Ben Ford, a former Royal Marine Commando turned tech leader and founder of Mission Ctrl, draws heavily on his military experience to forge innovative strategies for business and technology. His philosophy centers on adapting to and thriving in chaotic environments by applying battlefield-tested principles to the corporate world. Central to his teachings are concepts like the OODA loop, Mission Command, and viewing organizations as complex, adaptive systems.

On Change and Chaos

  1. Quote: "You do not manage change. Change is something that happens to you and around you that you you better adapt to at the very minimum." [1]
    • Learning: Traditional "change management" is a flawed concept because it assumes change can be controlled. The focus should be on adaptation and resilience, not management. [2][3]
    • Source: Strategy Meets Reality Podcast, YouTube [1], YouTube Shorts [3]
  2. Quote: "If you want to actually be a really high performing team company business organization whatever you should be leading the change right because then it's the ecosystem around you that's adapting to you." [3]
    • Learning: High-performing organizations don't just react to change; they proactively lead it, forcing their competitors and the market to adapt to them. [3]
    • Source: YouTube Shorts [3]
  3. Quote: "I increasingly think that fast-moving tech environments are much more like combat zones than factories. And most of our best practice seems to come from you know optimizing factories." [4]
    • Learning: Applying industrial-era, efficiency-focused management principles to the chaotic and unpredictable world of modern technology is a fundamental mismatch. [4]
    • Source: "Navigating chaos with military strategy - Ben Ford," YouTube [4]
  4. Quote: "The military is continually operating in chaos... over the centuries of doing that the military's emergent behaviors have come up in the military which are a good fit for operating in chaos." [4]
    • Learning: Businesses can learn from the military's centuries-long experiment in operating under complexity and pressure to develop their own effective, emergent strategies. [4]
    • Source: "Navigating chaos with military strategy - Ben Ford," YouTube [4]
  5. Quote: "We've built entire industries around 'change management,' yet most of them still cling to the fantasy that change can be controlled. In reality? Change isn't something you manage. It's something you survive, adapt to, or—if you're bold enough—lead." [3]
    • Learning: Businesses should abandon the illusion of controlling change and instead focus on building the capacity to survive, adapt, and ultimately, lead through it. [3]
    • Source: YouTube Shorts [3]

On the OODA Loop (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act)

  1. Quote: "The OODA Loop is the Algorithm of Adaptation... the best mental model for thinking about how we shape and are shaped by our environments." [5]
    • Learning: The OODA loop is more than a simple decision-making cycle; it's a fundamental algorithm for how any organism or organization interacts with and adapts to its environment. [5][6]
    • Source: OODAcast [5], "Understanding The OODA Loop and How It Applies To Tech Leadership," YouTube [6]
  2. Quote: "What we're talking about when we're talking about all this kind of organizational agility is we're talking about building an organizational OODA Loop." [1]
    • Learning: True organizational agility is achieved by embedding the principles of the OODA loop into the company's culture and processes, enabling it to observe, orient, decide, and act faster and more effectively than competitors. [1]
    • Source: "Maximizing Efficiency with Data: Ben Ford's Mission Control Strategies," YouTube [1]
  3. Quote: "Getting inside the OODA loop is more than just going faster... what you want to do... is actually breaking their orientation. You're actually causing them to continually drift away from reality." [4]
    • Learning: A key competitive advantage is to disrupt your competitor's decision-making cycle by making them unable to correctly orient themselves to the changing reality, forcing them into a state of confusion and inaction. [4]
    • Source: "Navigating chaos with military strategy - Ben Ford," YouTube [4]
  4. Quote: "I've started to think of OODA as more of a almost like a hierarchy than a loop." [6]
    • Learning: When operating in a familiar domain, you can act implicitly without deep thought. Surprises force you higher up the "hierarchy" into a more conscious and energy-intensive orientation phase. Getting stuck in this phase leads to rising entropy and a disconnect from reality. [6][7]
    • Source: "Understanding The OODA Loop and How It Applies To Tech Leadership," YouTube [6], "Navigating chaos with Ben Ford," JamesStuber.com [7]
  5. Quote: "The OODA loop is the meta process that you have underlying all of this stuff that allows you to have a systems view of your whole business." [4]
    • Learning: The OODA loop should not be seen as just one of many tools, but as the overarching framework that integrates all other business processes and enables a holistic, systems-level view of the organization. [4]
    • Source: "Navigating chaos with military strategy - Ben Ford," YouTube [4]

On Organizational Structure and Leadership

  1. Quote: "The alternative is to look at a business like some kind of machine and look at yourself as a business leader as some kind of mechanic... as soon as you get people involved the machine kind of analogy just goes straight out the window." [1]
    • Learning: Leaders should view their organizations as complex biological systems with feedback loops, not as simple machines. This requires a shift from a mechanical to a biological or systems-thinking approach to leadership. [1]
    • Source: "Maximizing Efficiency with Data: Ben Ford's Mission Control Strategies," YouTube [1]
  2. Quote: "One of the things that we're really really good at in the military is having kind of social technology... that's built up over the years to help us deal with complexity and uncertainty." [1]
    • Learning: Businesses often have better technology than the military but lack the "social technology"—the processes, culture, and communication protocols—to manage complexity effectively. [1]
    • Source: "Maximizing Efficiency with Data: Ben Ford's Mission Control Strategies," YouTube [1]
  3. Quote: "What look initially like technical problems often turn out to be people, communication or leadership problems." [8]
    • Learning: Many challenges that appear to be technical in nature are, at their root, issues with how people interact, communicate, and lead within the organization. [8]
    • Source: "This Commando Dev learned to code on a warship without internet," No CS Degree [8]
  4. Quote: "Decentralisation isn't chaos—it's trust, clarity and intent." [1]
    • Learning: Effective decentralized command requires a foundation of trust, clear communication of the leader's intent, and defined boundaries, which empowers teams to act autonomously and effectively. [1]
    • Source: Strategy Meets Reality Podcast sound bite, as cited in the description of "Maximizing Efficiency with Data," YouTube [1]
  5. Quote: "The aim of implementing something like mission command is to have intuition and fluency in your operations." [4]
    • Learning: Mission Command, the military tactic of decentralized execution based on a shared understanding of the mission's intent, is designed to create a state of intuitive and fluid operations within a team. [4][7]
    • Source: "Navigating chaos with military strategy - Ben Ford," YouTube [4], "Navigating chaos with Ben Ford," JamesStuber.com [7]
  6. Quote: "There's this really interesting thing that I think most companies really struggle to navigate is the the kind of the top down you know vision direction alignment... and the bottom up kind of invention, messy, you know try new things no certainty. And somehow those things have to meet in the middle." [6]
    • Learning: The key challenge for leadership is to reconcile the top-down need for strategic alignment with the bottom-up necessity of messy, uncertain innovation. [6]
    • Source: "Understanding The OODA Loop and How It Applies To Tech Leadership," YouTube [6]
  7. Quote: "Instead of big bang change, we believe that small steps are needed to successfully improve business processes. Small bets. Low risk and low cost improvements that can be quickly tested and iterated." [9]
    • Learning: Adopt an iterative approach to improvement. Focus on small, low-risk, testable changes ("small bets") rather than large, high-risk "big bang" transformations. [9]
    • Source: Mission Ctrl Website [9]
  8. Quote: "Stop over-optimising for efficiency. Start building capacity." [1]
    • Learning: A relentless focus on efficiency creates fragile systems. Businesses should instead focus on building spare capacity, which allows for resilience, adaptation, and the ability to handle unexpected events. [1][10]
    • Source: Strategy Meets Reality Podcast sound bite, as cited in the description of "Maximizing Efficiency with Data," YouTube [1]; Propane Fitness Podcast [10]
  9. Quote: "You can take the most amazing leader from a company... and that person gets parachuted in more often than not to a place where the system isn't like that... and therefore their impact is lessened and they struggle." [6]
    • Learning: Leadership effectiveness is highly dependent on the system in which the leader operates. A great leader cannot succeed in a broken system, highlighting the importance of building the right organizational structure and culture. [6]
    • Source: "Understanding The OODA Loop and How It Applies To Tech Leadership," YouTube [6]
  10. Quote: "In a complex world you need to use emergent behavior." [7]
    • Learning: You cannot pre-plan for every eventuality in a complex system. Instead, you must create the conditions (like Mission Command) that allow for positive, adaptive behaviors to emerge naturally from the team. [7]
    • Source: "Navigating chaos with Ben Ford," JamesStuber.com [7]

On Data and Decision Making

  1. Quote: "The idea of an internal nervous system is... the thing that connects your contact with the outside world the actions that you take and the observations that you make and pulls all that together into something that we can have a model of and make sense of." [1]
    • Learning: Companies need to build an "internal nervous system"—a technological and procedural framework that senses the environment, processes information centrally, and enables coherent, rapid decision-making. [1][2]
    • Source: "Maximizing Efficiency with Data: Ben Ford's Mission Control Strategies," YouTube [1]; Medium [2]
  2. Quote: "After 15 years of working on large complex software builds... data integration and integrity is the biggest challenge holding businesses back today." [9]
    • Learning: A primary obstacle to business agility and performance is the failure to properly integrate data from various sources into a coherent and trustworthy whole. [9]
    • Source: Mission Ctrl Website [9]
  3. Quote: "You see this kind of fractal... filtering and aggregating of information as it goes up or into the organization." [1]
    • Learning: Information should be filtered and summarized at each level of an organization. Senior leaders don't need raw, high-fidelity data from the frontline; they need aggregated insights relevant to their decision-making level, similar to military command structures. [1]
    • Source: "Maximizing Efficiency with Data: Ben Ford's Mission Control Strategies," YouTube [1]
  4. Quote: "You don't need to wait until the end of the week to know what's going on you've got it there in real time." [1]
    • Learning: Real-time dashboards, fed by well-modeled and centralized data, are crucial for modern businesses to move beyond slow, reactive reporting cycles and enable immediate situational awareness. [1]
    • Source: "Maximizing Efficiency with Data: Ben Ford's Mission Control Strategies," YouTube [1]
  5. Quote: "What you expect does shape what you observe." [1]
    • Learning: Leaders must be aware that their own biases and expectations ("the map is not the territory") influence how they perceive information. Building systems to get objective data is critical to overcoming this. [1]
    • Source: "Maximizing Efficiency with Data: Ben Ford's Mission Control Strategies," YouTube [1]

On Strategy and Execution

  1. Learning: Red Team Thinking, a military practice of challenging a plan from an adversarial perspective, should be embedded at every level of a business to pressure-test strategies and overcome cognitive biases. [10]
    • Source: Propane Fitness Podcast [10]
  2. Learning: Business today is not like conventional warfare (zero-sum), but it is akin to fourth-generation warfare: a diffuse environment where scrappy, tech-enabled upstarts can outmaneuver large incumbents. [7]
    • Source: "Navigating chaos with Ben Ford," JamesStuber.com [7]
  3. Learning: There are three key aspects to Mission Command in a tech context: a shared understanding of the goal, the freedom to make decisions at the edge, and the trust that individuals will act in line with the commander's intent. [7]
    • Source: "Navigating chaos with Ben Ford," JamesStuber.com [7]
  4. Learning: Constraints are essential to progress. Learning to code on a warship with no internet was helpful because it removed distractions and forced a deeper level of focus and problem-solving. [8]
    • Source: "This Commando Dev learned to code on a warship without internet," No CS Degree [8]
  5. Learning: A common failure for startups is achieving product-market fit and then having to "stop the world and rebuild" because their initial tech and systems weren't built to scale. [8]
    • Source: "This Commando Dev learned to code on a warship without internet," No CS Degree [8]
  6. Learning: In fast-moving companies, "time to value" is critical for getting buy-in for new initiatives. Focus on delivering quick wins to build momentum. [9]
    • Source: Mission Ctrl Website [9]
  7. Learning: A company's growth often involves a transition from siloed efficiency to systemic efficiency. Initially, silos allow for rapid development in specific areas. But as the company scales, the priority must shift to breaking down those silos to optimize the efficiency of the whole system. [4]
    • Source: "Navigating chaos with military strategy - Ben Ford," YouTube [4]
  8. Learning: The military's use of pre-briefs and de-briefs is a powerful "social technology" that offloads ego and interpersonal friction onto a structured process, enabling blameless, objective analysis of what happened and why. [10]
    • Source: Propane Fitness Podcast [10]
  9. Learning: Don't wait until you feel your knowledge is ready before you start building things. The act of building is an essential part of the learning process. [8]
    • Source: "This Commando Dev learned to code on a warship without internet," No CS Degree [8]
  10. Learning: Psychological safety is a prerequisite for emergent, adaptive behavior. Without it, team members will not feel safe enough to experiment, take risks, or challenge the status quo. [7]
    • Source: "Navigating chaos with Ben Ford," JamesStuber.com [7]
  11. Learning: When considering building vs. buying technology, always favor solutions that are flexible and self-owned. Opt for open-source tools where possible to avoid being trapped by a vendor's future business model changes. [1]
    • Source: "Maximizing Efficiency with Data: Ben Ford's Mission Control Strategies," YouTube [1]
  12. Learning: You can't achieve emergence by only thinking about individuals. You have to consider the interactions and flow within the group. [7]
    • Source: "Navigating chaos with Ben Ford," JamesStuber.com [7]
  13. Learning: The pace of technological development is astronomical because each new generation of technology is used to build the next generation more efficiently, creating an accelerating feedback loop. It's now "beyond humans to keep up" without technological assistance. [1]
    • Source: "Maximizing Efficiency with Data: Ben Ford's Mission Control Strategies," YouTube [1]
  14. Learning: In a scaling company, many functions need to be re-evaluated, from hiring and onboarding to marketing. These are all different OODA loops that require their own expertise. [4]
    • Source: "Navigating chaos with military strategy - Ben Ford," YouTube [4]
  15. Learning: You must have a framework, drill it until it's second nature, and then use that same framework to react when chaos is thrown at you. This moves you from slow, conscious thought (System 2) to fast, intuitive action (System 1). [10]
    • Source: Propane Fitness Podcast [10]
  16. Learning: You must empower people with training, equipment, and the freedom of action to adapt. This is the "Doctrine of Empowerment." [7]
    • Source: "Navigating chaos with Ben Ford," JamesStuber.com [7]
  17. Learning: A key role of a leader is to provide context and boundaries. Within those boundaries, the team has the freedom to operate and self-organize. [7]
    • Source: "Navigating chaos with Ben Ford," JamesStuber.com [7]
  18. Learning: To avoid siloing from the start, a company needs a clear, unified roadmap that ensures all teams are pulling in the same direction. [7]
    • Source: "Navigating chaos with Ben Ford," JamesStuber.com [7]
  19. Learning: Even as a junior developer, you can apply these principles. There is always a locus of control, a sphere of influence where you can improve processes and communication. [7]
    • Source: "Navigating chaos with Ben Ford," JamesStuber.com [7]
  20. Learning: The military system is a socio-technical one. Leadership is not just a set of personal skills; it's offloaded to the system itself, through processes like the orders and debrief process. [7]
    • Source: "Navigating chaos with Ben Ford," JamesStuber.com [7]
  21. Learning: Designing a customer-facing product is different from designing an internal tool to reduce operational friction. They require different heuristics, decision-making processes, and priorities. [1]
    • Source: "Maximizing Efficiency with Data: Ben Ford's Mission Control Strategies," YouTube [1]
  22. Learning: The person in charge of internal operations (like a COO) often doesn't have a technical background and may implement processes with sub-optimal technology choices because they lack access to the people who could build a "Formula One dashboard." [1]
    • Source: "Maximizing Efficiency with Data: Ben Ford's Mission Control Strategies," YouTube [1]
  23. Learning: A major reason for the slow adoption of "internal nervous systems" is a lack of capacity. Product-focused teams are often not spared to work on internal operational improvements, which is a misguided priority. [1]
    • Source: "Maximizing Efficiency with Data: Ben Ford's Mission Control Strategies," YouTube [1]
  24. Learning: Most agile consulting is too dogmatic. A systems approach offers more breadth, and combining it with deep technical experience is a powerful combination often missing in standard business coaching. [10]
    • Source: Propane Fitness Podcast [10]
  25. Learning: To stay current, you need to understand the fundamentals, and most modern agility concepts are just repackaged military doctrine. The best place to start is by learning about John Boyd and the OODA Loop. [1]
    • Source: "Maximizing Efficiency with Data: Ben Ford's Mission Control Strategies," YouTube [1]

Learn more:

  1. Maximizing Efficiency with Data: Ben Ford's Mission Control Strategies - YouTube
  2. Harnessing an Internal Nervous System for Organizational Performance | by James Burroughes | Jul, 2025 | Medium
  3. Ben Ford: What military thinking can teach businesses about thriving in chaos #shorts
  4. Navigating chaos with military strategy - Ben Ford - YouTube
  5. Ben Ford, Founder of Commando Development, on the OODA Loop and Tech Leadership
  6. Understanding The OODA Loop and How It Applies To Tech Leadership: Ben Ford
  7. Navigating chaos with Ben Ford - James Stuber
  8. This Commando Dev learned to code on a warship without internet - No CS Degree
  9. Why Mission Ctrl?
  10. Ben Ford: Lessons from an Ex-Marine turned programmer - Propane Fitness