What does a six-year-old cartoon dog have to do with a maverick fighter pilot's theory of strategy?

In this one we feel our way through two theories of how humans create knowledge — David Deutsch's collaborative "Taking Children Seriously" and John Boyd's adversarial OODA loop — and discover that Bluey's dad needed both, and had neither.

From bath-time burger shops to spitting toddlers, we try to work out when to problem-solve with people and when to (gently, lovingly) run rings around them.

• Why Bandit got comprehensively outsmarted by a 6 year old in a bathtub
• The radical parenting philosophy that works beautifully right up until your toddler wants to run into a road
• How a fighter pilot reverse-engineered his own brilliance (and why he loved discovering he was wrong)
• Is deception a necessary ingredient of all strategy? Tom didn't want it to be. He's coming round.
• The "playing the opposite" move that turned a spitting contest into the best half hour of the day
• Can you be collaborative one minute and Boydian the next without it becoming good cop, bad cop with your own family?
• Green blackberries, apples under car wheels, and where exactly the boundary sits

For anyone who's ever tried to reason with a toddler, a colleague, or an entire leadership team — and wondered why what it said in the book didn't work.

Can you wield both approaches without gaslighting everyone? Drop us a line: [email protected]

References

• Bluey — "Burger Shop" episode (Season 2) https://www.bluey.tv/watch/season-2/burger-shop/
• Taking Children Seriously — Sarah Fitz-Claridge & David Deutsch https://takingchildrenseriously.com
• Karl Popper — fallibilism and falsifiability
• John Boyd — the OODA loop, Energy-Manoeuvrability theory, and his paper "Destruction and Creation" (1976)
• Sun Tzu — The Art of War
• Carl von Clausewitz
• Gödel's incompleteness theorems and Heisenberg's uncertainty principle (Boyd's source material)
• Mia Wisinski — Playful Heart Parenting ("playing the opposite") https://www.playfulheartparenting.com
• Immanuel Kant — the categorical imperative
• Red Dwarf — Lister on the real lesson of the Trojan horse
• Taskmaster — the lolly-licking task (trigger warning: don't look up that clip. Or do.)
• The Matrix — bullet time

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