Ben Ford Profile picture
Aug 13, 2020 3 tweets 1 min read Read on X
Going Live! This Friday @ 1530 GMT - A Commando & Coach Discuss Complexity

Join me & @rhughesjones for a live stream discussion about #leadership, teams & systems for exponentially growing businesses in times of exponential change ⚡️
Up for discussion:

How has leadership changed / need to change for a complex world? #VUCA 🌎

Importance of communication & alignment 📣

How high growth businesses scale non-linearly & emergence 🌀
What would you like us to focus the discussion on?

Complexity Leadership

Communication & Alignment

Non-linearity / Emergence

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More from @commandodev

Jan 11, 2023
Boyd's OODA loop is probably the most valuable mental model I know of for reasoning about the increasing pace of change in the world. But - it's was formulated at a time before much of current complexity science. What's missing?
I want to share some of what I've been looking at to start answering that question, what a view to taking a fresh look at OODA in the context of a couple more decades of progress.
One of the really valuable meta anaysis of Boyd's work and related ideas is Evolutionary Epistemology by Franklin C. Spinney (whose own story is pretty fascinating in it's own right: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_…
Read 28 tweets
May 11, 2021
Organisations are evolutionary processes operating in a fitness landscape.

Military tactics and doctrine has been shaped by the same forces.

This thread is a series of atomic essays exploring the principles, overlaps, and leadership in uncertainty

#ship30for30
Tech leadership needs an UPGRADE. The paradigm of tinkering with a factory to make it more efficient is no longer of service to fast growing tech companies.

Read 10 tweets
Oct 16, 2020
Today's newsletter from @TaylorPearsonMe is excellent. It's about The Farthest Down the Chain Principle.

I haven't heard it called this before, but I do know about the principles under other names: Mission Command or empowered execution.

Important ideas - time for a thread!
Let's start with OODA.

There are 2 or 3 really good intros to OODA out there that don't oversimplify, and Taylor's is one of them. It's also another OODA loop video with insanely low views for its value! (I'll share some more later on).

The OODA loop was the culmination of Boyd's synthesis of millennia of military strategy and scientific principles. It truly contains multitudes, and if you're operating in an kind of complex environment, it's required knowledge.

Previous thread here:
Read 14 tweets
Oct 15, 2020
Potentially unpopular opinion on the tech industry.

We're already good enough at doing.

#devops, #nocode, #agile are all mainly focused on building things better and faster.

That's not the bottleneck anymore. We should switch our focus to what comes before and after

\1
What comes before?

Context and Situation - WHY are we doing this?

and after?

Learning and Improvement - how are we going to get better over time?

\2
Agile practices were born into a time where building and shipping was a lot harder and more time consuming than it is now. The tech landscape also moved much slower.

A couple of hours every two weeks is no longer the right balance between execution and reflection.

\3
Read 7 tweets
Oct 15, 2020
I've been researching, reading and practising on building better teams in tech start ups for ages.

One thing that's come up time and again (with increasing frequency recently) is navigating dichotomy and paradox.

So I'm going to dig into some of these phenomena. \1
I don't have any simple answers, but I do have an unusual perspective from which I hope to throw a different light.

I've been in tech for ~15 years and I've discovered some incredibly relevant ideas and doctrine from the military through research. \2 Image
The journey I've been on has been borne out of the pain of trying to lead technologists in chaotic start up environments.

It's lead me to re-discover things I never realised I learned from my military service.

In fact I think this stuff is so important, I made a course! \3
Read 10 tweets
Sep 24, 2020
I got a @onepeloton 3 weeks ago. Since then I've used it almost every day, and seen some pretty startling results.

I've lost nearly 5kg (not been drinking this month too) and my avg power output today over 45 mins was almost equal to a 20 min max effort in wk 1 🤯

Takeaways: Image
I am just a complex systems like any other. I want to pull out a few observation that I think apply to intervening in any system.
1) Make change easy and engaging.

I hate running. Even in the Royal Marines when I got relatively decent at it, I never really enjoyed it. Trying to take up a running habit has been a bust!

OTOH the whole experience of using the bike draws me in. Image
Read 8 tweets

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