Navigating Life's Battles: The OODA Loop Advantage
Plus using AI to accelerate the OODA Loop
Imagine you’re a jet fighter pilot engaged in a dogfight. With your opponent locked on your tail, you must make split-second life or death decisions that will determine survival and victory or defeat and death. Now take that high-pressure decision-making process and apply it to your life and the decisions you make that determine how well you survive and thrive. Welcome to the OODA Loop, a process that will enable you to better navigate your life’s battles.
Life, Death and Decision-Making
We are all goal-oriented creatures with goals and plans that, when appropriate, serve to maximize our ability to survive and thrive in our environment. Evolution has crafted us this way, killing off those who are unable to choose the right goals or determine the proper course to achieve good goals while allowing those who select the right objectives and make the right decisions survive, thrive and reproduce.
Jordan Peterson explains this with a diagram like the one below. We each live in the present, which is unsatisfactory for some reason (we are hungry, we want a promotion, we are pursuing a love interest) and all have a preferred future (eating a good meal, getting the promotion, wedding the one we love). Or in the case of the fighter pilot, the unsatisfactory present is the enemy on their tail and their preferred future is surviving the engagement and shooting down the enemy. We are all moving towards a goal we want to attain and have some type of plan to get there.
There are two takeaways here;
We need to select the right goals (B) to maximize our ability to survive and thrive
We must develop the proper plan of action to achieve those goals.
Enter the OODA Loop
How We Make Decisions: The OODA Loop Explained
The concept of the OODA Loop originated with Colonel John Boyd, a U.S. Air Force fighter pilot, a member of the “fighter mafia”, the guru behind the creation of some of America’s best fighter planes and one of the twentieth century’s leading military strategists. Boyd’s nickname was, “Forty-second Boyd,” due to his ability to win a dogfight in under 40 seconds. Much of his thinking can be applied not only to warfare but to any competitive situation; business, sports, and life itself.
Boyd developed the OODA Loop as a result of studying conflict throughout time, and especially dogfighting. He observed that the winner of any conflict moved faster through the four phases of the OODA Loop than his opponent, the four phases being Observe, Orient, Decide and Act. If a pilot could repeatedly move through a series of OODA Loops faster than the enemy, they would “get inside his opponent’s OODA Loop”, making decisions and taking action quicker than their enemy and shooting their adversary down.
The concept is not an invention. It is instead a recognition of the process which we go through each day countless times. Sometimes it’s lightning fast; I observe I’m tired, I know naps help me recover, I decide to take a nap and I go to bed. Sometimes it takes longer and requires more information-gathering, thought, and evaluation of options before making a decision, as in the process of buying a house. However, the steps in the process are the same.
Mastering the Cycle: Harnessing the Power of the Loop
Let’s look at each step of the process. While the process ostensibly begins with Observe, mastering the process calls for us to start by examining the Orient phase first, because it is the most crucial given it impacts every other phase immensely.
Orient
The orientation phase is about making sense of what is happening in the world as events transpire. It is your worldview, your Weltanschauung. It is the process from which we develop our understanding of what we are observing and create the options that go into the decide phase.
Orientation is critical because it is the filter through which everything you observe passes. If your orientation is incorrect, the entire process fails. This starts with the direction you are headed, i.e., your goals, objectives and mission. If you are focused on the wrong goals (goals that are not in synch with those of your organization, unethical ones, unrealistic objectives, ones that will compromise your health or welfare) you are doomed from the start.
While much of orientation is mental, there is a physical component. For example, the direction you are facing is important and will determine what you can see. Your location drives what you may be able to see, hear or sense as well.
Moving to the cerebral, our mind processes what we observe through many filters:
our past experience
the mental models we carry in our heads about how the world works
the assumptions we have about the world
, our ideologies and biases we hold from our culture and genetics and
the resources we have available and the limitations on our actions.
This creates context but also blind spots.
Thus it is crucial to have goals, mental models, and assumptions that accurately map to the world as it exists. The more we are driven off ideology, biases and unfounded assumptions, the worse will be the result of our orientation process. These all short-circuit the orientation process because they lead to snap judgements often not based on reality.
Therefore, it’s critical to have what Julia Galef calls, “The Scout Mindset”. She contrasts this mindset to the “Soldier Mindset”, which starts with a belief or position and then defends it at all costs, uses motivated reasoning to confirm pre-existing beliefs and sees information that conflicts with these beliefs as a threat.
The Scout Mindset, in contrast, is curious and wants to understand the world as accurately as possible, is open to revising beliefs based on new information, sees reasoning as a way to map out the terrain and get a clear picture of the situation and embraces uncertainty and nuance.
To have a Scout Mindset, and therefore be able to orient properly, one must cultivate intellectual curiosity, seek out information that challenges your beliefs, be aware of your own biases and the cognitive distortions that can interfere with clear thinking and adopt practices that promote accuracy over defensiveness. You must be intellectually humble, curious, and open-minded.
Observe
Observation is all about gathering information from the environment to feed the orient phase with as much complete, important, and solid information as possible. Complete so we don’t miss crucial facts, important so we don’t get overwhelmed with too much data and solid so we are not basing our decisions off bad information.
To get complete, important and solid information, we need to have a good network of human and other sources. For individuals, the other sources would include publications, podcasts, videos, etc. Organizations might have a more formal structure for intelligence gathering.
Whatever the process, the sources must be varied, as unbiased as possible, and be able to be consumed at speed.
Decide
The decision phase is where we develop options, evaluate them, assign risk and select an option to pursue. It is about predicting about which option has the highest probability of success and payoff.
In this phase, our ability to generate good options quickly, determine the pros, cons and risk and select which to implement is critical. Speed in this phase, as in all the phases, helps determine success or failure, survival or extinction.
Equally important is our ability to predict accurately. How well we can predict goes back to our orientation - is our picture of how the world works accurate? Again, if it isn’t, we lose. The closer it is to reality, the higher the chance we will win.
Act
Of course, all of the prior phases are irrelevant if we don’t act decisively and quickly. Acting often involves not only you as the individual but usually also involves marshalling others in support of your efforts. Communicating the plan, influencing others, finding resources and executing the plan.
It may also include testing and piloting and adjusting the plan based on how the pilot works.
A Continuing Cycle
The OODA Loop is just that - a continuing series of loop of observe, orient, decide and act until resolution. As mentioned earlier, moving through each phase with speed is key.
”Speed is the essence of war.” Sun Tzu, The Art of War
Moving through the cycle quickly allows you to “get inside your opponent’s OODA Loop”. To "get inside the opponent's OODA loop" means to operate at a faster tempo than your adversary, outpacing and outmaneuvering them. This disrupts their ability to make coherent decisions by consistently acting in ways that force them to respond to you, rather than allowing them to drive the tempo or make proactive decisions.
When you successfully get inside their loop:
You Become Unpredictable: Your adversary cannot accurately anticipate your next move. By the time they observe and orient themselves based on your previous action, you've already gone on to your next move.
They Are in React Mode: They cannot take the initiative because they’re perpetually "on the back foot" trying to respond to your actions.
You Induce Confusion and Frustration: As your adversary struggles to keep pace and understand the rapidly changing situation, they are more likely to mistakes and emotions cloud their thinking. This leads to them freezing or or to poor decisions on their part.
You Dictate the Terms: By taking the initiative, you control what happens, setting the conditions under which the engagement evolves, increasing your advantage.
In essence, by getting inside the opponent's OODA loop, you seize the initiative and maintain it, making the opponent perpetually reactive and reducing their ability to execute their strategy effectively.
Supercharging Your OODA Loop with Generative AI
ChatGPT and other Generative AI offer us the opportunity to accelerate the processing of our OODA Loop while improving the its quality.
Observe: Gen AI, especially when connected to the internet, can be used to scan the environment for trends and accurately summarize large amounts of information to make digesting it more easy.
Orient: Using generative AI to quickly develop options and evaluate the pros, cons and risks of each option can enhance the orient phase of the OODA Loop. It can also help you develop new ways to think about your problem via “cross-domain thinking.”
Decide: In the decide phase, Gen AI can offer predictions on which options might be most productive as well as the first, second and third order outcomes of each. It could also hypothesize potential responses to each option by your adversary.
Act: In this phase, generative AI can take your plan and deliver a ready-made list of action items, resources required and timeline for implementation. Of course, it will need refinement but Gen AI can quickly produce a comprehensive plan of action as a place to begin.
Taking Action Using the OODA Loop
If you’re sold on the OODA Loop, here’s how to get started.
Learn more about the basics of OODA Loops. There are many good resources on the web on OODA Loop, which can provide you a more rich understanding of the process. You can also query ChatGPT and other generative AI with questions you may have.
See the OODA Loop in your everyday activities. We use the OODA Loop for pretty much everything we do. We just either use it well or poorly. As you go about your day, start to see and think about how you are working through the OODA Loop as you work to accomplish your goals and tasks.
Consciously practice using the OODA Loop. For significant work efforts, especially those concerning competitive situations, make a conscious effort to apply the OODA Loop as you work through it. Once you’ve done that, revisit what went right, what could have been improved and your lessons learned about the OODA Loop.
Go deeper and go beyond. Dive more deeply into Colonel Boyd’s thinking on the OODA Loop and his other strategic concepts. Again, many resources exist on the web and there are excellent books about Boyd as well. Dive in.
Good luck!
