ABSTRACT
This chapter presents Boyd’s other five briefings. These can be considered an exercise in exploration and refinement of ideas presented in the essay and Patterns of Conflict. In the presentation titled Organic Design for Command and Control Boyd continues on the arguments he laid out in Patterns, but now focusing on the implicit arrangements that permit cooperation in complex, competitive, fastmoving situations. The Strategic Game of ? and ? emphasizes the mental twists and turns we undertake to surface appropriate schemes or designs for realizing our aims or purposes. It aims to uncover even more fundamental abstract dynamics than he has presented in Patterns. In Revelation Boyd makes visible the metaphorical message that flows from the Discourse. It is a restatement of the message of Destruction and Creation, which again he explores in detail and in less philosophical terms in The Conceptual Spiral. In the final presentation, The Essence of Winning and Losing, Boyd synthesizes for the last time in even more condensed form the core messages in a coherent comprehensive framework. In just a few pages and a graphic rendering of the OODA loop, he manages to merge Polanyi, Kuhn, Popper, Gell-Mann, Sun Tzu and Liddell Hart.
