Don Vandergriff is a retired U.S. Army officer and military educator who has dedicated his career to reforming military training and education using john-boyd's principles. Where Richards translated Boyd into business strategy via certain-to-win and the certain-to-win-framework, Vandergriff has focused on the internal military application: how to develop adaptive, initiative-taking soldiers and leaders using Boyd's insights about ooda-based-competition and decision-making under uncertainty.
Vandergriff is a regular participant in the boyd-and-beyond-conference community at Quantico, which serves as the primary annual gathering of Boyd disciples across military, academic, and civilian contexts. His work on adaptive leader methodology represents one application of fingerspitzengefuehl-as-expertise — Boyd's concept of intuitive expertise — to professional military education.
His focus on training reform connects to the organizational-climate-for-business concerns Richards develops: both are ultimately about creating institutions that can generate and sustain the kind of trust (einheit-as-trust) and distributed decision-making (schwerpunkt-as-focus) that Boyd's strategy requires. Vandergriff works this problem from the inside of military institutions; Richards works an analogous problem for business organizations.
Vandergriff's presence in the Boyd community illustrates that the boyd-circle-period extended beyond Boyd's death in boyd-death-1997 into an ongoing community of practice, of which the boyd-and-beyond-conference is the institutional expression.