Decoding "Destruction and Creation"

A Guide to Thriving in VUCA for Leaders and Their Teams

“To comprehend and cope with our environment we develop mental patterns or concepts of meaning.”¹

We live in a world defined by constant change. Anymore, very few leaders need convincing of this. But what will they do about it? VUCA threatens to overwhelm even the most capable leaders and teams. Linear solutions applied to these asymmetries will increase entropy and lead to certain defeat. We need a better way to think about it all, and act with an edge.

John Boyd’s Destruction and Creation (D&C) offers us a way to understand how to lead and thrive in this chaos. The core idea is simple yet profound. Your survival and ability to thrive will depend on your ability to destroy outdated ideas and create new ones as you continue to interact with your environment.

I am going to briefly walk you through how I came to understand D&C. My epiphany came with reading Franklin “Chuck” Spinney’s Evolutionary Epistemology.²³ I saw Spinney’s work then and see it now a codex that helps decode Boyd’s core…