OODA loop takeaways
Previously: Engage with the organisation *as it actually is*
[This post was first published on LinkedIn here – comments there welcome!]
I’m old enough to have grown up with the original BBC Radio version of Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe, and this was one of my favourite scenes (one of the several that as teenagers we would recite at school):
MARVIN: I’ve just worked out an answer to the square root of minus one.
FORD: Go and get Zaphod.
MARVIN: It’s never been worked out before. It’s always been thought impossible.
FORD: Go and get –
MARVIN: I’m going. Pausing only to reconstruct the whole infrastructure of integral mathematics in his head, he went about his humble task. Never thinking to ask for reward, recognition, or even a moment’s ease from the terrible pain in all the diodes down his left side. “Fetch Beeblebrox,” they say, and forth he goes.
“Pausing only to reconstruct the whole infrastructure of integral mathematics in his head, he went about his humble task”. That line comes to me when I think about how I first responded to John Boyd’s OODA loop, which I introduce in Chapter 2 of Wholehearted, the chapter titled “Adaptive Strategising”:
OODA loop image by Patrick Edwin Moran, after John Boyd. CC-BY 3.0. Source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loopTo understand my initial reaction, you need to know that before John Boyd became known as a military strategist, he was a fighter pilot. Looking at the Orient part of that picture, did he – mid combat, and before executing his next move – pause only to reconstruct the entire infrastructure of cultural traditions, genetic heritage, etc on which his performance was founded? Doing that faster than his adversary – “getting inside their OODA loop”, as the popular takeaway goes – is that what was key to his survival?
To some extent perhaps, but that is, I think, to miss the point. Acting in the moment, a highly trained pilot draws on what they know. Flashes of insight may occur, but most of the learning comes afterwards, reflecting on what happened, integrating the experience and the new information that it generated. That’s a much longer loop than the moment-to-moment decision-making of combat.
There is no adversary whose OODA loop you need to get inside!
Mercifully (and I don’t say this lightly), most of us will never experience combat. Our situations are not even best understood as adversarial. There is no adversary whose OODA loop you need to get inside! But, and paraphrasing if not directly quoting Boyd himself, we do need to “develop our capacity for independent action”. We need somehow to stay in the game when the game itself may be changing, and that Orient box – the only one that connects to all the others – is crucial.
Boyd was right: it is important to bear in mind that the understanding and the intelligence on which our strategies depend are very much products of the past – of our “tradition” and “heritage”, if you like. For your organisation, how it thinks depends very much on the path it has travelled. Moreover, its current structure and its priorities speak to how it now understands the world and its challenges. And therein lies another challenge: let it not be forgotten that they are significant constraints on what new intelligence and insights it will be capable of gathering and generating.
Effective strategising must therefore be conscious of the fact that everything that it thinks it knows is not only very incomplete, it has passed through perceptual filters that are both narrow and path-dependent. You can’t escape that, but you can act accordingly. Not as catchy as the popular takeaway, but that, for me, is the one to remember.
Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation hit Amazon earlier this month. You can find both print and Kindle editions on amazon.co.uk, amazon.com, amazon.de and other Amazon sites around the world. The e-book is also available on LeanPub, Kobo, Apple Books, and Google Play Books.
Previously: Engage with the organisation *as it actually is*
