Angus Fletcher studies the brain as a story engine built for action under uncertainty. He is a professor at Ohio State University and the author of Primal Intelligence. He has worked with US Special Operations forces. Mark “Moose” McGrath and I asked him what that view of the brain means for strategy, leadership and John Boyd’s real OODA loop.
Angus treats narrative as the way people chain actions together. A good story breaks an adversary’s plot and writes a better future faster than a rival can. He explains why planning trains the planner. He reads Commander’s Intent through Shakespeare. Intent gives the team the ending and protects their agency.
Exceptional information
Angus says intuition comes from detecting exceptional information, the mismatch that signals a new opportunity. He describes methods that keep orientation supple: working backward from a future, counterfactuals, Red Teaming and honest debriefs. He also explains why optimization makes a plan brittle. Culture and literature widen the range of what a leader can imagine.
Story in the cognitive war
We spend time on cognitive warfare. Angus argues that feeds built on association wear down people’s capacity for narrative, and that truth is the most effective long-term PSYOP. He sees the same pattern in markets, boardrooms and battlefields. The winners hold several workable plots and switch as reality shifts.
Education and leadership
The last part of the conversation covers education, elite institutions, the humanities in leadership, and what business can learn from the way the military learns from failure. I came away convinced that stories are how living systems reorient. Current AI cannot reframe the way people can.
What story will you run next?
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Written by Ponch Rivera with AI assistance in production. The full conversation is in the player below.