8 ms·

How to Keep Your Company Alive – Observe, Orient, Decide and Act

219 points by weinzierl 7y ago

mlthoughts2018 7y ago
> “ Notice that the word speed appears twice. This is not the time for committees, study groups or widespread consensus building. Even with imperfect information, the future of your company depends on your ability to make rapid decisions and start acting.” Yikes. I guess principled decisions have to go? Executive authority! It reminds me of the president in The Simpsons Movie... “I was elected to lead, not to read.”
- asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
  A few issues: 1. A decision isn't automatically more principled because it is made by a committee/consensus. Often the opposite is the case. 2. The purpose of the firm is to make money/value for shareholders, not principled decisions. If making principled decisions gets in the way of the goal, principled decisions are what should slip. 3. At least in the US, companies are generally not organized as democracies, so even if executives sometimes choose to delegate their authority to committees, that arrangement is always subject to revocation in extraordinary times.
- kop316 7y ago
  The OODA loop was invented by Col. John Boyd during the Vietnam War and is being adapted here for the business environment. The point is for some hard decisions, you will have to act on imperfect or incomplete information. A good leader will make a decision, because doing nothing and hoping you get more info will in fact be worse than making the wrong decision. As you get more information, you can then alter or tailor your decision. This is especially true in a military environment. For an example in a popular movie, look at 1st Lieutenant Norman S. Dike Jr. in Band of Brothers.
  - meheleventyone 7y ago
    Isn't the point of getting inside the opponents OODA loop to force them to make decisions faster than they are able to sensibly and ergo force wrong decisions. If you get inside your own loop by hurrying your decision making forcing wrong decisions how is that sensible? It also seems obviously untrue that acting on a wrong decision is better than doing nothing. The results of a wrong decision could of course be worse than the results of not making a decision in haste. If you're already at the point of being forced to make decisions then you've already screwed up? You're being reactive.
    - kop316 7y ago
      >Isn't the point of getting inside the opponents OODA loop to force them to make decisions faster than they are able to sensibly and ergo force wrong decisions. If you get inside your own loop by hurrying your decision making forcing wrong decisions how is that sensible? Nope. The point is if I am inside their OODA loop, I can make decisions and react quicker than the adversary. Now they are reacting to my decisions and I have the advantage. > It also seems obviously untrue that acting on a wrong decision is better than doing nothing. The results of a wrong decision could of course be worse than the results of not making a decision in haste. The keyword there is "could be". That's what makes leadership hard. You have to know when is enough information to make a decision, and when you need to wait. Or if you made the wrong decision, what can you do now? EDIT: For an example, there's a small brewery down the street that cannot can all of their beer. Making beer takes 3 weeks at least. So there's predictions of COVID-19 ending in May to Sept. So what is the right choice? Do I hope that it ends early and brew beer in a couple of weeks, or do I wait until Sept? What about all of the perishable supplies I have now? It does me a lot more harm to wait until the "all clear" and then order supplies. Why? Everybody else will do the same thing, and now I am out of beer for three weeks (and longer for other beer). That is a lot of revenue left on the table lost. What about making it now? Well if I am too hasty, now I have beer that will skunk because I cannot sell it fast enough. So the brewery owner needs to see what info they have now (obverse, orient), and decide and act. What will cost me more money?
      - meheleventyone 7y ago
sumanthvepa 7y ago
Some changes in the business environment seem non-intuitive. My cloud migration consulting work (which I thankfully do remotely) has seen a quick uptick. A lot of customers want to migrate to cheaper clouds or reduce their cloud footprint. I was expecting not have much work as many of my startup clients see revenue pressure. But in the short term a few months the opposite may happen.
HugoDaniel 7y ago
...that and money
jph 7y ago
The title quote "observe, orient, decide, act" is called the OODA loop, and it turns out the OODA loop is significantly more valuable than the article lets on. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop The OODA loop was developed by military strategist John Boyd, to explain how to direct one's energies to defeat an adversary and survive. Boyd emphasized that "the loop" is actually a set of interacting loops that are to be kept in continuous operation during combat. Boyd also indicated that the phase of the battle has an important bearing on the ideal allocation of one's energies. Boyd's views on the OODA loop are much deeper, richer, and more comprehensive than the common interpretation of the "rapid OODA loop" idea.
- DennisP 7y ago
  A great book on applying Boyd's ideas to business is Certain to Win by Chet Richards.
- pedrocr 7y ago
  Steve Blank is well aware of that. It seems it was used in the title but not explicitly in the body. He's written about it in the past though: https://steveblank.com/2015/03/31/hacking-for-defense-in-silicon-valley/ https://steveblank.com/2015/03/31/hacking-for-defense-in-sil...
- hammock 7y ago
  I highly recommend the biography "Boyd" about this man. I think I got the initial reco from this site.
  - zigzaggy 7y ago
    Agree with this recommendation. Excellent book, great story. Very interesting career.
  - WalterBright 7y ago
    Boyd was an amazing man and his biography is a must read for anyone who wants to accomplish the impossible in life. https://www.amazon.com/Boyd-Fighter-Pilot-Who-Changed/dp/B01I5OK43U/ https://www.amazon.com/Boyd-Fighter-Pilot-Who-Changed/dp/B01...
jezclaremurugan 7y ago
In Akamai the mantra is - Stabilize, Adapt, Emerge
philosophygeek 7y ago
We've had 10 years of frothiness in venture markets. Many employees under 30 don't even know what a downturn looks like. They're used to high pay, constant calls from recruiters, and venture capital flowing into their companies. Even the companies who flop, no big deal, just go down the street to the next company. I worry that that generation is going to have the most difficulty with these changes. They'll wonder why things are contracting, why difficult decisions need to be made, can't we just wait this one out...? I've never seen anything like COVID-19. I lived through the dot-com bubble, watching friends who want from an IPO party to crying and packing up their car back to Iowa within 6-months. Tech contracted and survived. Then there was the 2008 financial crisis. In that case, the damage was spread out beyond tech centers. Capital markets dried up and life seemed very uncertain for awhile. With COVID-19, we went from extreme prosperity to an unprecedented shutdown of global economies with massive uncertainty as to how long this will last. Every business will be affected, the vast majority of them negatively. I really wonder whether everyone is prepared for what it means to live in scarcity instead of abundance.
- Ididntdothis 7y ago
  “We've had 10 years of frothiness in venture markets. Many employees under 30 don't even know what a downturn looks like. They're used to high pay, constant calls from recruiters, and venture capital flowing into their companies. Even the companies who flop, no big deal, just go down the street to the next company. I worry that that generation is going to have the most difficulty with these changes. They'll wonder why things are contracting, why difficult decisions need to be made, can't we just wait this one out...?“ I went through this in 2002. It took me a long time to accept that the good life in the years before wasn’t because I was so smart but because of a favorable market. It was quite a shock to actually having trouble finding something new and also to accept that my pay was significantly lower. Somebody told me at that time “now you see how job search always has been for most of us”.
  - aidos 7y ago
    We've been trying to hire since last year and have really struggled because rates devs have been looking for on the market are well above what we could see them returning value-wise for their experience level (that's just the nature of the market, I get it). When you have people getting £130k for doing React at a fintech company... well, I just hope people are prepared for the market changes that are underway. Honestly, I'd rather this was all over and things went back to normal, but I do think that there's going to be a fairly hard reset of salaries for people that previously had a really sweet ride.
tyingq 7y ago
I imagine in many cases, what they chose to do in the past matters more than what they are doing now...in terms of survival. Cash reserves, assets you can get loans on, percentage of workforce that are contractors or professional services, flexible contracts, reasonable real estate costs, for example.
notacoward 7y ago
I thought the OODA concept was pretty cool when I first read about it and John Boyd. And it's fun to say. OODA Loop, OODA Loop, OODA Loop. But it has been seriously overused, to the point where nowadays it's just a shibboleth that "thought leaders" use to show their "edginess" or whatever. The problem is that "orient" has no real meaning in most decision-making contexts, and watching people stretch it to fit is almost painful. Sure, if you adopt exactly the right point in the word's semantic field, and carefully distinguish it from its neighbors (Observe and Decide), and squint a bit, it can make sense, but good metaphors or acronyms don't work like that. They don't require a High Priest to provide interpretation. A better metaphor, which I learned in a talk on autonomous computers at a UC Berkeley CS retreat in ~2001, is: * Measure * Analyze * Plan * Execute I might not have remembered the terminology exactly, let alone the acronym, but I think it's close. Steps 1/3/4 are roughly equivalent to the same in OODA, but step 2 is quite different. More about accuracy/completeness than about rapidity, though of course both are always important. I suppose one could substitute different words to make a catchier acronym like MAKE or MACE. If increasing dilettante appeal seems important, feel free. For me, the important thing is that we're not all fighter pilots and it's OK to have a qualitatively different decision process. Come up with your own metaphor, your own acronym, that fits your situation intuitively without such arduous adaptation.
- dataatemytime 7y ago
  Identifying the system and in particular the closed feedback loops is a great learning from Boyd's OODA model; what is critical though is identifying and optimising out (well, minimising to the best of your ability) the entropy that inhibits iteration and degrades overall system performance.
- nicwolff 7y ago
  OODA is certainly overused but "Orient" is hardly a mystery or metaphor – Boyd described it as the continuous re-evaluation of your "Cultural Traditions", "Genetic Heritage", "Previous Experience", "Analysis/Synthesis", and "New Information", and explained each of those in detail.
  - 7y ago
_curious_ 7y ago
"Your revenue plans are no longer valid." Probably my favorite line in the script :)
- hef19898 7y ago
  If they were in the first place, that is!
kerng 7y ago
Not a single reference to the actual creator of this model, John Boyd, a fighter pilot.
danaliv 7y ago
A similar model taught to pilots is DECIDE: - Detect that change has occurred - Estimate the need to counter or react to the change - Choose a desirable outcome - Identify actions to achieve the outcome - Do the necessary action - Evaluate the effects of the action It suffers a bit from being a backronym, and I don't know anyone who explicitly applies it "in real life," but I do emphasize the last item with students because it's so often overlooked. A lot of people will see a need for a change, do something to make the change, and then fail to notice that the desired outcome wasn't achieved. I see this omission in software systems a lot too, which manifests as a lack of monitoring, control, verification, and/or alerting. An ETL process that doesn't verify the correctness of its output, for example.
kirse 7y ago
There's no doubt action (and speed of adaptability) is important, but I'd also highlight a 2nd virtue - patience. Action for the sake of action is called panic. People who like to control things (executives, leaders, me, etc) often feel like they need to be doing something to have a sense of control in the midst of chaos. The only thing that needs action right now is triage - cost-cutting. Cash flow to survive and keep payroll going for the next 12-18 months. Once the safety net is in place, the mood changes from frantic survival to calm. At that point, the ratio of thinking:acting time should arguably double. Recessions take plenty of time to unwind. Take 30 days (not 2) to gather information from across the org and evaluate trending opportunities. “Measure twice, cut once.” applies to pivots, too. Re-developing new models for recognizing opportunities and a new decision framework for when to act upon those opportunities takes time. The folks who spend more time thinking about where the puck is going to be vs. reacting to its every jitter are the ones who will come out ahead.
- takinola 7y ago
  This is such an important point. However, sticking to the "panic only as much as needed" idea is difficult because, sometimes, incentives are skewed to reward panic. Think about all the laws that are passed without regard to the side-effects because "someone ought to do something about this". In peacetime, prepare for war. Before the crisis hits, you should take the time to think through how you and the people around you need to behave and what is likely to trip you up. Don't assume you will do the right thing. Plan to do the right thing.
  - kqr 7y ago
    Or as Deming liked to say, "Don't just do something -- stand there!"
arctangent 7y ago
While OODA is an interesting and increasingly popular concept, it is really only useful when applied to very short intervals of time. You can and should expect that an opponent with "a reasonable amount" of time will make the correct response. In business that timeframe is much longer than the few minutes or seconds a modern aerial duel might be concluded in. The general idea of OODA is that if you can "play fast" you can beat someone who can otherwise "play better". Think about how blitz chess differs from traditional multi-hour games, even though the rules of play are the same: for example it is often possible to exert time pressure by playing "confusing moves". This concept of "fast play" translates into the business timeframe more as the concept of "agility" (to be contrasted with large-company "inertia"), whereas businesses only try to confuse one another on television or by accident :-) Concepts similar to OODA but more applicable to a business context and timeframe would include PDCA [1] and DMAIC [2]. PDCA a.k.a. the "Deming cycle" stands for "Plan, Do, Check, Adjust" and is closely related to the concept of "kaizen" [3] (or "continuous improvement"). PDCA happens in timeframes that can best be described as a "short project" (or a "kaizen event"). DMAIC ("Define, Measure, Analyse, Improve, Control") on the other hand is a framework commonly used for larger business interventions where the stakes are higher, more project members are needed, more structure is required and so on. It is a key feature of the Six Sigma [4] approach as well as Lean Six Sigma [5]. Note: I'm sure there are other valid approaches too. I'm just mentioning the ones I am familiar with in case anyone else is interested in methods to help businesses improve and respond to change. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDCA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDCA [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMAIC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMAIC [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaizen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaizen [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Sigma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Sigma [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean_Six_Sigma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean_Six_Sigma
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
eric_b 7y ago
A similar title for this article could be: "How to bodysurf your way out of a tsunami" Good luck, you're screwed. If you're a cash flow negative startup even slightly tangentially related to an industry impacted severely by COVID, you're done. This economic shutdown is end of days for a huge number of small businesses. The media is hyping shutdown until at least May, but I'm seeing more "June and on". If that comes to pass, there will be very few small businesses left standing in the heavily impacted industries. It's going to kill a lot of otherwise healthy businesses too. The stimulus is mostly a feel good measure for politicians. How many of you have gotten your checks? How many have applied for EIDL loans and received them? How's the PPP going? Oh I'm sure they'll iron out the kinks, but it'll be too little too late. Hope ya'll are up to date on your Steinbeck, because that's what's coming.
oneVoiceOnHN 7y ago
Unemployed Engineer here. I can also sew. Not sure what I should be doing. Should I make non government certified masks?
- ckdarby 7y ago
  >Not sure what I should be doing. Set up a schedule to modernize your skills and start applying to remote first companies. >Should I make non government certified masks? Yes, in the unscheduled time.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

219 points by weinzierl 7y ago

mlthoughts2018 7y ago

> “ Notice that the word speed appears twice. This is not the time for committees, study groups or widespread consensus building. Even with imperfect information, the future of your company depends on your ability to make rapid decisions and start acting.” Yikes. I guess principled decisions have to go? Executive authority! It reminds me of the president in The Simpsons Movie... “I was elected to lead, not to read.”

asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
A few issues: 1. A decision isn't automatically more principled because it is made by a committee/consensus. Often the opposite is the case. 2. The purpose of the firm is to make money/value for shareholders, not principled decisions. If making principled decisions gets in the way of the goal, principled decisions are what should slip. 3. At least in the US, companies are generally not organized as democracies, so even if executives sometimes choose to delegate their authority to committees, that arrangement is always subject to revocation in extraordinary times.
kop316 7y ago
The OODA loop was invented by Col. John Boyd during the Vietnam War and is being adapted here for the business environment. The point is for some hard decisions, you will have to act on imperfect or incomplete information. A good leader will make a decision, because doing nothing and hoping you get more info will in fact be worse than making the wrong decision. As you get more information, you can then alter or tailor your decision. This is especially true in a military environment. For an example in a popular movie, look at 1st Lieutenant Norman S. Dike Jr. in Band of Brothers.
- meheleventyone 7y ago
  Isn't the point of getting inside the opponents OODA loop to force them to make decisions faster than they are able to sensibly and ergo force wrong decisions. If you get inside your own loop by hurrying your decision making forcing wrong decisions how is that sensible? It also seems obviously untrue that acting on a wrong decision is better than doing nothing. The results of a wrong decision could of course be worse than the results of not making a decision in haste. If you're already at the point of being forced to make decisions then you've already screwed up? You're being reactive.
  - kop316 7y ago
    >Isn't the point of getting inside the opponents OODA loop to force them to make decisions faster than they are able to sensibly and ergo force wrong decisions. If you get inside your own loop by hurrying your decision making forcing wrong decisions how is that sensible? Nope. The point is if I am inside their OODA loop, I can make decisions and react quicker than the adversary. Now they are reacting to my decisions and I have the advantage. > It also seems obviously untrue that acting on a wrong decision is better than doing nothing. The results of a wrong decision could of course be worse than the results of not making a decision in haste. The keyword there is "could be". That's what makes leadership hard. You have to know when is enough information to make a decision, and when you need to wait. Or if you made the wrong decision, what can you do now? EDIT: For an example, there's a small brewery down the street that cannot can all of their beer. Making beer takes 3 weeks at least. So there's predictions of COVID-19 ending in May to Sept. So what is the right choice? Do I hope that it ends early and brew beer in a couple of weeks, or do I wait until Sept? What about all of the perishable supplies I have now? It does me a lot more harm to wait until the "all clear" and then order supplies. Why? Everybody else will do the same thing, and now I am out of beer for three weeks (and longer for other beer). That is a lot of revenue left on the table lost. What about making it now? Well if I am too hasty, now I have beer that will skunk because I cannot sell it fast enough. So the brewery owner needs to see what info they have now (obverse, orient), and decide and act. What will cost me more money?
    - meheleventyone 7y ago

sumanthvepa 7y ago

Some changes in the business environment seem non-intuitive. My cloud migration consulting work (which I thankfully do remotely) has seen a quick uptick. A lot of customers want to migrate to cheaper clouds or reduce their cloud footprint. I was expecting not have much work as many of my startup clients see revenue pressure. But in the short term a few months the opposite may happen.

HugoDaniel 7y ago

...that and money

jph 7y ago

The title quote "observe, orient, decide, act" is called the OODA loop, and it turns out the OODA loop is significantly more valuable than the article lets on. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop The OODA loop was developed by military strategist John Boyd, to explain how to direct one's energies to defeat an adversary and survive. Boyd emphasized that "the loop" is actually a set of interacting loops that are to be kept in continuous operation during combat. Boyd also indicated that the phase of the battle has an important bearing on the ideal allocation of one's energies. Boyd's views on the OODA loop are much deeper, richer, and more comprehensive than the common interpretation of the "rapid OODA loop" idea.

DennisP 7y ago
A great book on applying Boyd's ideas to business is Certain to Win by Chet Richards.
pedrocr 7y ago
Steve Blank is well aware of that. It seems it was used in the title but not explicitly in the body. He's written about it in the past though: https://steveblank.com/2015/03/31/hacking-for-defense-in-silicon-valley/ https://steveblank.com/2015/03/31/hacking-for-defense-in-sil...
hammock 7y ago
I highly recommend the biography "Boyd" about this man. I think I got the initial reco from this site.
- zigzaggy 7y ago
  Agree with this recommendation. Excellent book, great story. Very interesting career.
- WalterBright 7y ago
  Boyd was an amazing man and his biography is a must read for anyone who wants to accomplish the impossible in life. https://www.amazon.com/Boyd-Fighter-Pilot-Who-Changed/dp/B01I5OK43U/ https://www.amazon.com/Boyd-Fighter-Pilot-Who-Changed/dp/B01...

jezclaremurugan 7y ago

In Akamai the mantra is - Stabilize, Adapt, Emerge

philosophygeek 7y ago

We've had 10 years of frothiness in venture markets. Many employees under 30 don't even know what a downturn looks like. They're used to high pay, constant calls from recruiters, and venture capital flowing into their companies. Even the companies who flop, no big deal, just go down the street to the next company. I worry that that generation is going to have the most difficulty with these changes. They'll wonder why things are contracting, why difficult decisions need to be made, can't we just wait this one out...? I've never seen anything like COVID-19. I lived through the dot-com bubble, watching friends who want from an IPO party to crying and packing up their car back to Iowa within 6-months. Tech contracted and survived. Then there was the 2008 financial crisis. In that case, the damage was spread out beyond tech centers. Capital markets dried up and life seemed very uncertain for awhile. With COVID-19, we went from extreme prosperity to an unprecedented shutdown of global economies with massive uncertainty as to how long this will last. Every business will be affected, the vast majority of them negatively. I really wonder whether everyone is prepared for what it means to live in scarcity instead of abundance.

Ididntdothis 7y ago
“We've had 10 years of frothiness in venture markets. Many employees under 30 don't even know what a downturn looks like. They're used to high pay, constant calls from recruiters, and venture capital flowing into their companies. Even the companies who flop, no big deal, just go down the street to the next company. I worry that that generation is going to have the most difficulty with these changes. They'll wonder why things are contracting, why difficult decisions need to be made, can't we just wait this one out...?“ I went through this in 2002. It took me a long time to accept that the good life in the years before wasn’t because I was so smart but because of a favorable market. It was quite a shock to actually having trouble finding something new and also to accept that my pay was significantly lower. Somebody told me at that time “now you see how job search always has been for most of us”.
- aidos 7y ago
  We've been trying to hire since last year and have really struggled because rates devs have been looking for on the market are well above what we could see them returning value-wise for their experience level (that's just the nature of the market, I get it). When you have people getting £130k for doing React at a fintech company... well, I just hope people are prepared for the market changes that are underway. Honestly, I'd rather this was all over and things went back to normal, but I do think that there's going to be a fairly hard reset of salaries for people that previously had a really sweet ride.

tyingq 7y ago

I imagine in many cases, what they chose to do in the past matters more than what they are doing now...in terms of survival. Cash reserves, assets you can get loans on, percentage of workforce that are contractors or professional services, flexible contracts, reasonable real estate costs, for example.

notacoward 7y ago

I thought the OODA concept was pretty cool when I first read about it and John Boyd. And it's fun to say. OODA Loop, OODA Loop, OODA Loop. But it has been seriously overused, to the point where nowadays it's just a shibboleth that "thought leaders" use to show their "edginess" or whatever. The problem is that "orient" has no real meaning in most decision-making contexts, and watching people stretch it to fit is almost painful. Sure, if you adopt exactly the right point in the word's semantic field, and carefully distinguish it from its neighbors (Observe and Decide), and squint a bit, it can make sense, but good metaphors or acronyms don't work like that. They don't require a High Priest to provide interpretation. A better metaphor, which I learned in a talk on autonomous computers at a UC Berkeley CS retreat in ~2001, is: * Measure * Analyze * Plan * Execute I might not have remembered the terminology exactly, let alone the acronym, but I think it's close. Steps 1/3/4 are roughly equivalent to the same in OODA, but step 2 is quite different. More about accuracy/completeness than about rapidity, though of course both are always important. I suppose one could substitute different words to make a catchier acronym like MAKE or MACE. If increasing dilettante appeal seems important, feel free. For me, the important thing is that we're not all fighter pilots and it's OK to have a qualitatively different decision process. Come up with your own metaphor, your own acronym, that fits your situation intuitively without such arduous adaptation.

dataatemytime 7y ago
Identifying the system and in particular the closed feedback loops is a great learning from Boyd's OODA model; what is critical though is identifying and optimising out (well, minimising to the best of your ability) the entropy that inhibits iteration and degrades overall system performance.
nicwolff 7y ago
OODA is certainly overused but "Orient" is hardly a mystery or metaphor – Boyd described it as the continuous re-evaluation of your "Cultural Traditions", "Genetic Heritage", "Previous Experience", "Analysis/Synthesis", and "New Information", and explained each of those in detail.
- 7y ago

_curious_ 7y ago

"Your revenue plans are no longer valid." Probably my favorite line in the script :)

hef19898 7y ago
If they were in the first place, that is!

kerng 7y ago

Not a single reference to the actual creator of this model, John Boyd, a fighter pilot.

danaliv 7y ago

A similar model taught to pilots is DECIDE: - Detect that change has occurred - Estimate the need to counter or react to the change - Choose a desirable outcome - Identify actions to achieve the outcome - Do the necessary action - Evaluate the effects of the action It suffers a bit from being a backronym, and I don't know anyone who explicitly applies it "in real life," but I do emphasize the last item with students because it's so often overlooked. A lot of people will see a need for a change, do something to make the change, and then fail to notice that the desired outcome wasn't achieved. I see this omission in software systems a lot too, which manifests as a lack of monitoring, control, verification, and/or alerting. An ETL process that doesn't verify the correctness of its output, for example.

kirse 7y ago

There's no doubt action (and speed of adaptability) is important, but I'd also highlight a 2nd virtue - patience. Action for the sake of action is called panic. People who like to control things (executives, leaders, me, etc) often feel like they need to be doing something to have a sense of control in the midst of chaos. The only thing that needs action right now is triage - cost-cutting. Cash flow to survive and keep payroll going for the next 12-18 months. Once the safety net is in place, the mood changes from frantic survival to calm. At that point, the ratio of thinking:acting time should arguably double. Recessions take plenty of time to unwind. Take 30 days (not 2) to gather information from across the org and evaluate trending opportunities. “Measure twice, cut once.” applies to pivots, too. Re-developing new models for recognizing opportunities and a new decision framework for when to act upon those opportunities takes time. The folks who spend more time thinking about where the puck is going to be vs. reacting to its every jitter are the ones who will come out ahead.

takinola 7y ago
This is such an important point. However, sticking to the "panic only as much as needed" idea is difficult because, sometimes, incentives are skewed to reward panic. Think about all the laws that are passed without regard to the side-effects because "someone ought to do something about this". In peacetime, prepare for war. Before the crisis hits, you should take the time to think through how you and the people around you need to behave and what is likely to trip you up. Don't assume you will do the right thing. Plan to do the right thing.
- kqr 7y ago
  Or as Deming liked to say, "Don't just do something -- stand there!"

arctangent 7y ago

While OODA is an interesting and increasingly popular concept, it is really only useful when applied to very short intervals of time. You can and should expect that an opponent with "a reasonable amount" of time will make the correct response. In business that timeframe is much longer than the few minutes or seconds a modern aerial duel might be concluded in. The general idea of OODA is that if you can "play fast" you can beat someone who can otherwise "play better". Think about how blitz chess differs from traditional multi-hour games, even though the rules of play are the same: for example it is often possible to exert time pressure by playing "confusing moves". This concept of "fast play" translates into the business timeframe more as the concept of "agility" (to be contrasted with large-company "inertia"), whereas businesses only try to confuse one another on television or by accident :-) Concepts similar to OODA but more applicable to a business context and timeframe would include PDCA [1] and DMAIC [2]. PDCA a.k.a. the "Deming cycle" stands for "Plan, Do, Check, Adjust" and is closely related to the concept of "kaizen" [3] (or "continuous improvement"). PDCA happens in timeframes that can best be described as a "short project" (or a "kaizen event"). DMAIC ("Define, Measure, Analyse, Improve, Control") on the other hand is a framework commonly used for larger business interventions where the stakes are higher, more project members are needed, more structure is required and so on. It is a key feature of the Six Sigma [4] approach as well as Lean Six Sigma [5]. Note: I'm sure there are other valid approaches too. I'm just mentioning the ones I am familiar with in case anyone else is interested in methods to help businesses improve and respond to change. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDCA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDCA [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMAIC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMAIC [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaizen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaizen [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Sigma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Sigma [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean_Six_Sigma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean_Six_Sigma

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eric_b 7y ago

A similar title for this article could be: "How to bodysurf your way out of a tsunami" Good luck, you're screwed. If you're a cash flow negative startup even slightly tangentially related to an industry impacted severely by COVID, you're done. This economic shutdown is end of days for a huge number of small businesses. The media is hyping shutdown until at least May, but I'm seeing more "June and on". If that comes to pass, there will be very few small businesses left standing in the heavily impacted industries. It's going to kill a lot of otherwise healthy businesses too. The stimulus is mostly a feel good measure for politicians. How many of you have gotten your checks? How many have applied for EIDL loans and received them? How's the PPP going? Oh I'm sure they'll iron out the kinks, but it'll be too little too late. Hope ya'll are up to date on your Steinbeck, because that's what's coming.

oneVoiceOnHN 7y ago

Unemployed Engineer here. I can also sew. Not sure what I should be doing. Should I make non government certified masks?

ckdarby 7y ago
>Not sure what I should be doing. Set up a schedule to modernize your skills and start applying to remote first companies. >Should I make non government certified masks? Yes, in the unscheduled time.

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