As previous blogs have alluded to, the law firms in this country are being liberalised following the production of the clementi report last year and the publication of the white paper prior to government sponsored legislation this year.

Well the first non-legal organisation has set out it's plans - it is the Co-operative Group which is going to take advantage by launching law services to cover easy retail law such as conveyancing, will writing, probate and accident management services. Initially it will work with a law firm panel system, but as soon as the legislation allows it will have lawyers in-house.

As I have previously mentioned outside competitors will look at work that is done by sole practitioners/small firms covering what Mr & Mrs Jones need on a retail basis. This is looking at legal work that can be systemised as they only plan to employ 150 people - the commoditisation of the law in the UK may have started today with future casualties likely to occur.

For the full article click here

Legal Week article

Watch this space for more.....

Apologies for the slight delay - as I've been having a break over the Easter holidays.

I was reading an article in the New York Times recently regarding the problems that female lawyers had in being made up to partnership. Then I was talking to a new colleague Bruce MacEwen who has an active blog covering the economics of law firms. We were chatting last night and I highlighted to him an article in this weeks Economist regarding the rise and rise of womenomics and how law firms need to get a grasp on this.

In the developed economies, girls do better at school than boys, more women achieve university degrees than men and females are developing as the most powerful engine of economic growth. This growth has been aided because of the decline in manufacturing work and the rise of service work.

Traditionally, women have tended not to rise the career ladder or have gone into more vocational and less well paid jobs such as teaching or nursing. however, over the next few years there is likely to become a bulge - where more and more qualified women are pushing up at the 'glass ceiling' and ultimately the pressure will tell and they will take more of the top jobs in law firms. I've always found it a bit foolish when so much money is expended by law firms in developing their staff that they find it cost effective to let a potential high flyer leave or that by deciding to have a family is seen as a potential bar to partnership. I'm sure that law firms would deny this intensely but I have heard it said apocryphally enough to wonder.

In today's knowledge based economies women are very good at team building teams and communicating and mixed teams are research has shown better at problem solving and seeing external threats.

I think that law firms of the future need to continue to develop the rise and rise of the female partner if only to slightly take over the macho culture that does occur at some of our law firms and replace it with a more consensual model which research has shown does bear better and longer lasting fruit.

All organisations have a life span

I read a statistic that most major European companies have a life span of 13 years - in the US it is 40.

Occasionally if we are successful then we always dream that we are on a long running winning streak and like Icarus we fly to close to the sun the wax melts and we plummet to earth.

All companies start of with a dream of an idea and they do tend to to be cash poor and therefore tend to be highly focused on getting that first client before they run out of cash. If they have got their differentiation right and it can be easily communicated to a market that is interested then they tend to survive. and then grows.

However one of the dangers is that as companies mature and grow into middlesecence they do tend to focus less on innovation and can become separated from their customers . their focus tends to shift to internal management rather than the factors that made them a success in the first place.

In an article I've written for MD magazine today, I also talk about decision making in organisations and how people can fall into the status quo trap where faced with a multitude of decisions then the status quo can look like the best decision. Most organisations as they approach middle age tend to become conservative in their outlook and look to avoid risk. however, organisations tend to forget that the environment that made their enterprise successful in the beginning may not be the same in the future.

Eventually the company can become gripped by an anti innovation immune system or group-think approach where new ideas are frowned upon and outsiders especially are resisted.

Then the organisation then starts to begin in breeding and starts only to recruit from within "as only insiders know our company", this then leads to the top management not getting an input of fresh genetic material to help it to learn to develop to meet the changing challenges as marketplaces evolve that can stop the organisation from collapsing in on itself.

There was once a programme on the problems at M& S under Sir Richard Greenbury towards the end of his management at M&S where the store was massaged and the corporate equivalent of a Potemkin village was constructed to hide problems and not to upset him.
.
But as Richard Watson has pointed out

"Perhaps none of this is a bad thing. After all, survival is not compulsory. Perhaps everything (individuals, organisations, markets, countries) need to die -- or at least be threatened with extinction -- so that the cycle of innovation can begin again."

Here are a few tips that he suggests

• Water your roots. Re-discover the entrepreneurial zeal and focus that founded your company in the first place.

• Think about how a start-up would operate in your market. How could you apply this thinking to make your own organisation more resilient?

• Don't just look at what the big guys are doing. Study what the start-ups are doing, especially those on the fringes of your market.

• History repeats itself. Companies and markets tend to operate in cycles, so know where you are and act accordingly.

I won't be writing for a few days as I'm going to my MBA graduation on Tuesday - so normal service will be resumed next
Wednesday.

My apologies as I've been working hard and so haven't done a blog for a couple of days.

When I was starting out working in the Bank, I got to work with one of the best managers, I ever worked with. He was considered a hard man to work for. I got to work with this manager and yes he was a hard man to work through and a number of times he really gave me a hard time for the work I produced. However I realised one truth, he demanded a high standard of work and seemed to know that I was capable of more than I was producing both in terms of volume and intellectually. In the end my work did rise to his standard because he was a tough manager but a fair and consistent one.

So how do you work with them - Rod Kramer in the HBR - outlines some ways of dealing with a manager like that.

Do your homework
If you fail to prepare you prepare to fail. I learnt over time what worked for this manager and looked at his work to get an idea of what he wanted. Also be sure of your information and be prepared to defend your corner and

Call their bluff

An intimidating manager looks for people with inner steel who can make the hard decisions when they need to when under pressure and isn't a straw man.

It does mean that you do have to

Work harder

but some time putting in does show commitment to these managers and finally

Stick around

I was sorry when I left working with that manager and sometimes when faced with a difficult manager we can be tempted to fold our tent and leave the field. But the lesson he taught me was valuable in that it is easy to be mediocre as a manager - but always look at yourself in the mirror and stay committed to excellence at all times.

I also learnt that the biggest danger for a manager is to have people who become yes - men. The Romans had it right when at the hour of a successful generals triumph through the streets of Rome a slave stood in the chariot holding the wreath over his head and reminding the general - remember thou art a mortal man at regular intervals. Every hard manager needs a person providing a critical and dissenting view point to provide a check and balance.


Also the shouts and plaudits of the crowd can make you deaf and so like Julius Caesar on the ides of march you fail to listen to the warning of impending assasination from the enemies that this type of leaders do accumulate over time.

Less occasionally than I like, I get to read the Financial Times for their weekend edition. On the back page there was an article by Harry Eyres who sat in on a masterclass by a piano teacher called Ferenc Rados. Rados was commenting on a technically perfect rendition of a violin sonata by using this analogy.

In the second world war, the German soldiers had very precise and very tight weaponry. The Russian soldiers weaponry was loose. In the Russian winter at -30 degrees - the German guns froze up and the Russians ones worked. He used this to illustrate convex and concave playing. Eyres comments that the 2 players were looking a bit disturbed and felt that they were being asked to unlearn long cherished habits.

Now by coincidence on Friday I finished reading a book that deserves to be a modern classic by John Roberts called "The Modern Firm" and I strongly recommend managers go out and get this book. Roberts mentions the concept of loose and tight coupling in organisation design and mentions the problems that organisations have when they are tightly coupled.

So what is tight coupling? An organisation that is tightly coupled means that if there is change in any aspect of the organisations design or the environment will compromise the performance of an organisation dramatically unless other areas within the organisation can also adjust. If there is an unintended knock to alignment which makes previous choices impossible. Organisations can then find themselves struggling to adapt and even if they do so they may find the change difficult to implement,

He cites the example of Japan and how in the 1980's their organisations were characterised by a web of complementarities of cross shareholdings, culture, national policies to deliver growth and limited shareholder power.

However in the 1990's Japan came up against a technological buffer and (as regular readers of this blog will remember) started to suffer from a slow down in population growth and an aging population. The tight coupling in the meant that Japan has taken nearly 15 years to adjust to the changes.

The opposite of this is a loose coupling in organisational design.

As the design is more flexible and can adjust when changes in the environment mean a change in the organisation can take place without incurring the massive restructuring that may occur in a tight coupling situation.

Loose coupling can mean that it is easier to experiment with changes as different parts of the business can face different challenges and opportunities and timings. However one downside is that a change that works in one part of the organisation may not replicate well in another part of the organisation.

Success for any organisation involves delivering a strategy that is coherent intellectually and fits with it's environment and with the parts that make up the organisation. There isn't one perfect answer and that people within organisations need to understand that managers try to see change as a choice and like a successful trimmer may need to adjust. It is why I believe that an incrementalist approach to strategy is the way forward as the current business environment is too 'chaotic' in terms of the fluidity and consequences of change to allow for a fixed strategy.

Part of the training that all managers need is that of flexibility and the ability to sense their environment around them usiung for example as a basic the easy to understand STEEPLE model (Legal, political, social economic,environment, technological and a new one ethical) as a means of understanding environmental forces, this though is strategy 101 which is for beginners though there are more better and useful models that managers can use.

I've worked in organisations that found it difficult to change because they retained the same people who had got them into the problem in the first place and could not change their paradigm.

Many organisations don't remove managers and staff when a restructuring takes place on the grounds that they need to retain experience and whilst there is some merit in that, you have to ensure that the people retained have the ability to change otherwise you are left in a world of tight coupling when you need a loose and flexible coupling to survive.

This is why especially in public sector organisations, there is the problem in changing because they are still wedded to the tight coupling regime and are not fully exposed to the full winds that invigorate competitive enterprises which don't have the taxpayer as lender of last resort. this may also be what will happen in the legal market when the new reforms come in via the governments white paper

Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise to balance it.

As readers of this blog will remember - in January 2006 I covered the concepts of quiet leadership. Well as the above quote by George Santayana highlights there are always two sides to the coin. So in this blog I'm going to look at the MBI school of management - which is Management by Intimidation and when it has it's place.

Management theorists and commentators have seen some very high profile and abrasive chief executives been toppled from their perch and have commented that the age of abrasion in Management is over.

However, I don't think that they are like the dinosaurs - however there is a place for them especially when the organisation is going through major and scary change - and sometimes we need some tough love to help us get there. There are advantages and disadvantages of having them. I think that they really do come into their own when an organisation is either stagnant or declining and it took a "Simon Cowell' to shake them up and clear the corporate arteries before they had a corporate heart attack. In their world these managers now that time is short, the stakes are the survival of the business and the measures that are required are drastic to break through the corporate nomenklatura that can frustrate any change.

They aren't bullies as such they see or believe that there is a way through the forest and like Alexander the great with the Gordian Knot they tend to be impatient to clear it and don't like the impediments be they structural or human in their way. Roderick Kramer in a recent article contends that these leader have political intelligence and use hard power and intimidation to exploit the anxieties and vulnerabilities they detect. They don't rely on empathy they have a dispassionate, clinical view of people and harness them as resources to be leveraged to achieve the ends that they are required to achieve.

As Richard Nixon once said - "People react to fear not love - they don't teach that in church but it's true" If you read some of the books about the Nixon presidency - it was apparent that to Nixon leadership isn't about being liked and inspiration - it was about achieving tangible results. Of course there is a fine dividing line as too much fear may induce corporate paralysis - too little complacency. the same i would contend was true with Margaret Thatcher.

The next blog will deal with working with a boss like this and where they can go off the rails.

This is not a Pre Valentines day blog, but it was interesting the symmetry.

Yesterday the EU released a paper on the free movement of workers across the continent to evaluate what had happened since the accession of the 10 new countries to the EU.

People may be aware that only Sweden, Ireland and the UK were the only countries that did not put up any/mimimal barriers to the new entrants workers coming into their countries. I'm sure that we can all remember the tabloids response to this in this country - that we would be swamped by Czech gypsies etc etc. Well in France it was the Polish plumber who not only dominated this area but also those who campaigned against the Euro constitution and feared - wait for it the 'ultra liberalism' of the EU - an oxymoronic concept at best.

The restrictions were as follows according to the EU.

When does the decision on whether to keep restrictions have to be made?

Member States have until April 30 2006 to communicate to the Commission whether they wish to retain restrictions. If a Member States chooses not to communicate any proposed restrictions before April 30, 2006, Community law comes into force for that Member State (in other words, no restrictions apply).

How long can restrictions remain in place?
If a State wishes to maintain restrictions on access to its labour market, this will apply for the period from May 2006 to 30 April 2009. Thereafter, they could be renewed for a further, final period of two years, but only if there is evidence that labour flows had disrupted (or were threatening to disrupt) a country's labour market.

The EU is urging countries to relax/remove it's restrictions and Peter Mandelson made a speech recently in which he urged the hold outs to resist the urge to go populist on this. time is also on his side as you can see from above all restrictions must be removed by 1 May 2011. (May day workers holiday!!)

Of course via the Schengen agreement people can travel fairly freely within continental europe and taking a fortress europe concept really is not going to work - just as Canute's exhortation to the tides didn't. People will travel to where they think that they can do the best for themselves and their families - and it is best that they are in the open market rather than going to the 'black market' where they will compete with the official market and undercut by not having to deal with taxes and worker protection.

Mandelson then said that Europe must judge "issues on the basis of transparent economic criteria and not getting carried away by the emotions of economic nationalism and self defence of vested interest."

This form of economic nationalism does seem to be more prevalent in countries that have fairly dirigiste regulated economies such as France and Germany. it is interesting to note that the services directive this week that would liberalise the market became a victim of the Polish plumber as the proposed deal being struck at the moment gives added scope to countries to block new entrants in the service markets.

Of course we also see problems with the bid for Arcelor which seems to being beset with governments getting involved. Of course the French are past masters at this game - anyone remember the furore when it was suggested that Danone which makes yoghurt might be bought by Pepsico. We too have used golden shares to protect our privatised companies from take over - but these seem to be fading in to the sunset in the UK - see the potential bid for BAA by a Spanish company.

Progress does seem to be being made - but it will take some serious mandelsonian machiaveliian machinations to breach the walls of continental Europe protectionist governments by the commission.

An article in the lawyer regarding the possibilities of law firms floating. All the more reason for better managerial training for current and prospective partners.

I'll comment on this later - here is the article:-

">Lawyer Article

Previous readers of this blog will remember that i mentioned the trips of Zheng He who travelled to the shores of Africa and most of Asia mostly in search new alliances and trading routes to bring resources to the Chinese empire

In my study of history, most conflicts have been over the control of and need for resources. If you look at most conflicts most campaigns aim for the control of strategic resources,

I remembered an article in the Economist last year which looked at the travels of the Chinese Leader and published a map which I attach



As we can see from the map the Chinese President has travelled far and wide, often in the pursuit of strategic partnerships with commodity-rich potential suppliers for China's industrial enterprises

To that end he has toured Latin America, Africa, Australia, Canada and Central Asia.

It is especially interesting to note that to some of the resource rich but debt strapped countries these have been accompanied by offers to clear existing debts.

We mentioned the 'great sucking sound' in the earlier blog and maybe that is the hoovering of secure resources to keep the Chinese economy from slowing down.

If we look at the oil market last year there was a major play by China and India for oil assets abroad As their governments became more and more concerned about the need for energy security Asian energy firms snapped up oil and gas everywhere from Ecuador to Canada to Kazakhstan.

A Chinese company made a spectacular (although ultimately unsuccessful) $18.5 billion bid for America's Unocal. however not daunted the same company has just announced a successful $2.25 billion deal for oil and gas assets in Nigeria.

It is also rumoured that the same Chinese firm is now looking to purchase, a Canadian oil firm with assets in Central Asia, for a further $2 billion.

It was interesting to note that the first overseas trip of the new king of Saudi Arabia this month was to China and not to their traditional oldest ally the US .

In 1989 I read a book by the historian Paul Kennedy called

The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500-2000 

 It was one of my favourites and though a little dated it's premise was that most empires collapse when it as at its most hegemonic.

Empires also tend to collapse for other reasons:

A) when the costs of maintaining a defence capability become too much for the economy to bear.

B) They lose the ability to project power anywhere in the globe to be able to maintain access to the resources to keep it's economy going.

C) They also tended to become more isolated and introspective and become more concerned to maintain the status quo rather than having to compete and adapt to meet the changing world around them.

Zheng He in 1436 was barred by imperial edict from constructing seagoing ships by the Ming Emperor as that empire began its slow collapse when it turned its back on the world. It lost access to new ideas and potential new markets and limited its trade routes to mostly internal markets.

Do we learn the lessons of history?

The 21st century will be a different place and different shape geopolitically than it was as the slow decline of the 1945 settlement takes place. There will be new alignments which will be uncomfortable to us in the western world especially in the sclerotic European social economic market.

I was walking in Sainsbury's yesterday and saw a cheap very simple DVD player for £25.00. If we as consumers want a DVD player that cheap then there are consequences as there is little chance that it could be built in the UK without making a loss. I understand, that it is the lower costs of Chinese production that is keeping prices down and with it inflation.

However, there are opportunities for us in the UK as we do tend to be more open minded about keeping our borders open and are better than most at assimilating. I think that it is by being open that we will survive, but it is important that we educate our children that education doesn't stop at 16, it really is something that you have to do every few years or so in order to ride the surf waves of economic change

If we don't, then in 20 to 30 years will the UK be nothing more than a giant theme park for visitors from Asia to visit to see our heritage sites and will we be a living testament to one of Shelley's best poems about Ozymandias which if we do not adapt could be an epitaph not a sonnet.

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said:—Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

The rise of the BRIC's was commented on by Jim Neill at Goldman Sachs but I do remember reading an article by CK Prahalad who highlighted the rise of the new market opportunities to the (to our concept) poor and rising middle class of the BRIC's. (I will re read the article and post a blog in due course) They will want the services that we want such as cars and demand and this opens the opportunity to a market in the BRIC's of about 2.7 bn people

The competition is going to be relentless because the BRIC's are just the fore runner as other poor countries say in Africa see the success of these 4 countries an copy their examples to grab a share of the global economic pie.

Ross Perot in the 1992 US election continually fulminated about NAFTA and said the great sucking sound you are hearing is your job going to Mexico. If he was campaigning today would he substitute a BRIC for Mexico.

The next bit of this blog will be about BRIC's and the lessons of History.

In this Morning's Times newspaper 26/01/06

My own personal comment on this is that I can remember when studying economic geography in the 70's India and china were viewed as economic basket cases and seemed trapped behind inflexible command and control economies where the bureaucrat in Beijing/New Delhi knew best showed promise but no delivery.

Now by taking on board more liberal free market principles they are now feted as economic success stories and show that even the biggest economies can be turned round and you don't have to be a tiny nimble tiger economy to help increase your countries standard of living.

Here is the article

CHINA’S economy expanded 9.9 per cent last year, overtaking Britain and France to become the world’s fourth largest, while income per head for China’s 1.3 billion people increased to £120 a year to make its inhabitants richer than those of Morocco.

What is not in doubt is that China will sweep well ahead of Britain during 2006 and it is only a matter of a few years before third-placed Germany is surpassed.

Last year’s strong expansion followed growth of 10.1 per cent in 2004 and 10 per cent in 2003. Government measures to cool the economy such as credit curbs, tougher planning laws and a currency revaluation have made little impression.

Stephen Green, an economist with Standard Chartered Bank in Shanghai, said: “All these things should slow the economy down. But as a supertanker, it’s got so much momentum behind it.”

Investment covering everything from apartments to art centres contributed a whopping 48.8 per cent of 2005 growth. Consumption, which the government is trying to stimulate, accounted for 33.3 per cent of the increase in GDP while trade made up 17.9 per cent.

Statistics bureau chief Li Deshui said action was needed to brake investment and avert the risks of overcapacity, which could lead to a fresh crop of bad loans, wasted resources, bankruptcies and rising unemployment. However, barring policy mishaps, China’s prospects were bright.

Given its population and the Communist Party’s ambition to transform China into an economic superpower, many analysts anticipate it will one day become the world’s top economy. The US in 2004 had the world’s biggest economy at $11.7 trillion, followed by Japan at $4.9 trillion according to figures from the International Monetary Fund.

Over the next few issues, I'm going to start to look at the issues of BRICs which is an issue that a number of commentators have started to look at.

Over the next 50 years, Brazil, Russia, India and China-the BRICs economies-could become a much larger force in the world economy.

Subject to the usual caveats. If things go right, in less than 40 years, the BRICs economies together could be larger than the G6 in US dollar terms. By 2025 they could account for over half the size of the G6.

Of the current G6, only the US and Japan may be among the six largest economies in US dollar terms in 2050. it is predicted that at the end of 2006, China will put the British economy into 5th position and the G 8 is likely to expand to at least the G12.

The list of the world's ten largest economies may look quite different in 2050. The largest economies in the world (by GDP) may no longer be the richest (by income per capita), making strategic choices for firms more complex as well as having a major geopolitical implications.

If we look at the picture at the bottom, emerging economies produced slightly more than half of the worlds GDP. Also the 32 largest emerging economies grew over the last two years. It is interesting to note that the world economy is strengthening as more and more countries adopt a more open and market friendly economic systems. The emerging countries real incomes also are growing.

The US and Britain doubles their real incomes over a 50 year period whereas China has achieved this in 10 years.
I suppose that there are advantages by being an early adopter of technology than always being a leader. The interesting thing being a historian is the examination of trends and that China and India have been economic powers in the past but fell into a deep conservatism.

If you go to Wikipedia and look up the travels of Zheng He in the 15th century, you would wonder why the Chinese Empire did not follow up it's advantage in science and travel to become a leading economic power.

I was listening to a meeting of some manufacturers recently and listened to their fear based on the belief that emerging countries will steal emerged countries output.

However if countries are exporting and achieving good economic growth, then it will give these countries the opportunity to import those services and goods that the local market cannot supply. A major problem is that low skilled workers who relied on very little educational qualifications will lose out relative to skilled and workers (and organisations) who are flexible.

That is why the European economies can't afford to be laggards over reform or leave their work force both now and in the future ill equipped to meet the challenges of today and tomorrow.

We will need to make hard decisions and move away from sunset industries and move towards either niche areas where a premium price can be achieved either in manufacturing industries or in service industries which will be able to tap in to the new economic areas increasing wealth and demand for up market products.

If i learnt one thing from my thesis on knowledge sharing it was that this is an area where retaining knowledge will be the major source of sustainable competitive advantage for organisations.

When you are reading this title, you will be wondering where this article is going to. hopefully by the time you've finished this - you will have another in your armoury for decision making.

I when smaller enjoyed making models and one of the last I made was a F-16 fighter jet as it was designed as a throwback to old planes like the Spitfire. It isn't the quickest nor does it fly higher or go further than other fighter aircraft. It's ability is in the way it is more agile and can withstand 9 times G force.

John Boyd from the USAF helped in the design and championing of this type of aircraft to outmanoeuvre any competitive fighter jet of its type. Boyd was known as 40 second Boyd as he had a standing bet with any fighter pilot that even if he was at a disadvantage at the start of a simulated dogfight he would be in a winning position within 40 seconds. If not then he would cough up $40. He never lost.

It is the same with organisations in today's competitive are you a F 16 - highly agile and able to outmanoeuvre your competition or are you a the corporate equivalent of Hercules Transport plane where it takes you a long time to react.

Out of his experiences he came up with the OODA loop which stands for:-

Observe, Orient,Decide and Act.

He saw this as a means of gaining competitive advantage over another fighter. If you can pull a tighter turn than another fighter pilot then it gives you the advantage for if you are acting quickly and out thinking and outmanoeuvring an opponent tends to generate confusion and disorder for that opponent. If you don't believe it just watch "Top Gun' for classic OODA tactics.

Where the corporate world is becoming more and more complex and we work in environments were the rules of the game seem to constantly change and time horizons alter, then perhaps we need to look at OODA loops.

What i am interested in is how leaders within the organisation can corrupt an OODA loop working within their organisation because they fear that they cannot handle in terms of complexity the constancy of OODA loops that keep running all the time.

A recent comment in another blog called Zen Pundit highlights how this occurs.

He highlights that Leaders play a critical role in the operation the OODA loop both for the decision-makers and the remainder of the organisation.

Leaders, so long as they retain the initiative, usually have the framing advantage on areas under under discussion, thereby determining the parameters of debate. this can be as I have learnt because of their status either through their position in the organisation or through their technical expertise.

Framing not only influences the " orientation" part of the OODA loop where information is integrated into the worldview but it can also effect "observation" as well. These definitions can then affect the way that perceptions are driven thus creating self-fulfilling prophecies and blind spots.

Leaders can do a number of things to corrupt the OODA loop:

1. React to uncertainty by attempting to impose ever higher degrees of control over a complex system.

2. Accept only the data as valid that agrees with their own mental maps of the world when making systemic decisions.

3. Deliberately attempt to isolate themselves from feedback or undertake " kill the messenger" policies.

If these informational dysfunctions occur then you can get just as confused as your potential opponent.

If you would like to find out more about OODA loops as part of my training on decision making, then please contact me.