5 ms·
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 serio
by 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 agoIdentifying 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 agoOODA 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.
- fenwick67 7y agoThis hasn't explained what "Orient" means at all, you've just piled new concepts that need explaining on top of it and said it's a summation of them.
- yaj54 7y agoI'm completely new to this acronym but I'm grokking orient as "account for your bayesian priors."
- zbobet2012 7y agoThat's about perfect
- lonelappde 7y ago"Orient" is a fancy work for "think" the obvious step between Observe and Decide In computing it's Input Compute Return Effect (output controls device drivers)
- notacoward 7y agoThere's the pain I was talking about. Ow ow ow.
- KineticLensman 7y agoI found it harder to take OODA seriously after I came across "Observe, Overreact, Deny, Apologise".
- notacoward 7y agoHAHAHA! Good one. Thank you.
- 1123581321 7y agoOODA is not executed sequentially like Measure, Analyze, Plan, and Execute and it can’t really be used without considering its interaction with an opposing process. It’s really something different. I do agree that misunderstandings of it are too popular.
- notacoward 7y agoThat's a really good point about an opposing process. Of course, there are opposing processes in business too, but I guess not the same - multiple, not always directly or continuously opposed, vs. a single implacable enemy. Do you think OODA still applies to business, or does overcoming these differences change it into something else? Not trying to be snarky or refute what you said here. I'm genuinely curious.
- 1123581321 7y agoYes, the multiple adversaries and unending situation can make it difficult to apply to business. Business also has a lot of specialized operation methods that take up all the capacity for meta discussion in many organizations. In many cases this is good, e.g., most of the benefits of Boyd’s thinking as it pertains to individual sales performance are already found in good training material. In other cases, such as the cycle of SWOT analyses followed by initiative rollouts, Boyd is nearly absent. There have been some good efforts to reframe marketing as cost-efficiently understanding and anticipating market trends in order to reliably surprise the market which are closer to Boyd’s teaching of how to gain energy advantage than to the misunderstanding of OODA as outworking the problem. In short, it just depends on the business aspect and what kind of thinking is possible by the people working on it. Edit: a simpler way to say all that might be that Boyd was too wonky for the military, so it’s even harder to apply to business. The principals can be repackaged and taught to people who don’t need to know OODA. The resentment of the people who write about OODA, in my opinion, partially comes from the knowledge that they would be unable to directly apply OODA in a real organization because they can’t teach the term without losing the full meaning. But it is possible to teach the meaning in business.
- kqr 7y agoYour sequential cycle is more common known as the Shewhart cycle, Deming cycle, or PDSA: - Plan - Do - Study - Adjust First plan an action through which you will learn something about reality, then perform that action. Study the results, and adjust your operation accordingly. This is a sequential, iterative process, though, and sufficiently different from the original OODA concept for it to be worth not conflating them.
- notacoward 7y agoThat doesn't quite seem the same. PDSA describes two phases - Plan/Do and Study/Adjust - resulting in two sets of changes to a system. They differ in the sense of big vs little, forward looking vs. backward looking, hence four total. The methodology I described results in one set of changes to the system, with a very different distinction between measurement vs. analysis vs. planning (which in PDSA subsumes the other two in the first phase). I'd say that PDSA is very different from OODA, but that's why it shouldn't even be part of this discussion.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- ksk 7y agoYou asserted it, but what makes your metaphor better? What results have you gotten out of it that everyone can learn from?
- notacoward 7y agoIt's not really about my metaphor being better, though I apply this approach to problem-solving just about every day and it has played a part in a pretty successful career. It's not even about any particular one metaphor being better. The real point is that finding a metaphor/slogan/mnemonic that can be applied usefully to a particular situation is a perilous exercise. OODA is just an example of trying too hard to "borrow success" from a completely different kind of endeavor. It sounds smart at first, but doesn't hold up to serious scrutiny.