A pilot reads a mid-air collision before doing any math. The aircraft that demands everything holds a constant line of sight, fixed in the canopy while it grows.
John Flach is a cognitive systems engineer, and he first joined us in Episode 56. He came back to follow one idea from James Gibson’s ecological optics and Wolfgang Langewiesche’s Stick and Rudder into how leaders decide on Wall Street and in elite sport. John says the information is already out there. In the cockpit the environment hands it to you as optic flow. In business and sport the information is just as real and poorly specified.
So, in John’s account, a leader’s work is to build the optical flow field that does not exist yet. That is ecological interface design. He traces it from safety displays after Three Mile Island to landing displays that let a pilot see total energy without guessing from speed and altitude.
Experts and constraints
We cover Gary Klein and naturalistic decision making, including the Scud missile story and the firefighter who could not explain what he knew. John lays out three classes of constraints (affording, specifying and satisfying) and connects them to the constraints-led approach, which gives coaches language for designing practice. John also covers human-machine teaming, and how to make an AI’s computations visible to the people working with it. He walks through Jens Rasmussen’s decision ladder as a non-linear picture of the same loop Boyd was drawing.
The same path
Orientation sits at the center of Boyd’s real OODA loop, and John reframes what orientation is. He says the OODA loop was never a race to act faster than the other side. He also tells his own reorientation. Once he stopped believing the caricature of the OODA loop, he found Boyd walking the same path as Gibson, Rasmussen and William James. We close on after action reviews, command and intent, and the low-energy approach the best organizations run on.
What dashboard would let your people see what your experts see?
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Written by Ponch Rivera with AI assistance in production. The full conversation is in the player below.