Spy's Guide Blog by John Braddock

Good Data For What I Write Next

The Data-Analysis-Decision-Action process in A Spy’s Guide To Thinking isn’t static. It isn’t something you do one time. It’s born from Boyd’s OODA Loop. As a loop, you cycle through the DADA process as many times as you can. After you act, you observe the results. You collect new data. You feed the new data into your analysis. So you make better decisions each time around. You get feedback. And you use it to inform what you do next. You can have a problem at any of the stage

A Mistake Writers Make

A Mistake Writers Make

If you’re a reader, you’ve probably read a book by Malcolm Gladwell. Either his bestsellers The Tipping Point, Outliers or his more recent book David And Goliath. Now, he’s teaching a “masterclass” on writing. One tip he gives away for free in the advertisement for the class (beginning at the :59 mark): Gladwell: “One of the mistakes I think writers make is they spend a lot of time thinking about how to start their stories. And not a lot of time thinking about how to end them

When Strategies Appear "Irrational"

When Strategies Appear "Irrational"

In Victor Davis Hanson’s The Second World Wars (plural), there’s a discussion about how World War II started. Hanson says, “Emotions push states to war as much as does greed” (p. 25). In A Spy’s Guide To Strategy, we use a simple model to analyze strategies. It looks like this: Strategists have a Positive-Sum Endgame in mind. They reason backward through Zero-Sum Games of conflict and Positive-Sum Games of alliance, then take action to build and win those games to reach their

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