“It’s a proud day to be a Boston police officer,” Police Commissioner Edward F. Davis told his force over the radio moments after the arrest. “Thank you all.”

“Confronted with a task, and having less information available than is needed to perform that task, an organization may react in either of two ways. One is to increase its information-processing capacity, the other to design the organization, and indeed the task itself, in such a way as to enable it to operate on the basis of less information. These approaches are exhaustive; no others are conceivable. A failure to adopt one or the other will automatically result in a drop in the level of performance.” —Martin van Creveld, Command in War

“…organizations where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning to see the whole together.” ~Peter Senge

We must become more deliberate, more disciplined, and more thorough in our approach to learning and teaching

As cops, we often cry loudly about the lack of training in our profession. I am guilty of it myself.

However, while we whine about the seemingly lack of interest in ongoing training, we also miss the opportunities to train and learn from the everyday lessons available to us.

Those lessons that come from every call we respond to and every shift we work.

There’s No Magic Here

Through the Boyd Cycle is how we gather and process information and make decisions in our day to day law enforcement duties. We utilize this process of observation-orientation-decision and action to see the world around us, orient to what we perceive is going on and then based on this observation and orientation we make decisions and take actions to accomplish certain objectives based on what our goals or intent is.

“If you light a lamp for someone else it will also brighten your path.” ~Buddha

“It is one thing to be a solo performer, a single man or woman out on the wire or ahead of the pack. It is quite another to translate singular excellence to a group, to impact a vision and style so completely that, after awhile, the body begins to act in concert with its leader.” ~GEN Gordan Sullivan, United States Army,(Ret.)

Or “wrote.” Written.

Boyd is sometime criticized for not having sat down and written Patterns and his other briefings into nice books. They claim that his ideas are hard to fathom just from his briefings.

But Boyd’s framework, although deep and complex, is not esoteric. In addition to “Destruction and Creation,” Boyd produced a continuous stream of writings from August 1976 until January of the year before his death: Continue reading Chet Richards piece here:

I finished reading H. John Poole's latest book, Gung Ho! The Corps Most Progressive