How did one fighter pilot win 45 dogfights, when losing means death?
How did the US Airforce design fighter jets that were more effective than the opponents’ even though they were slower and had a poorer turning radius?
What was the basis for the doctrines for military strategy and tactics currently in use by the US Armed forces and NATO?
OODA was developed over 25 years by John Boyd, the fighter pilot who won 45 dogfights, and stands for a deceptively simple method: Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. It might be the single greatest method used to succeed in must-win situations since Sun Tzu’s Art of War. You can use it for short term advantage and long term results in competition, occupation, or life.
Think of it. You walk into a situation. You take a look around and gather information (Observe). You compare what you’ve found out with similar situations and different strategies or tactics (Orient). You determine what you’re going to do (Decide). And then you do it (Act).
Then the feedback from your actions becomes the next input to your re-orienting, new decisions, and new actions.
Elegant, but far from simple. Why? Here are three examples.
The faster you can effectively cycle through the steps to modify your actions, the more likely you are to win.
Consider an aerial dogfight. You’re flying and the person you are fighting is flying. One of you is going to be dead in 45 seconds. You each decide on a course of action. But you are faster at the OODA loop and being able to modify your actions. As you change course, the opposing pilot observes, orients, decides, and acts, but before he completes his action, you’ve already passed through another loop and changed course again. His cycle becomes confused, and in his moments of hesitation, blast. You live; he dies.
And it turns out that fighter planes that are able to change tactics are more effective than ones with greater speed or tighter turning radii. So if you’re the US Air Force you design the F-15, F-16, and A-10 aircraft using OODA.
Or in politics perhaps by the time you gather all the facts and decide on a course of action, your political opponent has instituted a new attack. So you go back to reassess, and still your opponent has taken a new tact before your strategy is effectuated. And you find you our out politicked.
One OODA principle is that often it’s not the best information gathering or decision that wins, it’s the ability to rapidly orient and act.
Orienting is the most important step.
One of the most common mistakes people make is to gather information, decide, and then act. This gives a false sense of speed, but rarely leads to success. In fact, one of the attributes of expertise is actually skipping the decide step; experts in a domain can take in information, orient, and then act without a conscious decision.
Or, a second common mistake is to gather information until we reach certainty. But we’ll never get enough information. Most situations are ambiguous; there is always uncertainty. We need information and feedback, but orienting is the step that processes the information based on what has or has not worked in the past and creating workable plans.
And orienting isn’t just choosing from methods used before. In fact, part of orienting is to bust out of the mental models that can limit our perspective. It’s often mashing together seemingly unrelated methods into something that we can cobble together to meet the unique situation we are faced. OODA is a methodology for dealing with a randomly changing universe.
Those who can mash models from broad experiences are more likely to succeed
Charlie Mungar of Berkshire Hathaway summarized:
You’ve got to hang experience on a lattice work of models in your head. What are the models? Well, the first rule is that you’ve got to have multiple models — because if you just have one or two that you’re using, the nature of human psychology is such that you’ll torture reality so that it fits your models, or at least you’ll think it does…So you’ve got to have multiple models. And the models have to come from multiple disciplines — because all the wisdom of the world is not to be found in one little academic department.”
Boyd himself pointed out, if you’ve only got one model, you’re a dinosaur. Period.
Or as we all say, “if you’ve only got a hammer, every problem is a nail.”
These are just three principles behind being an OODA Buddha. One can think of OODA as a learning system that deals with uncertainty to facilitate the best course of action.
How can you learn to apply OODA to your classroom, school, or business?