What if we went into situations with the viewpoint that
- Whatever we try isn’t going to work the first time
- What we decide to try will give us valuable feedback
- We can learn from the feedback and eventually we will succeed
- If we prepare to iterate rapidly, we can succeed even if others oppose us
This mindset is the basis of John Boyd’s OODA loops.
I first blogged about OODA Loops in 2018 with OODA: The Winning Paradigm which describes that OODA Loops is a methodology for effective and rapid iteration, especially when we anticipate that there will be unknown adversities and possible opponents to our plans.
Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act. John Boyd’s O. O. D. A. (or OODA) is a deceptively simple model and is based on a wide set of readings, from Sun Tzu, Napoleon, Heisenberg, Kuhn, Einstein, Gödel, and others.
John Boyd was an air force fighter pilot, military tactician, and strategist, so his work was initially aimed at armed military conflict. Armed conflict is a very high stakes form of interaction, most of the situations we are involved with aren’t literally win or die. The principles behind OODA can be and are applied in more generalized form to any type of change, decision, or conflict. And, in fact, Boyd became a trusted advisor of political leaders and business leaders around the world.
I love in the second Top Gun movie, when Tom Cruise gets in front of the fighter pilots he’s supposed to train, shows them the manual, and asks them if they know it. And of course, these are all the top pilots and they’ve already mastered it and memorized it. And then Cruise takes the manual and dumps it in the garbage. He tells them that their opponents have mastered and memorized it, too. The winner is not going to be the one who knows the manual the best, the winner is going to be the one who can pull together what is happening and then react fastest. The manual isn’t going to help them, building their ability to react rapidly and effectively to adverse situations is what’s going to keep them alive.
That’s OODA.
The OODA loops diagram above was created by Chuck Feeney who worked with John Boyd for 20 years. A complete explanation is in his 2 ½ hour OODA Loop & Evolutionary Epistemology of John Boyd video.
Notice that there are three loops highlighted:
Loop 1 is the rapid OODA loop. You are in the heat of the moment, you are in the middle of executing, perhaps in an argument or confrontation. You don’t have time to do research, consult experts, or even revise plans. You need to act and react fast. The better you are able to observe what’s happening, and the more possible actions you have already internalized so you can orient, the faster and better you will decide and act.
Loop 2 is the dangerous loop. This is when we get caught up in what we think will happen and what we think we should be doing. We observe, we come up with what we should do, but we don’t actually modify based on the results of our actions, we double down on what we’ve already decided and then justify why we should continue that way.
Loop 3 is the slow OODA Loop. This is when we have time to reassess the results we’ve achieved and devise new possible actions. Boyd used slow OODA to train quick OODA. Between events, Boyd worked on:
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- What potential obstacles hadn’t he seen before or prepared for?
- What should he focus on in next time?
- What techniques should he be able to deploy in next time?
- How could he train himself on those so that they became automatic?
Think about any challenges you face. How could you start preparing so that when you are in the heat of the moment you can observe your actions and their results, you have a wide variety of fluencies to draw on so that you can rapidly analyze and then synthesize possible actions, and you can decide and act in a way that gives you an opportunity to observe and reorient?
If you want to go into OODA loops and complicated and complex situations more deeply, look into the course Mindshifting 2: Flexible Mindsets for Long Term Success starting in March 2024.