[HN Gopher] The OODA Loop: How Fighter Pilots Make Fast and Accu...
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The OODA Loop: How Fighter Pilots Make Fast and Accurate Decisions
Author : feross
Score : 177 points
Date : 2021-03-15 13:21 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (fs.blog)
(TXT) w3m dump (fs.blog)
| KineticLensman wrote:
| Observe, Overreact, Deny, Apologise?
| JSeymourATL wrote:
| Related: terrific biography.
|
| Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War by Robert
| Coram
|
| > https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38840.Boyd
| apress wrote:
| Chip design guru Jim Keller told me this was one of his
| favorite books (and highly influenced his business approach)
| when I interviewed him last year.
| https://fortune.com/longform/microchip-designer-jim-keller-i...
| F00Fbug wrote:
| Easily in my top 10 list of books!
| davejohnclark wrote:
| Second this. I first heard about this book in a comment on HN a
| few years ago (can't find it at the moment to link), and
| happily pay it forward whenever I can.
| dangoljames wrote:
| Effing Brilliant.
| dang wrote:
| I thought there were more past threads about this but the only
| significant ones I could find are
|
| _The OODA Loop and the Half-Beat_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22601681 - March 2020 (31
| comments)
|
| _Ask HN: How do you apply Boyd 's OODA Loop in your life?_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16447690 - Feb 2018 (10
| comments)
|
| _John Boyd and the four qualities of victorious organizations_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6669129 - Nov 2013 (29
| comments)
| sodomak wrote:
| The OODA Loop in context of cryptoanarchy
| https://youtu.be/gTtbkguROdk?t=358
| glitchc wrote:
| OODA by itself is not useful unless a fighter pilot can do it
| quickly. Acquiring yomi (getting into the mind of the opponent)
| is far more useful for winning dogfights.
| nateberkopec wrote:
| For anyone interested in OODA, the Robert Coram biography of John
| Boyd, and "Certain to Win" by the Boyd disciple Chet Richards are
| good entry points.
|
| The value of OODA isn't really in providing a model for
| individual-level decisionmaking. The value is as a model for
| intra-organizational conflict: that one obtains strategic
| advantage (i.e. tempo) by running through one's OODA loop faster
| than competitors or opponents. You can draw a very straight line
| from OODA to the Lean Startup.
| WJW wrote:
| Indeed. The OODA loop model describes how you can win a
| competition by responding to a changing situation on the
| battlefield faster than your opponent. The Lean Startup
| describes basically the same thing but for civilian companies,
| and where the opponent is "the market" rather than a more well
| defined enemy.
|
| "The Art of Action" by Stephen Bungay is also a very good book
| on this subject.
| la6471 wrote:
| Unfortunately people bring this hyper competitive mentality
| in meetings and other situations where collaboration would be
| more beneficial than competition. I am specifically referring
| to the impulse some people have in making quick decisions
| without due diligence , just to stay in charge or for other
| ulterior motives. And when the majority acts like that more
| reasonable voices gets drowned in the din. While heathy
| competition is good we also need to be vigilant about not
| taking it too far to the point where we lose the way.
| lb1lf wrote:
| -At a former employer, we suddenly found ourselves with a
| fresh hire manager who subscribed wholeheartedly to the
| 'Move fast and break things' mindset. Additionally, he had
| a very strong urge to show everybody who had the last word.
|
| Only problem was, we built heavy machinery (Think low
| megawatt range) - so 'breaking a build' most often meant
| something blew up - in the quite literal sense.
|
| Took a little getting used to, that.
| dheera wrote:
| I'm unclear as to what's novel about OODA. Can someone give me
| an alternative model for context?
|
| It seems like all other permutations, e.g. DOAO or ADOO or DOOA
| wouldn't make sense, so what is the "eureka" about OODA?
|
| Also, separately, it just sounds to me like perception (OO),
| planning (D), control (A) renamed so I'm still not seeing
| what's novel about it.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > I'm unclear as to what's novel about OODA.
|
| Well, it's almost 70 years old, so, literally, nothing about
| it is _novel_.
|
| > It seems like all other permutations, e.g. DOAO or ADOO or
| DOOA wouldn't make sense
|
| But it didn't emerge in a context where the four stages were
| taken as given but people were just trying to figure out how
| to order them.
|
| Nor did it emerge as a novel thing people should do. OODA, at
| the level of the acronym and it's expansion, is a description
| of a fairly simple observation of what people _inherently
| do_. It 's also the organizational outline for a body of work
| on how they ought to do each part of it (delivered by its
| originator, John Boyd, in in-person briefings that apparently
| ran up to 5 hours, and in quite large written works by people
| downstream from Boyd.)
| karmakaze wrote:
| These two lines show how this is a dynamic interactive
| activity--like there are tight and loose loops continuously
| updating the decision making processes. Sort of like agile vs
| waterfall.
|
| > "Orientation isn't just a state you're in; it's a process.
| You're always orienting." --John Boyd
|
| > The second stage of the OODA Loop, orient, is less
| intuitive than the other steps. [...]
| dheera wrote:
| Ironically I never understood agile and waterfall either.
|
| I always thought that the entire universe operates by what
| people seem to call "waterfall", and "agile" was just a
| term that managers use when they're not happy with the way
| the universe works so they can bump up their own
| reputation.
| jfarmer wrote:
| It seems like "perception, planning, control" is used for
| autonomous vehicles? That's all I see when I google it. Boyd
| outlined OODA in the 1970s, so it's "novel" in the sense that
| it came ~30 years earlier.
|
| From a human perspective, I think the novelty is that that it
| focuses attention on hard-to-see aspects of decision-making.
| It's not about the quality of any given decision, but about
| your ability to keep the song going and evolving in the right
| direction.
|
| If you read Boyd's original material, he doesn't reallllllly
| see it as a loop. Every "node" in the process can feed back
| into previous parts. The focus is more on rhythm, tempo,
| beats.
|
| He almost always writes "Loop" with quotes. A slide directly
| from him: https://share.getcloudapp.com/L1uN1RAJ
|
| It's really worth reading Boyd directly. His picture is way
| more interesting and nuanced than "just go through the OODA
| loop faster". It's more like: you want to make it hard for
| your opponent to keep the beat.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Boyd outlined OODA in the 1970s
|
| Every source I find says sometime in the mid-1950s. (The
| vagueness seems to be because he published very little, and
| the OODA loop was presented predominantly in oral
| brieifings; most of his writings that have been published
| or mined by other writers weren't intended for publication,
| but are briefing notes.)
| jfarmer wrote:
| He would've been 23 in 1950, so that seems unlikely.
|
| Nothing from the 50s listed here:
| https://www.colonelboyd.com/boydswork
|
| AFAIK you first see the core concerns driven home here: h
| ttps://static1.squarespace.com/static/58a3add7e3df28d9fbf
| f4...
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| OODA was formalized in the 1960-70s with his destruction
| and creation briefing/seminar, and later EM theory work.
| However Boyd came up with the theory in the 1950s while
| he was a fighter instructor at Fighter Weapons School
| (TOP GUN for the Air Force).
| Jtsummers wrote:
| The eureka was giving it a name in order to articulate its
| importance in tactical and strategic thinking. That's really
| it. Other people, throughout history, have operated in the
| same fashion but either not described what they did or
| described it in different terms.
| AlexCoventry wrote:
| Yes, his "patterns of conflict" slide deck goes through
| something like a dozen examples of historical battles which
| illustrate his principles. Some of the battles were
| thousands of years ago.
| dheera wrote:
| Hmm interesting. Maybe I should give a name to shoveling
| dirt. Look, Align, Poke, Scoop. LAPS. The most efficient
| way to get the most dirt shoveled is the LAPS loop. It's
| revolutionary. Can I be famous?
| Jtsummers wrote:
| Perhaps if it leads to a better way to discuss or perform
| the task itself. I mean, someone came up with PASS (pull,
| aim, squeeze, sweep) but I don't think they became famous
| for it.
| ghgdynb1 wrote:
| I'm not sure, I'm not an expert in this and I've never been
| in the military.
|
| However, I bet there's little to nothing uniquely good about
| OODA over the alternatives you mention. My guess is that
| having a standardized rapid decision making framework is
| valuable compared to the frantic scramble that might take
| place otherwise.
| craftinator wrote:
| A couple of additional benefits of OODA loops, not editing
| my original because I'm on mobile:
|
| It really helps prevent micromanaging, because it
| encourages the team leader to only change orders in
| response to a change in what they've observed.
|
| It's very useful in after action debriefing ("debugging"
| for the HN crowd), because specific questions can be asked
| about where in the OODA loop a fault occured. Did you
| observe something incorrectly, or miss noticing a key
| detail? Did you incorrectly orient yourself because you
| didn't understand the purpose of what you were doing? Did
| you make a bad decision, or the wrong decision? Did you do
| everything else right, but your team failed in taking
| action correctly? Utilizing this framework gives
| granularity and introspection to you decision making
| process.
|
| It prevents undermanagement, as you feel compelled (and
| justified) in responding to a changing situation, rather
| than fighting with yourself about taking action.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| "after action debriefing" = retrospective. A critical
| part of agile processes that's often ignored. It permits
| not just the examination of the product under
| development, but the processes that are in use.
|
| It's a crucial difference between most organizations and
| proper "learning organizations". Most organizations (here
| I mean from team on up to large corporations) do not
| sufficiently introspect and retrospect to discover their
| own flaws (and we all have flaws). Learning organizations
| incorporate those two activities into their culture and
| methods in order to properly react to their competition
| and satisfy their customers.
| craftinator wrote:
| > My guess is that having a standardized rapid decision
| making framework is valuable compared to the frantic
| scramble that might take place otherwise.
|
| Having been in the military and received specific training
| on tactical decision making, I can say that this is a
| pretty good take on why OODA is taught.
|
| When you're in any situation where you need to maintain
| positive control on the outcome, the biggest problem you
| can run into is when the situation changes in an unexpected
| way (insert classic Napoleon paraphrase "Plans are the
| first casualties in contact with the enemy"). The reason
| why the OODA loop is specifically used, rather than other
| permutations of the same idea, is that it's very efficient.
| For the classic HN crowd, a good analogy or application of
| OODA would be a PID loop, or any other event-driven
| feedback system.
|
| Observe: has the situation changed? If not, continue with
| the current plan, else orient.
|
| Orient: how can we change to match the situation, given who
| we are and what we're doing? If there are no positive
| changes to make, keep observing, else make a decision.
|
| Decide: can we make a decision based on our new
| orientation? If not, return to observe, else act.
|
| Act: perform the decision, then return to observing, paying
| special attention to the outcome of the actions.
|
| Using this loop properly, at each stage you're still ready
| to go back to observing, and less likely to get mired in
| back and forth decision making without a solid
| reassessment.
|
| This thought pattern is especially helpful in small team
| leaders, as they often have the flexibility and direct
| observational abilities to make full use of the information
| at hand. It tends not to work as well for single
| individuals and large organizations (in my experience), for
| individuals because of the incomplete information, and for
| organizations because of the signal delays in information
| and enactment.
| px43 wrote:
| I feel like when I learned about the OODA loop, the big
| strategic advantage came from getting _inside_ your opponent 's
| OODA loop. It's less about being faster than them, and more
| about matching their tempo such that you're always one step
| ahead of them.
|
| In a fighter pilot context, this makes a lot of sense, and
| gives you a model for figuring out who is chasing who. One
| person controls the flow of battle, and one ends up simply
| responding to their opponent. OODA lets you quickly figure out
| where your opponent is at in their decision making process so
| you can shift your own reactions such that you dictate to the
| opponent how the next moves are made.
| enraged_camel wrote:
| Yes, precisely. Speed of execution of the OODA loop isn't the
| goal in and of itself. The goal is to keep your opponent in a
| reactive state, and yourself in a proactive state.
| dingosity wrote:
| Yeah. I really liked Coram's biography. John Boyd was a family
| friend when I was growing up at Eglin and Andrews. I can
| confirm he was "a bit wild" -- even more-so than my dad, who
| was nicknamed "The Lesser Santini"
| codeulike wrote:
| _Boyd 's famous OODA loop (observe-orient-decide-act) is probably
| the most misunderstood and misused diagram of practical
| significance in decision making. It is to decision-making what
| the five elements (earth/fire/water/wind/ether) model from
| alchemy is to modern chemistry. Or what Freud's id-ego-superego
| model is to neuroscience ... Though the terms and concepts of the
| OODA loop are intuitive and coherent at least at a first pass,
| there is fundamentally no way to use them entirely safely without
| making gross errors. Just as there is no way to do modern
| chemistry using alchemical concepts without making gross errors.
| Or trying to do neurosurgery based on an id-ego-superego map of
| the brain without making gross errors._
|
| https://breakingsmart.substack.com/p/the-use-and-misuse-of-t...
| jmcalvay wrote:
| I've been enjoying this video series with interviews of Boyd's
| surviving collaborators as a way to separate out what he meant
| from what folks often misunderstand:
|
| Chet Richards (as it relates to business) -
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hDhznBtN24
|
| Chuck Spinney (as it relates to epistemology) -
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdK4y6O-llE
|
| Both - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWfbPoDuEwg
|
| (they're from this meetup: https://52livingideas.com/)
| 7402 wrote:
| "Godel's theorems, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, and the
| Second Law of Thermodynamics"
|
| Bah. It drives me crazy when people use scientific or
| mathematical principles as psychological metaphors, without
| understanding what the principles actually mean. They usually get
| it wrong.
|
| When you apply the Uncertainty Principle to a flying airplane, it
| implies the exact opposite of what the author thinks it does. A
| fighter jet is a macroscopic object. Assuming I recall my college
| physics correctly, if the velocity of the plane is "only" known
| to within a quintillionth of a m/s, then the position is "only"
| knowable within a few hundredths of a quintillionth of a meter.
| thethimble wrote:
| Maybe better would have been "Bayesian Inference"?
| vz8 wrote:
| On a longer timeframe, PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-Act) / PDSA (Plan-Do-
| Study-Act) models[0] are common, and I run into them frequently
| in non-profit social/community work. The "Do" part of the cycle
| is frequently misunderstood, it's more of a test.
|
| I've found PDSA to be challenging with developers, with a
| tendency to want to short-circuit the process and leap
| intuitively to the "solution" at the end of the cycle. Talented,
| experienced, and ignorant all end up looking like P-A-P-A (or
| just AAAA with a spectacular thud at the end when things finally
| hit the fan).
|
| The author "recommended a process of "deductive destruction":
| paying attention to your own assumptions and biases, then finding
| fundamental mental models to replace them." -- going to borrow a
| few ideas from the article and try a different approach for a few
| of our Mavericks...
|
| [0] https://asq.org/quality-resources/pdca-cycle
| goliatone wrote:
| PDCA sounds to me like it would fit with the agile scrum cycle
| of plan, sprint, review and retro? I would not be surprised if
| scrum is just repackaging
| Jtsummers wrote:
| I'm not sure Scrum is a repackaging, but it frustrates me
| that more people aren't familiar with the Deming-Shewart
| cycle (PDCA) which leads neatly into the Toyota Production
| System and Lean.
| mellosouls wrote:
| For martial arts practitioners (or just those interested in the
| subject or self defence etc), Rory Miller uses the OODA loop for
| framing some of his advice in his Meditations on Violence:
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3396377-meditations-on-v...
| vr46 wrote:
| In the UK we have advanced motorcycle training that uses the
| IPSGA loop:
|
| * Information * Position * Speed * Gear * Acceleration
|
| Bikers are probably more prone to injury and death than your
| average fighter pilot, too.
| karmakaze wrote:
| I'm going to attempt to consciously apply this to my StarCraft II
| playing and see if I make faster progress.
| dingosity wrote:
| As it turns out, John Boyd went to flight school w/ my dad and we
| saw quite a bit of him when they were both working on the F-15
| program. I still literally have the scars.
|
| OODA by itself is simplistic, but it was part of a larger
| presentation called "Patterns of Conflict," and you should
| probably look at that presentation before deciding what OODA
| means.
|
| I found a printed copy from my dad's records that's not quite as
| long as the one I found online (and heck, maybe there are later
| versions available as well.)
|
| Anyway... it might be useful to read this to get an idea of the
| original context of the "OODA Loop."
|
| https://geekboss.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/patterns-of-...
| [I have no affiliation w/ geekboss. they were just the first hit
| when i searched "patterns of conflict presentation"]
|
| Also, here's "Destruction and Creation," which was more popular
| among staff officers I came in contact with.
| http://www.goalsys.com/books/documents/DESTRUCTION_AND_CREAT...
|
| There are a lot of "applying OODA to business" type blog posts
| and presentations. I'm not sure I'm qualified to evaluate their
| value, but for me, getting the extra context of what was going on
| in the Air Force in the early 70s into the 80s was useful in
| understanding the meaning and intent of what Boyd wrote about
| "OODA."
| pretendscholar wrote:
| >Although Boyd is regarded as a military strategist, he didn't
| confine himself to any particular discipline. His theories
| encompass ideas drawn from various disciplines, including
| mathematical logic, biology, psychology, thermodynamics, game
| theory, anthropology, and physics.
|
| This guy is really setting off my bs radar. Godel's theorem,
| Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, entropy, this is like gpt-
| reddit.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| The OODA loop is just entry-level cybernetics; it describes a
| single (negative/balancing/homeostatic) feedback loop. Knowing
| OODA is a good start for learning about the mechanics of self
| correcting systems but for some reason cybernetics doesn't come
| up often in association with it. It's like learning how to code a
| todo list but not knowing that more advanced programs are
| possible because you're not aware that what you're doing is a
| small part of a whole field called "programming".
| retrocryptid wrote:
| There's source material the FS blog isn't giving you. You
| probably want to read that before saying "OODA is just
| Cybernetics." Having read both Norbert Weiner and John Boyd, I
| can assure you there's more to it than what's presented by the
| fs.blog link. Though... yes... Cybernetics cut a swath through
| Systems Command in the 60s and 70s, but if you slog through
| dissertations at the Air War College, you'll find several
| critiques of Cybernetics for it's lack of descriptive power in
| an environment with incomplete information.
|
| See Lind's Manouver Warfare Handbook for more details.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| Thanks, I'll check it out. For what it's worth I agree that
| cybernetics alone isn't as useful for describing complex
| systems as it is for designing adaptive processes like OODA.
| That's more the realm of systems dynamics and causal
| analysis.
| rootsudo wrote:
| As with many things in aviation, it's checklist, redundancy and
| training.
|
| Things go wrong with you skip one and become very expensive or
| deadly quick.
| cratermoon wrote:
| "Because they're developed and tested in the relentless
| laboratory of conflict, military mental models have practical
| applications far beyond their original context."
|
| Really? How does that follow? Just because a process has been
| optimized for effectiveness in one area doesn't make it easily
| generalizable. It's probably more likely to be less effective, or
| even worse, outside the specific realm.
| [deleted]
| hedgew wrote:
| OODA loop is often hyped, but really it is just a description of
| how humans (and animals) behave in almost any situation. "Look,
| Think, Decide, Act" in other words.
|
| It's not valuable in the sense that you can "practice" or "apply"
| the loop and perform better. Your behavior already follows this
| model. Its real value probably came from presenting this common
| decision making process in a way that appealed to upper military
| management, which made it easier to develop processes and
| practices that help decision makers (like pilots) in critical
| situations.
| elethon wrote:
| It might be overhyped but that doesn't mean there's nothing
| valuable in the model. While it might describe how the world
| works, it is also intended to bring your attention to
| specifics. For instance, maybe you don't do a great job of
| actually looking (observing as it's called in the model). If
| you have this model in your head to refer to, you can stop and
| think "Wait, I need to make sure that I'm considering all the
| relevant evidence before acting".
| g_sch wrote:
| The reason the OODA loop was useful, though, is because it took
| a decision-making process that was normally used by individuals
| and brought it into organizations. It seeks to answer the
| question: how do we minimize the overhead cost of making
| decisions in large organizations without compromising on
| effectiveness? Given that it originated in the military, the
| lack of a "wait for orders" step is what's notable.
| [deleted]
| 1123581321 wrote:
| The loop is not (usually) executed sequentially, in nature or
| in human tactical training.
|
| Boyd's thinking was useful in the military bureaucracy to make
| the right types of aircraft that would support high
| maneuverability and rapid decision making. Training to excel in
| use of new aircraft only came naturally to the pilots to a
| certain point, and this is still true today.
|
| However, it's true that OODA skills like rapid re-orientation
| are often best taught to humans by putting the right kind of
| pressure on them so that their instincts will be honed in a
| useful way, although mastery requires thinking about and tuning
| those instincts as well.
| gpm wrote:
| I've never been in an organization that needs this sort of
| model, but my assumption was it was more about what not to do.
| Don't second guess yourself endlessly, don't panic, don't
| reminisce about what could have been, don't blindly repeat your
| last action, don't freeze, etc. In high stress situations
| people tend to do dumb things, this sounds to me like an
| attempt to say "don't do that" without saying the word "don't"
| or specifying the "that".
| beckingz wrote:
| Sufficiently large organizations easily panic, second guess
| themselves, etc.
|
| Formalizing the decision making process helps get to the
| point where you can make a decision. In risk averse
| organizations, this is extremely valuable.
| arethuza wrote:
| Pretty sure I have met people who tended to do "Act, Look,
| Think, Decide" in that order!
|
| i.e. Do something daft, look at what they had done, think about
| the consequences and decide whether to admit to the mistake ;-)
| JshWright wrote:
| As long as you keep the "act" small in scale (and you
| continue to loop through the steps), this is probably the
| best approach in most circumstances. If for no other reason
| than is break you out of the initial tendency many people
| have to freeze when confronted with crisis.
| arethuza wrote:
| I'm sure I've been told by someone who had been trained as
| an officer in the British army that they were very much
| trained to have a "Bias for Action" - i.e. the worst thing
| you could in most situations would be to get caught in
| their version of "analysis paralysis". Of course, he told
| me this with impeccable self deprecating humour (presumably
| also part of their training) - so difficult to tell how
| serious he was being.
| JshWright wrote:
| Yeah, my take also comes from prior training (as a
| firefighter/paramedic). Start moving towards/away from
| the problem (which direction depends on your own personal
| defaults and risk tolerance). You don't need to figure
| everything out before you start moving.
| touisteur wrote:
| I heard the same from an ebola containment expert. Can't
| locate the interview now but it felt borne from hard-
| earned experience.
| fluidcruft wrote:
| It's the same when run as a loop though, so it's just a
| difference in opinion about where the loop started.
|
| ...), (Act, Look, Think, Decide, (Act, Look, Think, Decide),
| (Act, Look, ...
|
| ..., Act), (Look, Think, Decide, Act), (Look, Think, Decide,
| Act), (Look, ...
| chrisseaton wrote:
| People were doing manoeuvre warfare for thousands of years
| before Boyd, as well. People think nobody had any idea what
| they were doing before OODA. And don't get me started on people
| who think manoeuvre warfare was invented by Ender...
| kirse wrote:
| That's a bit underselling it, like saying _" E = mc^2 is just a
| description of how light behaves"_ and sweeping it under the
| rug as if the explanatory model provides no additional benefit.
|
| The value comes from the ability to consciously influence the
| various stages of the process instead of it simply being
| subconsciously driven. In fact, you can practice and apply the
| stages of the loop better - for example, making a list of
| questions you'd like to ask yourself during the observe phase
| in a given scenario. You practice consciously asking yourself
| observation questions enough and in time the brain integrates
| that into the subconscious processing loop.
| Y_Y wrote:
| It not a description of how light behaves at all.
| sjwest wrote:
| I agree that the OODA theory is in line with what any behaviour
| is. I think the real value of it is with its implementation :
| "Fail fast, fail often" and agile mentality is born from this
| original theory, and I think these tactics are invaluable for
| rapid progress.
|
| I think this also makes OODA an effective strategy: being able
| to conceptualise the whole system/problem in a holistic manner,
| and being able to quickly ascertain what are the important
| variables/factors, and therefore what you need do to to achieve
| the greatest impact/effect in line with your goal. This is, in
| my view, the whole point of OODA, and this takes a shrewd
| intellect and a lot of practice to get good at!
|
| This kind of goes beyond the basic OODA acronym, but
| consideration of approach through each of the OODA stages is
| where the value of this theory resides. Indeed I try to
| implement this approach in my work as a scientist each day!
| WJW wrote:
| While I agree that the OODA loop is most often presented as a
| (fairly obvious) decision model for individuals, the model
| itself is not the big idea. Rather, the primary value comes
| from the realization that in a competition (like war, or
| business, or sports, etc) between two or more
| individuals/groups the ones who can "cycle through" the OODA
| loop will be able to adapt faster and often gain the upper hand
| through superior decision making.
|
| In the context of the military, there are ways of reorganizing
| your command structure to enable faster OODA loop cycling. For
| example, a major driver of the "slowness" of traditional armies
| is their centralization of command. Propagating new intel up
| the chain and orders down to the troops takes a lot of time,
| especially when intermediate nodes keep dropping out. If you
| can delegate your decision making to the lowest possible level,
| this will make the average decision slightly worse, but because
| you can make each decision much faster you can still come out
| ahead overall. This is one of the ways an organization can
| "practice" the loop. (And coincidentally, one that growing
| startups often struggle with since it is very difficult to
| transition from direct command to delegation based command)
|
| I also don't agree with your claim that you can't "practice"
| the loop on an individual level. Anyone who suffers from
| indecision in the face of uncertainty and overwhelming options
| ("analysis paralysis") should know that it is something you get
| better at over time, especially when you need to be doing it
| under time pressure.
|
| Source: Was a Navy officer for 14 years, we had tons of
| discussions of "how to get into the opponents loop" during
| briefings and trainings. Note that in the military it is
| sometimes possible to actively slow down the opponents OODA
| looping, something that is probably illegal for most civilian
| companies. (Though see
| https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/ for
| a legal example)
| mamon wrote:
| > delegate your decision making to the lowest possible level
| [...] this will make the average decision slightly worse.
|
| I don't think that's necessarily true. Information going up
| the chain of command will always be a bit outdated,
| distorted, and incomplete (unless you can just live-stream
| video with sound to your command center). So with properly
| trained soldiers decisions made at lower level can actually
| be better than those made by higher-ups.
| WJW wrote:
| The soldiers on the ground can make better decisions about
| their own situation, yes. On the other hand, they will
| never know whether they could be even more useful 100 km
| further down south unless HQ tells them. Whether that kind
| of information actually matters changes from operation to
| operation.
| EthanHeilman wrote:
| >I also don't agree with your claim that you can't "practice"
| the loop on an individual level.
|
| To further agree with what you are saying...
|
| In many sports: people put work in to run their OODA loop
| faster even they don't call it that. People watch videos of
| their opponents to learn how to more quickly orient their
| opponents actions with the context of the sport.
|
| In engineering: unittests, debuggers and IDEs are all
| designed to provide information that allows a faster OODA
| loop.
|
| The idea of rapid iteration is based on the idea in
| exploratory settings with low information a faster OODA loop
| is often better than a smarter but slower OODA loop.
| npatrick04 wrote:
| One of the best ways to slow down an opponents OODA loop in
| soccer is to choose inconsistent actions from play to play.
| As a forward receiving the ball from defense: dribble (with
| speed changes), pass back, pass across, etc.
|
| It was pretty awesome hearing my son's team making this
| type of observation on the field as the opposition repeated
| the same offensive play, and adapt their response.
| yowlingcat wrote:
| Great point and part of why I've increasingly developed a
| preference for Kanban and optimizing cycle time at
| organizations I've worked at. There's a great blog post [1]
| that popped up in my network which I think does an excellent
| job of describing this in a very visual, tangible manner.
|
| [1] https://erikbern.com/2019/10/16/buffet-lines-are-
| terrible.ht...
| peatmoss wrote:
| I recently listened to a podcast that talked about the strengths
| of this model, but then also talked about the kinds of problems
| where OODA loops are a poor fit:
|
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000sr4s
| parkersweb wrote:
| Seconded - I particularly enjoyed the references to how OODA
| was applied by Dominic Cummings in the Brexit vote campaign -
| but also how that same thinking is flawed when faced with
| everyday running of government.
| [deleted]
| chriselles wrote:
| I'm a non-resident fellow at the Krulak Center for Creativity &
| Innovative, Marine Corps University.
|
| It wasn't just fighter pilots, the United States Marine Corps
| were deeply influenced by John Boyd's work and his body of work
| is held by MCU.
|
| Major Ian Brown has written a great book on John Boyd that is
| available free on PDF that is really quite good:
|
| https://www.usmcu.edu/Portals/218/ANewConceptionOfWar.pdf?ve...
| zoomablemind wrote:
| I agree with the points made here that OODA is just as good as
| any other mental technique acronym.
|
| The mental frameworks for decisionmaking under time constraint
| and information overload are inevitably too rational. Their main
| objective is to be able to act in progressively efficient manner.
| However simply relying on these frameworks as prescribed under
| the real constraints will lead to even higher information
| overload and thus loss of time.
|
| In fast-flowing situations human actions tend to follow the
| emotional reaction route, bypassing the the slower rational
| reasoning. Emotional route is faster, but success of such
| reaction depends heavily on the learned behavior. Closing your
| eyes to "hide" is obviously not going to help one to flee a
| danger.
|
| So, using any kind of mental framework is the most valuable in
| _training_. This helps transform the reasoned actions into
| learned behavior to be [hopefully] triggered as a reaction under
| the constraints.
| joosters wrote:
| Before stating *how* fighter pilots make fast and accurate
| decisions, surely we need to study *if* fighter pilots make fast
| and accurate decisions? I mean, do they really? What evidence is
| there that pilots are great, or even above average, decision
| makers?
| angry_octet wrote:
| What we can say is that, in the engagement scenarios we believe
| are likely, certain pilots are better than others. And by
| better I mean that the opponent dies.
|
| It is true that a computer will sometimes come up with stronger
| responses, even against strong human players, but it usually
| does this by choosing certain death for some of the pilots.
| While human pilots do accept certain death directions in combat
| (for example, to defend a high value asset like a trip
| transport), that still likely means that the planner failed.
| It's going to be interesting when we have robot planes; not
| only can they pull 10Gs for >10s, they can do it very quickly,
| and you can commit them to high risk engagements.
| edrxty wrote:
| Ding ding ding!
|
| This thread is cargo culting hard. This is just a tool for
| making decisions in stressful situations buy forcing a
| separation of planning and acting so you don't flop around
| frantically. It's not a tool for organizations or your startup.
| Maybe it works for that but its applicability to you're startup
| should be proven independently.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| OODA is related to other feedback-loop ideas like PDCA (Plan-
| Do-Check-Act, Deming/Shewart Cycle) which works at both a
| tactical and strategic level (but at obviously different
| tempos, if that's not obvious I don't know what to say). It
| should be seen primarily in contrast to two other options:
| Haphazard ad hoc, primarily reactive, approaches; long term
| commitments to plans that turn out to produce the wrong thing
| (because they lacked feedback, aka classic Waterfall).
| earthboundkid wrote:
| A lot of the discussion here is assuming that the US military
| is good at what it does, but we've been losing for twenty years
| to people who live without electricity, so either the Taliban
| has a lightning fast OODA loop or the concept is basically
| useless as applied.
| [deleted]
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