This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
The OODA Loop
Boyd hypothesized that all intelligent creatures and organizations undergo decision loops continuously as they interact within their environment. Boyd described this as four interrelated and overlapping processes that are cycled through continuously and which he called the OODA loop, depicted in Figure 2.3. These processes include the following:
Observe: The collection of all practically accessible current information. This can be anything from observed activity, unfolding conditions, known capabilities and weaknesses present, available intelligence data, and whatever else is at hand. While having lots of information can be useful, information quality is often more important. Even understanding what information you do not have can improve the efficacy of decisions.
Orient: The analysis and synthesis of information to form a mental perspective. The best way to think of this is as the context needed for making your decision. Becoming oriented to a competitive situation means bringing to bear not only previous training and experiences, but also the cultural traditions and heritage of whoever is doing the orienting—a complex interaction that each person and organization handles differently. Together with observe, orient forms the foundation for situational awareness.
Decide: Determining a course of action based upon one’s mental assessment of how likely the action is to move toward the desired outcome.
Act: Following through on a decision. The results of the action, as well as how well these results adhere to the mental model of what was expected, can be used to adjust key aspects of our orientation toward both the problem and our understanding of the greater world. This is the core of the learning process.
)
Figure 2.3 OODA loop.
Many who compare OODA to the popular PDCA cycle1 by W. Edwards Demming miss the fact that OODA makes clear that the decision process is rarely a simple one-dimensional cycle that starts with observation and ends with action. The complex lines and arrows in Boyd’s original diagram visualize the hundreds of possible loops through these simple steps in order to get to the desired outcome. As such, the most suitable path is not always the next in the list. Instead, it is the one that ensures there is sufficient alignment to the situation. That means that there will be many cases where steps are skipped, repeated, or even reversed before moving on. In some situations all steps occur simultaneously.
To help illustrate this nonlinear looping, let’s take a very simplistic example of a typical process failure.
You get an alert that appears to be a failed production service (Observe->Orient).
You decide to investigate (Decide->Observe).
Before you can act, someone points out (Observe) that the alert came from a node that was taken out of production.
As you change your investigation (Orient) you then may go to see what might have been missed to cause the spurious alert (Observe).
Then you fix it (Decide->Act).
The action will likely involve changing the way people approach pulling nodes from production (Orient).
This solution may need to be checked and tuned over time to ensure it is effective without being too cumbersome (Observe, with further possible Decide->Act->Orient->Observe cycles).
What is important to recognize is that rapidly changing conditions and information discovered along the way can change the decision maker’s alignment, leading to a new orientation. This can necessitate canceling or revising a plan of action, seeking out new information, or even throwing out decisions you may have thought you needed to make and replacing them with different and more appropriate ones. It may even require knowing when to throw away a once well-used practice in order to incorporate new learning.
With the loop in hand and understanding how changing conditions can affect the way it is traversed, Boyd became interested in exploring the ways that one could not only out-decide their opponent, but also disrupt their decision process. Was there a way to overwhelm the enemy by changing the dynamics on the battlefield beyond the enemy’s ability to decide effectively?
Boyd ultimately called this “getting inside” your opponent’s decision cycle. Increasing the rate of change beyond the enemy’s ability to adjust effectively can overwhelm their decision making enough to render them vulnerable to a nimbler opponent. He realized that the path to do this started with traversing the OODA decision loop to the target outcome faster than your opponent can.
With this knowledge, Boyd tried to identify the ingredients necessary to drive effective decision making.