When Organisations Turn Unrestricted Warfare Inwards

And why Boyd offers the only real antidote

The greatest threat to most organisations isn’t the external environment. It’s the unrestricted warfare they quietly turn on themselves.

In 1999, two People's Liberation Army (PLA) colonels wrote Unrestricted Warfare, arguing that in modern conflict, there are no fixed boundaries. Everything becomes a method: financial markets, media, regulation, culture, public opinion, networks, infrastructure, and even psychology. The purpose was not to shock, but to highlight how conflict had moved beyond the clean lines of doctrine and into the messy, interconnected world the rest of us already lived in.

Their central insight was simple. Victory does not come from firepower. It comes from attacking the opponent’s orientation. If you can overwhelm their ability to understand, adapt and coordinate, you win long before the first shot is fired.

The uncomfortable truth is that many organisations recreate these same conditions internally. They create saturation, fragmentation and disorientation, not through malice but through habit. They destabilise their own sensemaking faster than any competitor could, and they do it in the name of improvement.

This is where John Boyd becomes essential. If unrestricted warfare collapses orientation, Boyd’s work shows us how to protect it.

The quiet problem: internal overwhelm

Unrestricted warfare removes the distinction between battlefield and environment. Everything is in play. In practice, the aim is to hit from every direction at once and exceed the opponent’s ability to process what is happening, saturate their bandwidth, overwhelm their attention and collapse their ability to coordinate.

Most organisations end up doing the same thing to themselves.

They launch strategy refreshes alongside restructures, operating model redesigns, capability programmes, digital initiatives, cultural rewrites, new reporting frameworks, new behaviours, new technologies, new KPIs and new governance. All at once. All competing for the same attention, time and cognitive effort. All framed as essential.

This is not development or transformational; it is an internalised conflict. Not by design, but by accumulation.

When everything matters, orientation collapses, and people lose the ability to see the whole. They stop understanding what truly moves the organisation forward and revert to defending their own area, because defending the whole is impossible.

The PLA authors warned that unlimited measures aimed at unlimited ambitions lead to failure. They were talking about states, yet the logic applies equally well to organisations. A team with finite capability cannot sustain infinite commitments; pile enough on top and something eventually breaks. Often, the first thing to go is coherence.

Why this matters: orientation is the centre of gravity.

Boyd understood that the decisive factor in any competitive environment is not action itself. It is the ability to make sense of what is happening. Orientation determines strategy, timing, judgment and execution. It determines whether an organisation moves with clarity or flails in every direction at once.

Unrestricted warfare targets orientation because once it fails, everything downstream collapses. Decisions become erratic, responses slow, coordination becomes fractured, and initiative disappears.

This is exactly what happens in organisations that overload themselves. Strategy becomes incoherent, execution becomes mechanical, and leadership becomes reactive. The organisation stops learning because it is too busy surviving.

Competitors rarely need to defeat these organisations; they simply wait for them to defeat themselves.

How leaders unintentionally accelerate the collapse

Most leaders do not set out to create chaos; they try to improve things with their initiatives and ideas. Each change, on its own, is sensible; it is the totality that destroys coherence.

Because change is rarely viewed through the lens of absorption, sequence or orientation, organisations end up fighting on too many fronts simultaneously. Every initiative pulls the organisation in a slightly different direction. Every function optimises for its own interests. Every change introduces new complexity without simplifying anything that came before.

This is the organisational equivalent of fighting across multiple domains without synchronisation. The very thing the PLA saw as a weapon becomes a self-inflicted wound.

Boyd’s counter: restore manoeuvrability, not control

Boyd’s work offers the remedy. Not through tighter control or more discipline, but through restoring the organisation’s ability to orient.

This means reducing internal noise so people can see. It means aligning action to intent rather than to the loudest initiative. It means designing structures that support adaptation instead of reacting to every pressure with a new layer of oversight.

Boyd’s insight was that adaptability beats prediction, manoeuvrability beats planning and clarity beats volume. When an organisation can reposition faster than its environment shifts, it remains viable. When it cannot, it becomes trapped. It loses initiative and is forced to react.

The answer is not to add more mechanisms. It is to remove what obscures judgment. It is to create space for observation, interpretation and movement. It is to build an organisation that learns while in motion, rather than one that collapses under the weight of its own ambitions.

The real leadership task

The greatest strategic threat to most organisations is not the external environment. It is internal saturation. The organisation wages unrestricted warfare against itself and then wonders why execution falters.

Leaders must protect the organisation’s orientation above all else. Clarity, coherence, cadence, constraints. These are not soft ideas, they are the structural foundations of adaptation.

When leaders create the conditions for observation, sensemaking and manoeuvrability, the organisation becomes resilient. When they overwhelm it with noise, the organisation becomes brittle. It loses its ability to see, think and act as one.

Boyd understood this decades ago, the PLA saw it clearly in their own analysis of modern conflict. It is time organisations observed it and understood it themselves.

The enemy is not complexity. The enemy is disorientation.

Stop waging unrestricted warfare on your own organisation. Start building the capacity to observe, understand and manoeuvre.

That is where the advantage now lies.

If you want a strategy that survives contact with reality, let’s have a conversation.