The Top Gun Bird Strike Nobody Noticed: Intent-Based Leadership | Gareth Holebrook
About this episode
Gareth Holebrook spent eighteen years trying to qualify for Kona. He got there in 2022 and collapsed seven kilometres from the finish. He does not tell it as a triumph. He tells it as a governance failure: effort continuing after awareness had already stopped.
A former Royal Navy weapons engineer who spent six years working with David Marquet on intent-based leadership and ran the agile practice at Visa, Gareth joins Brian "Ponch" Rivera to argue that capable people rarely fail from lack of capability. They fail because nothing governs the decision once it is underway.
They cover who owns a decision after it is made, the Santa Fe, crew resource management, the limits of checklists, Tim Noakes and the central governor, what a leader does in a complex domain when they genuinely do not know, and a Top Gun Maverick scene Ponch had watched and missed.
Late in the conversation Gareth explains why he thinks Boyd's loop is not a sequence of four things and is not about cycling faster. He got there from endurance sport and organisational decision governance, having never studied Boyd.
Books: Ishi: The Discipline of Determined Intent, Kaizen of the Day, and Kettei: The Discipline of Governed Intent.
Gareth Holebrook
Substack: https://ishidodi.substack.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/garethholebrook/
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John R. Boyd's Conceptual Spiral was originally titled No Way Out. In his own words:
“There is no way out unless we can eliminate the features just cited. Since we don’t know how to do this, we must continue the whirl of reorientation…”
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