that shape the external world too, right? And going back to that 70-30 conversation we just had.
09:27
So it is very possible that people are looking at this and they’re hearing it from different military themed organizations that say you have a buka and you have the OODA loop and you need to do these things. It just becomes something that you talk about at a cocktail party and it’s a good sound bite. The truth is if you can actually execute on it, if you can dive into it a little bit, you’re going to absolutely crush your competition. And that’s what we had in the military. I don’t know if we really have it right now. We have near pure competitors, pure competitors.
09:55
We had the advantage for a long time with technology and people. Now let’s reverse that. People and technology. We’ve had that for a long time in the military. And you saw that in the Gulf War. You saw that early of the, going back to 2001, 2002, 2003, we had an advantage. But guess what we started to do? We didn’t have a good direction of travel from our leadership. And it’s not our job in the military to actually determine what the state department should be doing. That’s not our jobs in the military. We can break stuff and…
10:23
do that quite well and quite effectively. We’re not nation builders. So I’m kind of getting off the topic here a little bit, but yeah, a lot of neat connections to be made there. And then speaking of the Gulf War, wasn’t Boyd integral to that left hook component as we got in there? Yeah, so I get all these wars mixed up now. So one of the interesting things about my background is I spent some time in an air and space operations center as a map chief and a combat plans division deputy chief. Well, what’s interesting about that is I’m a Navy guy.
10:53
I was active duty Navy when I was doing that. You look back at Chokhanov and you get into John Warden’s work and you get into John Boyd’s work, that’s 100% observable right to side acts. How do we rapidly get in there and create massive mismatches for what we thought was a pretty good competitor back then? How do we do that? Well, in that context, we used Chokhanov, we used our air power to do it. That doesn’t mean we can do the same thing today.
11:22
So context matters, but the idea of using that type of thinking works today, just not the same way we did it 30 years ago and 20 years ago, right? But John Boyd’s work, John Warden’s work, I want to connect a few things here. John Warden was a colonel in the US Air Force that really did a lot of, I’ll say thought leadership in the Air and Space Operations Center on how we actually design that integrated
11:51
I spent a lot of time doing that from a Navy perspective inside an AOC, Air and Space Operations Center, where bringing cyclical operations from our carriers into that space and explaining to Air Force people, because they’re people too, how a carrier actually works and that people have to sleep and you can’t operate 24 hours a day on an aircraft carrier. You can for a short amount of time, but at some point machines break, people break and all that. So the whole point of that is what worked years ago?
12:19
we’re talking the shock and awe isn’t going to work today. But that type of thinking does work and will work. And that is how do you create mismatches for your opponent? And that left hook you brought up there is that type of mismatch. So I think the feint to the Marines and all that that was going on at the time, how do you get them looking over here and then punch them on the left side in Iraq is critical. So yeah, a lot of great lessons from that. But most, I say most military folks don’t know the connection back to the…
12:48
John Boyd’s work and even John Warden’s work there. And that goes perfectly in with, as we see historically, strategies that have been used forever. Bruce Lee has the five ways of attack. He has this idea of the single or simple direct attack, attack by drawing, progressive indirect attack, attack by combination, and then he calls it hand immobilization, but it is very much this idea of violence of action, getting close, overwhelming the enemy in such a way that now their hands are sort of immobilized. And again, it comes back to this idea of
13:18
If we are the ones that are initiating the chaos, it does not surprise us nearly as much as the opponent. So it’s sometimes in our best interest to have that ability to be, again, that surprise unpredictable. And that in itself may be the thing that actually creates the mismatch. Yeah, absolutely. And today we go back 30, 50, 70 years, 100 years. The big thing is the speed that news travels now, right? So now we have to be mindful of that, but that creates a…
13:45
different type of warfare, which is fifth generation warfare, liminal warfare, however you want, whatever you want to call it. What’s essential about that is the idea of John Boyd’s OODA loop and the flow and information flow and all that still stand true even in fifth generation warfare. So moving on from third generation warfare, which was maneuver warfare, and then fourth generation what we saw in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the enemy didn’t necessarily wear the same, we couldn’t tell them apart. So here we are today. The concept still stands true.
14:14
but just the type of warfare has changed. And that’s that information piece, right? So imagine trying to do shock and awe with somebody having access to Twitter today and pointing out that there are four carriers here, three just left that day. We know where all the B1s are. It’s just fun work. But again, that type of thinking, creating those mismatches and going back to your point about Bruce Lee is essential, right? And we can also look at what’s going on today with the wars around the world.
14:43
Are they using an overwhelming force? And the answer is, I don’t think so. They’re kind of sitting on their hands and you’re dragging out a war. And now you start adding drone technology into their UAVs, whatever you want to call them, changes every week, what do you want to call them? But we’re going back to attrition warfare, back to generation one and two warfare, which is not a good thing. Because attrition warfare is, line up all the bodies and let’s start shooting at each other and do it that way. We’re going to do with drones instead. And by the way, what we’re seeing here in the US is,
15:13
Yeah, we need to give them more money so they can go defeat the Putin. But nobody wants to put their, you know, I don’t want to send anybody over there. It doesn’t make any sense to me. But if, if you’re so adamant about fighting this war and why you want to fight it, there’s nothing stopping you from getting on a plane and going over and fight it. So go, go do that. I’ll tell you what I’m not going to do. I’m not going to do that. It doesn’t make any sense to me, right? Unless you’re going to use overwhelming force and you can see things that are happening today in Israel where.
15:39
Again, information warfare is kind of guiding how the Israelis fight. I think that when they’re trying to put people in for war crimes and all that already, and you got protests in the US that you’re like, Hey, do you really understand what you’re doing? So yeah, again, we’re going to go down a political path and I don’t necessarily want to go there, but so many ways to look at this from both a flow and goodly perspective. And back to some of Boyd’s work is, I mean, I could go down that path that you’re talking about as well. But.
16:09
I feel that a lot of people like myself included when I first learned about the OODA loop, it was incomplete. It was they muddied the water to make it seem deep in many ways. So for those that are not familiar with it, could you give us a brief synopsis of what it is and then also correct us in some of the assumptions that we’ve had or that we’ve been taught throughout the years that are obviously not true? At its core, you can think of it as a perception action loop. The way you perceive reality, we can talk about that here in a second and the actions we take on the external world, right? So
16:38
Right now our five senses, we’ll use our eyes right now. Our eyes are our window to the external world. That’s what observation is. It’s a window to the external world. That’s what John Boyd describes it. So you think of observation as your sensory organs, those five sensory organs that we have skin, eyes, ears, nose, mouth, that type of thing. They pick up some type of signal from the external environment and they turn it into a currency and that currency is we call it a feeding forward pattern.
17:06
So these sensory signals go into something, a black box we’ll call it orientation. And that orientation generates a prediction about what’s causing those sensory signals coming in. So this is where it gets kind of interesting, right? The punchline right now is you and I are engaging with each other. Let’s say we’re in the same room. I see you, you see me. What’s happening is we’re making predictions about what’s happening in the room. So we’re experiencing the world top down, inside out. We’re…
17:34
basically creating a hallucination of the external world because we’re not actually experiencing the external world. Our sensory organs are just picking up signals from that and sending it back to our orientation. So that is a basic component, one component of the OODALEU which goes observe, orient, decide, back to observe. Right, so that’s a predictive processing, Bayesian inference thing that’s happening all the time. All of our senses, we’re doing it all the time.
18:02
in teams and organizations, countries as a universe, right? That’s how that works. However, there’s another point here. You and I are thinking about many things right now that we’re not executing on. We’re thinking about tilting our head, maybe I need to look at the camera this way, maybe I need to do that. That counterfactual thought that what if policy or what if scenario that we’re running in our head before we actually execute on it is happening within the OODA loop. It goes from act back to observe, right? So we haven’t done anything yet.
18:32
And the reason we’re doing that is we’re doing that to solicit more information from the external environment. So we can actually create our perception of what’s happening now and start to anticipate what happens next. And then we get into more things in the OODA loop, which include implicit guidance control, which I like to tell this to my girls implicit guidance. Control is when you’re dribbling a basketball with your left hand, do you have to think about it? Right. The right-handed by the way. And.
18:57
There wasn’t time in the past where they had to spend energy thinking about it. So it wasn’t implicit anymore. They’re spending energy trying to do that. So you get the technical skills built up in your body. So your body just does these things, implicit guidance control when you’re playing a sport and that allows you to have more energy, your brain have more energy to see what’s going on in the external environment so you can anticipate what’s coming next. You can, instead of reacting to the environment, you shape the environment. And this is what athletes are doing all the time. So.
19:23
I know we’re not doing any justice to the OODA loop because we’re walking people through it without drawing it out, but it goes your observation, which are your sensory signals or sensory organs, picking up something from the external world, putting into a signal that goes to orientation, which is central to the OODA loop. And we’ll talk about what’s in there in a moment. It creates a prediction or generates a prediction of what’s going on the outside. So we’re predicting what we think we see. And we’re also creating these counterfactuals, what if scenarios as we go along.
19:52
And this is happening in your cells and your neurons, everywhere, it’s a fractal approach, right? So punchline here, it’s not a passive process. The passive process that everybody talks about, a lot of people talk about is, first you observe, then you orient, then you decide, and then you act. That’s a passive process to, when you think about John Boyd’s observant-oriented side of active. It’s actually an active process. We are actively creating these things through our counterfactual thoughts and through soliciting information from the external environment.
20:22
And that’s a big difference. And we start to unpack things in complexity theory, complex adaptive systems, systems thinking, cybernetics, biology, neuroscience. And that’s what makes John Boyd’s, uh, lootal loops are powerful as we can start to connect more and more disciplines to it. It’s so true. And the thing that I was overlooking, I wasn’t focusing on was that second step that you were talking about. What orientation is and who we are. And through you through Mark, through listening to your podcast, the no way out podcast.
20:50
you guys really shine a light on that. And it shows how that alone, because once that orientation is being executed upon through decision and action, we’re not even thinking about it at that point, because that’s who we are. Orientation is as unique as a fingerprint from what I understand, correct? Yeah. So the key components of it are genetics, cultural traditions, and experience. And those happen to be central to trauma. So the way we experience trauma is something known as the multiple hit hypothesis, meaning that…
21:19
You and I could experience the same horrible events. We could watch it or be part of it and it will affect us differently. Why is that? Well, multiple hits, right? I may have multiple hits on me because I saw something like it 20 times over and it may not affect me like it’s gonna affect you. Genetics, I may have something in my past, my family’s past, which prevents me from seeing something like that. Cultural traditions, maybe my culture doesn’t necessarily embrace something. You know what I’m getting? So it’s these things that make up trauma.
21:49
but they happen to be inside of the voids, OODA loop, genetic, heritage, cultural traditions and previous experience. So those things are central to the OODA loop. And then you get into new information. That new information, you’re gonna love this part. The new information coming in is coming from our sensory organs and even more. There’s more than five senses by the way. So we’re picking up on these things. Our brain filters out quite a bit of information that’s out there. And I heard recently that
22:18
Our eyes are only picking up about less than 1% of the information that’s actually out there. And that may or may not be true, but let’s just say it is right now. Our brain has conditioned our eyes that, hey, I don’t need to see this, I don’t need to see that. So it’s filtering out information. The reason behind that is our brain is burning so much energy, 2% of our body weight is burning about 20% to 25% of our energy, it has to find a way to reduce the energy associated with survival.
22:47
to what reduces those things down. I don’t need to see in the IR spectrum as a human, right? Maybe another animal does. I don’t need sonar as a human or radar as a human, whatever you want to call it. So we get these other things going on. But anyway, genetics, cultural traditions, and previous experience are central to that. Previous experience includes things like, what did you eat for lunch, breakfast, how much sleep did you get, education, where did you get your education, are you like me, did you go to a public school, and did that really mess you up?
23:14
So your merge wakes every now and then just based on where you went to school. So all of these things matter and they’re already captured in orientation. Orientation determines how you sense the external world, decide and act. And that’s the most powerful thing about John Boyd’s Oodaloo. And again, Mark and I, and we talked to Chad Richard about this, we understand that Boyd’s Oodaloo is not ready for teams right now because there are no genetics on a team, right?
23:45
But there’s other aspects we’re looking at, which goes into initiative, harmony, things like that, agility, other components that go into a team. So that orientation, when we start talking about teams may change, but the OODA loop still stays the same. Yeah. It’s a, it’s a truth that’s undeniable and we see it reproduced. We have seen it reproduced for centuries, especially when we look historically. And back to what you were saying also, we have to have that particular activating system in our brain that filters out all these things that we don’t need. And for those of you that don’t know it.
24:15
If you’ve been in a crowded room and heard your name through all of that noise, that’s because that’s again, that’s what you’re focused on or your wife’s name or your kid’s name or in New York, somebody drops a coin in a busy place on the metal ground, everybody’s going to hear that because that’s what we’re sort of oriented towards. Having said that, I think that was a great point you brought out about Teams, which is it’s hard to find some genetic component to that for, to understand the orientation, but we may have data.
24:45
try to find those patterns and maybe try to get in front of it in the process as well. Yeah, so with the flow system and having John Turner, the complexity background, a team science background, we’ve had a lot of conversations about this. And I agree with John that orientation, the way it is written in John Boyd’s OODA loop is not necessarily ideal for a team. Genetic, again, it goes back to that genetics. Previous experience, yeah, that’s in there. So that is something that needs to be evolved. And you can do the same thing with a large language model, which is not.
25:15
a full of OODA loop, right? By the way, it’s kind of a closed system when you think about it. So the application of John Boyd’s OODA loop, it kind of scales based off of context. And that’s what we discovered when we put it in the book and compared it with the Kenevan framework, which is place and multiple belongings, context matters. What are the dominant pathways in the OODA loop that are in a clear environment, in a complicated environment, in a complex environment, in a chaotic environment?
25:42
And it’s not to say that that’s the only part of the OODA loop you use, but that’s the dominant side of the OODA loop or pathways you use when you’re in chaos, which is you act, sense, respond. You act in the way we explain in fighter aviation. We don’t sit there and tell people, hey, I think they’re shooting at our nine o’clock, right? By that time, you’re already dead. So you say, brake left, muzzle flash, right, three o’clock. I said nine o’clock, but you get the idea. So there’s a lot of overlap with what Boyd studied, what he drew.
26:11
and what he was thinking. And of course, it’s never going to be complete. And it will never be mastered because, again, we’re always evolving, we’re always changing. And hopefully, like you said, that means that our confirmation biases or cognitive dissonance is hopefully eroding away and not keeping us in that pattern. Let’s build on that. Because in genetics, heuristics or biases are part of our genetics. The reason we see a face in a cloud is because we’re genetically predisposed to see faces that way. We see faces.
26:41
There’s an illusion that we show folks where you take a mask, you know, like a Halloween mask and you spin it around. And as it spins around, it still looks like when you’re looking at the backside of the mask, it still looks like it’s popping out at you. And the reason for that, our brains process that information as a way for the, anytime you see a face, it’s not convex, convictive, but it always looks that way. So heuristics and biases are part of our genetics. They keep you alive, right? You cannot eliminate those things.
27:11
People say we have to eliminate our biases and all that. You’re like, man, I don’t know what planet you’re from, but those things keep us alive. You could be aware of them. And as a team, as an organization, you can use red teaming techniques to mitigate them, but you can’t eliminate them. Yeah, absolutely. And we look at, again, we look at modern technology, as you were saying, like we’re an old species where technology has exceeded and passed us in many ways. So it used to be where…
27:39
thousands of years ago, you and I, if we’re in a tribe, we’re never gonna see more than a couple of hundred, maybe a couple of thousand people in our lifetime. So again, if we see a person or we see a tribe that has a certain physical characteristic, that’s why we say that person looks familiar. Maybe that’s why our gut instinct, when we see that person is like, the answer is to see that person reminds us of this other person, therefore, the epigenetic kicks in and now that instinct says, hey, we need to be a page in this or maybe we’re in danger. Yeah, so we’re pattern matching beings, right? And that goes back to the previous experience.
28:09
We are looking to find ways to reduce the energy we spend on surviving the basics. Right. So that means we’re lazy species. We’re always taking shortcuts. And if you know that this kind of goes back to what you brought up earlier about, we think about the system driving behaviors. If you know you’re lazy, you’re always looking for shortcuts. It’s not, by the way, I don’t mean we’re lazy humans. I mean, it’s, it’s in our DNA trying to figure out how do I not do that. Right.
28:34
So in an organization, and this is true in the organization VKRVIC, and all of them that we come across, and I’ll reflect back on a conversation that Mark and I had with the CEO in the last week, and that is at 11 o’clock in the day in the morning, I walk in and I see my engineers and I notice that they’re on their CAD software drawing things, right? And they have 11 different windows open, right? Meaning that they’re working on seven different drawings at the same time. Well,
29:02
We don’t do that as humans, we can’t context switch, right? So he was asking, what do we have to do? And this comes back to flow. Well, what do you have to do to increase productivity in doing that? Well, there are some interesting numbers out there when it comes to productivity. I’ll throw a few out there, I might be off on some of these numbers, so don’t put me on all this and say, well, Pondsted is 352 when it’s actually 353. 352 times a day you check your iPhone on average. That’s a lot of times, you know, maybe less, maybe more.
29:33
56 times or so, you’ll check your email while you’re at a computer, or maybe it’s 66 times a day, you get interrupted by people too. Again, don’t quote me on these numbers, but it’s a lot. Where am I going with this? There’s about 11 minutes of focus work you get done in a day, 11 minutes of focus work. That’s on average, but people are actually getting done. Technology has created these conditions. And then on top of that, our systems, I want you on five teams.
30:02
Marcus, when you’re working on this, you’re going to be assigned to that team, this team, this team, and that team. Imagine being assigned to five different teams in combat. You can have five different missions and all that, mission sets and things like that, but you can’t be on five different teams at the same time. But yet, in industry, they go, you’re on five teams, you get to dedicate 20% of your time to this, 20% of your time to that, and this. And then while you’re on that 20%, 90% of your time is going to be in meetings where you’re not getting work done, and then you’re context switching all the time. You don’t get any work done.
30:32
What has to happen here is we have to improve how we trigger our individual observe-oriented side of that loop. And that is, how do I get to focused work? And that’s a flow problem. How do I remove these distractions? So I can increase the likelihood that I’m gonna get to a flow state, which means I just get work done. You can’t do that when you’re skipping around all day long. So we’re doing a lot of work on that now to help people understand things like digital hygiene, if you wanna call it that.
31:02
create the conditions in your house, we’re not getting interrupted. How do you create the conditions at work so you can actually get work done as a team? That’s kind of where Agile was trying to go, like things like Scrum. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Scrum, but Scrum was created by a former fighter pilot, Jeff Sutherland, and it’s basically a team lifecycle that says you plan, you brief, you execute, you debrief, you actually do five events, you plan, you do a daily standup.
31:30
You have an execution container. You have a review with a customer, and then you have a retrospective or debrief at the end, right? So you have these five events. That’s just a team life cycle. What they’re trying to do with that is create the conditions to get work done in a container. What’s interesting about that is Jeff points out, Dr. Sutherland points out that the idea comes from a couple of places. The OODA loop of fighter aviation and the Toyota production system. If you dive into Boyd’s work.
32:00
Before he sketched the OODA loop, he studied the Toyota production system. There’s many great lessons from TPS that are fed into the OODA loop. And one of them is control is outside and bottom up. The external environment controls you. So if you wanna talk about some things that happened the last year or so, or year plus, you can think about woke things. And I’m not a big proponent of calling everything woke and all that, but the idea again goes back to a text-based operations. I think the future looks like this.
32:29
I’m going to work backwards from that, and I don’t care about anything that happens around me.” Well, that didn’t work out for Bud Light. That didn’t work out for Target now, did it? So you start to see how these things start to overlap, right? So there’s a lot of great lessons in Boyd’s work and flow and how do you start to reduce the energy required by an organization and its people to train, to build higher performance, to adapt, to build that adaptive capacity to this rapidly changing world.
32:59
companies don’t pick up on this soon, they’re gonna be obsolete. Business life cycles, product life cycles are getting shorter and shorter. So why wouldn’t you spend time to learn about flow, which will ultimately lead you to understanding John Boyd’s observable-oriented side-actually. Yeah, it’s everything. And we see also that it comes back to this idea that we as a species, we are designed to monotask well, complete the task. My definition of multitasking is screwing up a bunch of things and accomplishing none of them.
33:27
And then what else do we have this like residual anxiety? Cause we feel like something’s not complete, but yet we may not even know what the hell it is because we’ve got so much stuff going on. So if everything is a priority, then nothing is a priority. Figure out what’s important. And then like you said, now let’s quit messing around, cut the bullshit and get to what really needs to be done. And I think that’s what your flow system does beautifully. It sounds like. I’m really impressed with the flow research collective’s work on this, on high flow coaching, this is where it gets interesting. I read, I think you’ve had.
33:57
Frogman. Oh, the mindful frogman. John. Yeah. John’s last name. I work with him in a neighborhood reserve. I know him. And what’s interesting is going back to Kotler. I think he’s had Kotler on his show before. So a great podcast about mindfulness from a Navy SEAL’s perspective. And I forgot his partner is on that. Where I learned about Kotler was I think was stealing fire. I think
34:21
John and I were having a conversation, say, Oh, you got to read this book. And I’m like, okay, I read it. And I’m like, well, it’s flow and psychedelics. Yeah. Navy SEALs flows psychedelics and there’s some aviation stuff in there. And that’s where we’re right about that time. When I read that I became exposed to the psychedelic assisted therapy work that’s being done outside of the U S right. And having gone to the university of Colorado, you know, my undergrad, you would think that I would.
34:47
known in every psychedelic in the world, right? Cause I mean, that’s Boulder, planet Boulder. That’s not true. You know, I’m a product of the war on drugs. And what you’d get out of that is being a Catholic boy and living through the war on drugs. All psychedelics are horrible, right? That’s what I knew. What I saw right after reading that book, I think it was 2020, 2021, somewhere in there. So I read the book in like 2018, 2019 was these veterans were going out of country to tackle their PTSD TBI.
35:17
going back to that trauma, you know, genetics, cultural traditions and previous experience, multiple hypotheses in play. What ended up happening is, I’m not going to get into all the specifics about it, but one of my buddies was pretty close to taking himself out of this world, right? And I started to realize it’s happening all around us. So we got him some help, got him down to Tijuana, and I got to see what that actually looks like when a veteran goes through that. It’s mind blowing. And that gave me…
35:45
more awareness about how the brain works through the world of neuroscience. We’re getting into things known as the entropic brain hypothesis and things like that. Well, as a rating these things, there’s a connection to cybernetics and physics and quantum physics, quantum mechanics, neuroscience that John Boyd looked at. I’m like, oh my gosh, I can use the OODA loop to explain how veterans and anybody who’s using a modality, either yoga, mindfulness, breathing, or psychedelics
36:15
relaxes their ego, their implicit guidance control on how they go from orientation back to the observed. There’s a pathway that does that. How they relax that ego, get access to counterfactual thought, which we’ve already talked about, that helps them see the previous experience in a new light, which helps them deal with that trauma. And that’s what’s happening there through that. But where we’re going with this is that the flow system stuff, flow research collective stuff connects more into that. We’re bringing the OODA loop into that space.
36:44
of course, connecting it to the Flow system, which allows us to see an organization from the wellness perspective all the way to the customer, which is absolutely mind blowing. I’d say in 2025, watch out. If you’re not up to speed on FRCs, high flow coaching, and what we do with the Flow system, it’s over for you. If your competitors are following us and doing these things, we’re going to knock your socks out.
37:10
You don’t have to look far to see where this is working right now. You can go to the somebody who’s high performing sports teams, you know, you look at what’s going on in the NBA and NHL, I mean, they’re already doing these things as organizations, bringing it all together as individual human performance, team performance, organization performance, and that’s how they have sustained performance over time. And it’s scalable and it’s something that’s reproducible within the organization. And back to what you’re saying for those that are like, well, I don’t want to go into psilocybin land again.
37:38
You can breathe, you can get outside. There’s all this research that we see now that shows that the hormonal cascade created from detaching from your solar device and just going for a walk and seeing the different textures around you and listening to the outside environment. Those things can do something similar. And whether it be nociception, inhibition, or anything else that’s in that feedback loop, it creates that condition that we’re trying to look for to give you the capacity to really breathe, detach, let your ego go and say,
38:07
Okay, what’s really going on here or frankly like you’re saying what’s really important in the first place? Because so many of these people are chasing something that again even when they get there It’s not going to give them what they need or what they think is supposed to be in the first place Yeah, so I wanted to go back to John the castle the castle breathing. Yeah, I was like, I know that names in there So I’m sorry. I should have said the last name. We both said John. Yeah, we don’t buy in first name basis No, you’re not John. Oh, yeah, John when he started doing the breathing stuff. I’m like, are you kidding me? What are you doing? And then I connected with them in Colorado right after we got back from
38:36
taking my buddy down to Mexico. The conversations were phenomenal, right? So what the special operations community is doing with normalizing, I hate to say normalize, but making access to psychedelics, okay, and we’re not talking about recreational use, let’s be clear about it. We’re talking about therapeutic use with the aid of a doctor, not the let’s go do psilocybin, let’s go do some MDMA and find a toad and go smoke the 5-Meo DMT and.
39:05
That’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about setting all these things that are basically setting off, call it a nuclear weapon in your brain that just creates access to novelty, that you can get done in prayer, you can get done in breathing like I pointed out, but now it gives you the ability to rapidly recover and start doing those things at a higher level, which includes when you meditate, that you can get back to a meditative state rapidly and make wild connections. And I think what we’re seeing
39:34
from the veteran community is that we’re leading the way and saying it’s okay to do these things. Because the alternative is 22 to 44 veterans are taking their lives every day, right? That’s unacceptable. I do believe the future is gonna be a lot about flow for many, many constructs of flow. And back to your point about trauma, TBI for those that don’t know means traumatic brain injury. And so those things are very common in the military, especially in combat arms. But frankly,
40:03
It’s common in a lot of different places here if people are not aware of it. And just again, that, that architectural restructuring of certain parts of the frontal lobe, that changes how you see things, that changes you ethically in some capacity. So now all of a sudden this person that used to be a standup responsible person, now they’re quitting their job and they’re doing drugs and they’re having all this like dangerous behavior. It’s like, Oh, something happened. It’s like, well, it did, but if we’re not able to at least look at what a potential ability to
40:32
rehabilitate or heal, frankly, it’s going to be hard for us to base anything else around that. Yeah, I was shocked to learn about the cocktails, the pharmaceutical cocktails the VA hands out to our veterans, things like benzodiazepines. Like, whoa, those are pretty bad. I mean, they actually increase anxiety. Again, I’m not a doctor. I read about these things and go, that sounds pretty bad. But one thing about complex adaptive systems thinking is we know that there are unintended consequences of trying to influence nature. Let’s put it that way.
41:01
There are things that get put in our body daily, whether it be alcohol that some people do, some people drink alcohol, which is really, really bad for it’s probably the worst thing you put in your body, but it’s okay, it’s normalized on base because you can go to a PX or NEX or whatever you wanna call it. But you can’t smoke, and I’m not a big fan of marijuana and things like that, it doesn’t make any sense to me based on the science, but psychedelics, you can’t, so with Simon, why can’t we do that to recover? And this is really important in a flow cycle where we go from struggle,
41:31
release to flow to recovery. It’s that recovery step that is so critical in everything. So recovery could be thought of as a debrief as a team. How do we recover, learn from this thing that we just went through and improve the future? Well, meditation can be useful for recovery. Slowing down the work and all that is good for too. So how do you recover from multiple combat tours?
41:57
How do you do that? Well, you go to the VA, you tell them you have PTSD and they give you a cocktail of stuff that just raises your anxiety higher and higher, and they end up killing yourself. That’s a horrible approach. And again, I think, I think with the veteran community and through podcasts like this, we can start to communicate to folks that, Hey, that thing you said, observe, orient, decide, act. It actually is useful to understanding how we experience trauma, PTS and PTSD, things like that. And here are things that you can do with it. So again, flow, UTA, all these things matter.
42:27
And for those of you that are saying, well, I’m not a veteran. It’s like, listen, are you an entrepreneur? Are you a founder or a co-founder? Are you working 12 hour days, seven days a week? Then you are literally in that same sort of loop where you’re not allowing- Same cycle. Exactly. So we have Dave Snowden that is our company advisor and he always jokes around about the alcohol caffeine cycle at IBM in the old days, which is true. So think about it as people are doing the alcohol caffeine cycle, alcohol at night, caffeine in the morning. You’re not recovering. You’re not getting good sleep.
42:55
Caffeine’s probably another thing you want to limit when you bring in your body. So Marcus, this is fascinating because over the last several years, I want to go back to who I was. One, I never should have joined the Navy. What I mean by that is I was the last guy anybody would think would ever be in the Navy, right? Put it that way. And it’s for reasons like I’d never expect to go to college. But fast forward to the day where I had all these experiences in the Navy, doing all kinds of awesome stuff. And to where we are today, where my friends are talking about functional medicine and I’m like, okay, I can listen to that. Makes sense.
43:24
Because I understand a little bit about flow systems and how the things that are put in our body matters. It determines how you sense, decide, and act. So if you’re being poisoned, which you can argue that we are by the food we eat and all the stuff that’s going into processed foods, that’s not a good thing. And you can think about when you go to the store, how expensive it is to buy quality food. It’s very expensive. We’re creating these dependencies, which is a…
43:52
To me, it’s fifth generation warfare that’s happening in our bodies right now from the pharmaceutical industry, you know, the food industry. Is it intentional? I don’t know. But guess what they know? They know our orientation. They know how to create an addiction. They’re getting inside everybody’s oodaloo. It is and like you said, whether it’s intentional or not, seeing the data and then responding from that capacity, again, we see that even if it wasn’t intentional initially, it’s definitely not an accident now. It’s definitely not. Well, there’s a…
44:21
And complex adaptive systems thinking, Dave Snowden taught us this, and it’s really easy. You amplify the things you want, dampen the things you don’t. That’s it. You find out, hey, that thing works over there. Let’s do more of that, and let’s do that. And this kind of goes back to capitalism and the dangers of capitalism. I’m a huge capitalist, by the way. I fully believe in it. Me too. But there are dangers with that. And that is when everything is driven by money, how do I make more money by creating a customer? Well, I create an addiction.
44:50
ready for this. What happens if psychedelics take off and all these people that are sick start to improve? Well, we just lost the whole industry. And next thing you know, I’m dead because they’re knocking on my door or I magically, whatever, because I become a threat to the pharmaceutical industry because we point this out. I’ve actually had pharmaceutical industry as a client before. I’m not saying they’re all wrong or all bad. There are great things coming out there, but be careful. Yeah. When I spoke to Lieutenant Colonel Grossman,
45:19
He said that Netflix says that their biggest competition is people sleeping. So again, if you’re looking at just bottom line, and then you hear that statement, it’s like, clearly they don’t have our best interests in mind. If you look at it from that, that statement, at least. Let’s go into this because I’m fine going into this space with you. So I joke around and tell folks when I was doing a lot of agile coaching, coaching software teams, software organizations on the West coast, I realized this rapidly, my job.
45:48
is to teach social skills to socially awkward people. Why would I say that? Okay, so you have people that they make it mad and that’s fine, all right. My experience, again, it’s my experience, the folks that are attracted to that type of work are a little bit more on the spectrum, meaning they’re oodloops, they’re not engaging with, they don’t see the human in us, that’s okay. I’m not saying, by the way, it’s not to say they’re wrong, it’s just that’s what I see happening. Those industries attract certain people.
46:16
And think about like Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg. Why did Mark Zuckerberg create what is now known as Facebook? You didn’t have any friends. We’re running into a new world where technology is creating more socially awkward people. Kids are engaged with their iPads at a young age. And we get into epigenetics, and we talked about genetics a little bit and you brought up epigenetics. And the idea here is that our DNA changes and the external environment can change our internal DNA. Control was outside in bottom up, right? Going back to Ulu.
46:46
that orientation changes as we introduce something that triggers that RNA or DNA, and again, I might get that wrong, to evolve. So that’s happening. We’re creating more socially awkward people. I just heard it on one of our podcasts that testosterone is going down for many reasons. So our world is evolving. Is it right or wrong? I don’t know. I’d say it’s probably not a good pathway that we’re heading, but it’s unbelievable of…
47:13
Where’s this fifth generation warfare actually occurring? It’s in your house every single day. I think also we’re starting to just now see you have kids that are born in 2020 in that time and then developmental psychology for a young one, right? Between zero and five, that’s like such important times. And if what you’re doing is isolating that family, keeping them from people, not letting them see social cues, giving them, like you said, electronics. Now, what is that doing? That’s completely all of their positive serotonin.
47:43
level that they should have is now jacked and backwards. Now you have people that can’t shake hands, won’t look you in the eye, can’t have a conversation. They look away and now to people from different generations it’s like why won’t they look at me? That seems disingenuous. Maybe they’re doing something that’s maybe not in my best interest when in actuality they’re trying to do the best that they can. It’s just that perhaps in that that moment, in that context, it’s hard for them. So these are powerful perspectives to look at. Yeah and then having you know gone through
48:12
What grade were they in there? How old are they now? They’re ninth, nine-year-olds, 10-year-olds from when they went through that. So key developmental years, right? That were here at the house, on their computers. I’m having a lot more concerns about our education system and our government, actually. People are doing things in their best interests. And I heard this again from another executive in the last week that his number one group for new hires are former school teachers. And that tells me that people are running out of that role. And chances are, it’s not the…
48:41
low quality people that are running out of there. It’s probably the high quality ones that are running from that saying, I’m good with this. My wife and I were watching a Saturday Night Live episode, a recent one, and I think one of those kids was about the teachers telling a kid basically, you win, you got it, whatever you want, you win. So our education system is suffering as a result of what we saw in the last five years. I could see it in the kids too. In sports, our girls are heavily involved in AAU basketball. And what we end up seeing are you get some kids that blame the external environment.
49:10
everything they do wrong. So that internal location control is reversed. I try to teach my kids, hey, you own this, right? It’s not the referee or your other player. What’s in your span of control? So I can’t remember the term for it, but people are blaming the external environment. It’s because of that that I’m not doing well in whatever. So yeah, it’s a very concerning time. It really is for us. And I think that’s what brings us all together on podcasts like this is to, hey, we’re not here just to…
49:39
have a conversation, but it’s bringing together different insights to say, we’ve got a course correct. We really do. We do. And this victim mentality is becoming rampant. I’ve noticed that once a person has a victim mentality and it’s everybody else’s fault, now they can’t wait to be victimized by something else or they can’t wait to be offended by something else. And it’s like, at the end of the day, we can only control our thoughts, our beliefs, and our actions. Everything else is external. And if we just make peace with that, that’ll help us remove that energy towards these things that we can’t control.
50:09
focus on what we actually can quadruple down on those things. And again, go into this, the OODA loop, use this flow system, put us in a position to be offensive instead of this defensive posture where now we’re already a step behind. Yeah, as I get older, I start to look back at my time in the military and government and just go, hey, who were we really serving? Was it the American people or the politicians? And that concerns me too. My view is it should be mission focused, which is American people. But I don’t think a lot of leaders
50:39
see it that way right now. I think they’re all ego focused, which is an internal focus, rather than an omission focused, having backwards what you and I just talked about. We want people that are mission focused on the American people. Inflation is raging right now. We got a K-shaped recovery happening. Those that have money are going to make more money. Those that don’t can’t afford quality food, right? So they’re continuing to poison their bodies based off the low quality food that they have access to. So I think now more than ever, it’s important to learn about these concepts.
51:09
I mean, there’s something that we brought up today. You have to learn these things, or we could easily find that we die as a species. Yeah, like you said, you were talking about as we evolve, but in a lot of ways, it’s more of a mutation than an evolution. Yeah, I like it. Yeah, and mutations happen to be one of about John Boyd’s features of the world that we just can’t eliminate, right? Exactly, absolutely. There is no way out. Yeah, there isn’t. Listen, I could talk to you forever, and I look forward to talking to you many other times. Tell us where we can learn more about the flow system.
51:37
AGLX, is that where you would send them and follow you on LinkedIn? Yeah. So all of those things are true. No Way Out podcast. We’re expanding that. I highly recommend that one. It’s amazing. I tell you, it’s the conversations with the people that we have on there. We go somewhat academic on it sometimes and we’ll lose some listeners. And that’s okay with us. We’re like, there’s always, we’re doing it that way. So yeah, No Way Out is great for getting deeper into some of these concepts that we brought up today. aglx.com or
52:04
Global, I think we’re opening up a new place in Australia. That’s what I heard yesterday. That’s what your team tells you. Okay. We’re doing it. Yeah. I’m like, that’s cool. The only time I’ve been to Australia was when I was in the Navy at 2002 or something like that, so maybe I’ll get out there again. So we have Singapore, Australia, New Zealand. We were looking to do something in Europe. I’ll probably put that on hold for a little bit. And then the flow system flow consortium. So flow consortium is the holdings, if you will, of the flow system.
52:32
That is going to grow significantly. You need to keep your eyes out for a TV show that’s coming up in September, October this year. I can’t say which one. It’ll feature the creators of the Flow system, where we talk about quite a few things that you may have heard on today’s episode as well. And then look to 2025 coordinating a Flow conference. I’m not gonna say where yet. We’re still working on that, working on getting some big names out there. I don’t think people wanna hear me talk about this. We gotta get some folks on stage that wanna talk about this stuff.
53:02
really accelerate this type of thinking in 2025. So we’ve got some stuff with Wall Street happening. We’ve got large clients. It’s overwhelming, it really is. It’s fun, but application to markets is unbelievable. And actually right after this call, we’re gonna jump on that work. Yeah, and so if you’re a business, this is where you wanna go to learn some of these things. They can come and do workshops for you. They can do remote coaching. They can do whatever you’d like to do. But I do highly recommend that you jump in now because again,
53:31
as that window shuts, those opportunities get fewer and far between. And as they continue to evolve and grow, this is your opportunity to get in before you miss again, the market with what’s going on. Even the correct decision is wrong if you wait too long. So if you hear this, use the initiative now. Yeah. And I think one of the risks to that is in about a year’s time, two years time, we’ll have a lot of people talking about flow, but they won’t know what they’re talking about. So because like the loop. Yeah. Good point. Absolutely. Punch.
54:00
Thank you, my friend. I appreciate you. Awesome. Appreciate your time, man. Thanks for having me. Thank you for listening to this episode of Acta Non Verba.
