Did Naval Aviators Influence Boyd's Thinking?

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The myths are seductive: a Top Gun fighter pilot invents the OODA loop from the cockpit of his F-86 and spends the rest of his life proving it. The truth is better—and far more useful. We sit down with Ian Brown to explore Snowmobiles and Grand Ideals, a new Marine Corps University Press publication that explores John Boyd’s recorded presentations and pairs them with contextual essays by Frans P. B. Osinga. For the first time, you can hear Boyd’s voice on the page: the questions he fields, the slides he barely touches, the ones he can’t leave alone, and the jokes that make the hard parts stick.

What emerges is a living flow. Orientation—not raw speed—sits at the center. Surprise is an outcome, not a lever. Implicit guidance and trust, not slogans, generate tempo. We trace Boyd’s ideas from Destruction and Creation through Patterns of Conflict, Organic Design for Command and Control, The Strategic Game of Interaction and Isolation, and The Conceptual Spiral, showing how the 1995 OODA sketch lands late as a synthesis, not a starting point. Along the way we connect flow and team science to cohesive action, revisit Vietnam’s CAP program to understand tempo, and dig into narrative, messaging, and the danger when words don’t match deeds in a world where every person is a sensor.

This is Boyd without the folklore—no shortcuts, no decontextualized slides—just primary sources, carefully transcribed and annotated so leaders in business, education, policy, and the military can apply the real mechanics: build better world models, test them against reality, and keep them provisional. If you’ve ever been told to “go faster,” this conversation explains why you should get oriented first. Listen, share with a friend who cares about natural intelligence and if it challenges your priors, leave a review and tell us what changed.

Ian Brown on LinkedIn

MCUP Snowmobiles and Grand Ideals

NWO Intro with Boyd

March 25, 2025

Flow Learning Lab

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