(2014-09-30) McCay The Tao Of Boyd: How To Master The OODA Loop

Brett & Kate McCay: The Tao of Boyd: How to Master the OODA Loop.Perhaps his (John Boyd's) most significant contribution to military strategy, though, came from a series of briefings he gave. In them, Boyd laid out a way of thinking about conflict that would revolutionize warfare around the world.

The OODA Loop is an oft-cited, but typically misunderstood idea. If you’ve heard of it, it was most likely presented in a fairly superficial way — as a 4-step decision-making process where the individual or group who makes it through all the stages the quickest, wins.

The reason the OODA Loop is so frequently misunderstood is that John Boyd never described it in detail in a technical paper

Instead, he developed and explained the OODA Loop through a series of sometimes five-hour-long briefings. The only notes we have are his briefing slides and a few tape recordings and transcripts that exist of his presentations.

Boyd combined a deep understanding of military history and strategic thinking with a wide range of other intellectual domains and theorems, including quantum mechanics, cybernetics, chaos theory, Karl Popperism, and Neo-Darwinism.

It takes the basic ways we think, decide, and operate in the world — ways that often get confused and jumbled in the face of conflict and confusion — and codifies and organizes them into a strategic, effective system that can allow you to thrive in the heat of battle. It is a learning system, a method for dealing with uncertainty, and a strategy for winning head-to-head contests and competitions. In war, business, or life, the OODA Loop can help you grapple with changing, challenging circumstances and come out the other side on top.

I have spent the last month diving deep into the OODA Loop.
Below you will find a synthesis of what I have learned. My goal is to provide the most thorough, but also accessible primer on the OODA Loop out there.

Why We Live in Uncertainty

Ambiguity is central to Boyd’s vision . . . not something to be feared but something that is a given . . . We never have complete and perfect information. The best way to succeed is to revel in ambiguity. —Grant Hammond

While the randomness of the outside world plays a large role in that uncertainty, Boyd argues that our inability to properly make sense of our changing reality is the bigger hindrance. When our circumstances change, we often fail to shift our perspective and instead continue to try to see the world as we feel it should be.

Mental models — or paradigms — are simply a way of looking at and understanding the world. They create our expectations for how the world works. They are sometimes culturally relative and can be rooted in tradition, heritage, and even genetics.
They can be something as specific as traffic laws or social etiquette. Or they can be as general as the overarching principles of an organization or a field of study like psychology

Because Boyd was more interested in using the OODA Loop as an organizing principle for a grand strategy, he tended to focus on these more abstract types of mental models.

While our paradigms work and match up with reality most of the time, sometimes they don’t. Sometimes the universe pitches us a curveball that we never saw coming and the mental models we have to work with aren’t really useful

Boyd points to three philosophical and scientific principles to show that trying to understand a randomly changing universe with pre-existing mental models only results in confusion, ambiguity, and more uncertainty

Those three principles are Kurt Godel’s Proof, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, and the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics:

Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems.

any logical model of reality is incomplete (and possibly inconsistent) and must be continuously refined (all models are wrong)

as our observations about the world become more and more precise and subtle, a second principle kicks in which limits our ability to observe reality correctly

Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.

even as we get more precise observations about a particular domain, we’re likely to experience more uncertainty about another. Hence, there is a limitation in our ability to observe reality with precision.

2nd Law of Thermodynamics.

individuals or organizations that don’t communicate with the outside world by getting new information about the environment or by creating new mental models act like a “closed system.” And just as a closed system in nature will have increasing entropy, or disorder, so too will a person or organization experience mental entropy or disorder if they’re cut off from the outside world and new information. (Pathological)

The more we rely on outdated mental models even while the world around us is changing, the more our mental “entropy” goes up.

any inward-oriented and continued effort to improve the match concept with observed reality will only increase the degree of mismatch

When these old mental models don’t work, they will often keep trying to make them work — maybe if they just use an old strategy with more gusto

Charlie Munger calls this tendency to use the familiar even in the face of a changing reality the “man with a hammer syndrome.”

These folks never stop to ask, “Maybe I need a different tool?”

The Tao of Boyd: The OODA Loop

So how do we overcome this uncertainty or mental entropy?

The OODA Loop

the OODA Loop is an explicit representation of the process that human beings and organizations use to learn, grow, and thrive in a rapidly changing environment — be it in war, business, or life.

he had a much grander vision for it; it was to be the explicit representation of the “evolving, open-ended, far-from-equilibrium process of self-organization, emergence and natural selection.”

At the end of his life, Boyd drew out a much more nuanced and complex diagram

Below, I take you on a deep journey through John Boyd’s OODA Loop. My goal is to show you that it isn’t merely the simple four-step decision-making tool it is often seen as, but rather is in many respects a tao, or way of thinking, about the world in order to deal with uncertainty

Observe

By observing and taking into account new information about our changing environment, our minds become an open system rather than a closed one, and we are able to gain the knowledge and understanding that’s crucial in forming new mental models.

From a tactical standpoint, to effectively observe you need to have good situational awareness. You need to always be in Condition Yellow. Condition Yellow is best described as relaxed alert

From a big picture strategic level, say, running a successful business, observation will require you to keep track of not just your gross revenue, expenses, and profit, but also larger trends that may or may not affect your bottom line.

In his presentations, Boyd notes that we’ll encounter two problems in the Observation phase:

• We often observe imperfect or incomplete information (thanks to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle).
• We can be inundated with so much information that separating the signal from the noise becomes difficult.

These two pitfalls are solved by developing our judgment (taste) — our practical wisdom

As John Boyd scholar Frans P.B. Osinga notes in Science, Strategy, and War, “even if one has perfect information it is of no value if it is not coupled to a penetrating understanding of its meaning, if one does not see the patterns. Judgment is key. Without judgment, data means nothing

the one with better judgment, the one who is better at discerning patterns.”

Orient: The Schwerpunkt of the Loop

*focal point of the loop.

The reason Orient is the schwerpunkt of the OODA Loop is because that’s where our mental models exist, and it is our mental models that shape how everything in the OODA Loop works.*

As Osinga notes, “orientation shapes the way we interact with the environment . . . it shapes the way we observe, the way we decide, the way we act. In this sense, orientation shapes the character of present OODA loops, while the present loop shapes the character of future orientation.”

You constantly have to break apart your old paradigms and put the resulting pieces back together

Boyd calls this process “destructive deduction.”

Once we have these constitutive elements, we can start the process of “creative induction”

To illustrate this process, Boyd offered this thought experiment in a presentation called Strategic Game of ? and ?

Imagine that you are on a ski slope with other skiers . . . that you are in Florida riding in an outboard motorboat, maybe even towing water-skiers.

leaves only the following separate pieces: skis, outboard motor, handlebars and rubber treads

It’s a snowmobile.

Orienting, in a nutshell, is the ability to make figurative mental snowmobiles on the fly and in the face of uncertainty.

A loser is someone (individual or group) who cannot build snowmobiles when facing uncertainty and unpredictable change

It’s important to point out that destruction deduction and creative induction of mental models isn’t a one-time event. For Boyd, it’s a continual process; as soon as you create that new mental concept, it will quickly become outdated as the environment around you changes.

how can we become better at it?

Boyd left us with some ideas:

1. Build a robust toolbox of mental models

Boyd warned his audience of the way in which strict operational doctrines can stifle the cultivation of a robust toolbox of mental models

if you] read my work, ‘doctrine’ doesn’t appear in there even once. You can’t find it. You know why I don’t have it in there? Because it’s doctrine on day one, and every day after it becomes dogma.

dogmatism has the tendency to create folks with “man with a hammer syndrome”

You also see “man with a hammer syndrome” in folks who discover some pet theory and start applying it to every. single. situation in life without considering other factors. People who are fans of evolutionary psychology are prone to this.

It’s for this reason that Boyd advocated for familiarizing yourself with as many theories and fields of knowledge as possible, and continuing to challenge your beliefs

Well, I understand you’re going to have to write [military] doctrine, and that’s all right . . . [But] even after you write it, assume it’s not right

look at a whole lot of other doctrines

the reason you want to learn them all [is so that] you’re not captured by any one, and you can lift stuff out of here, stuff out of there. . . . You can put your snowmobile [together],

Charlie Munger advanced a similar argument for the necessity of having a widely varied library of mental knowledge

You’ve got to hang experience on a lattice work of models in your head. What are the models? Well, the first rule is that you’ve got to have multiple models

And the models have to come from multiple disciplines — because all the wisdom of the world is not to be found in one little academic department.

Munger has repeatedly emphasized in his speeches that reality is an interconnected ecosystem of factors that influence one another. Thus, to understand this ecosystem, you need to apply multiple models in an interconnected fashion.

what sort of models should you put in your toolbox?

Boyd lays out seven disciplines every military strategist (or any person strategizing how to win any kind of conflict or competition) ought to know:

• Mathematical Logic
• Physics
• Thermodynamics
• Biology
• Psychology
• Anthropology
• Conflict (Game Theory)

Munger’s list includes the following mental models:

• Math
• Accounting
• Engineering
• Economics
• Probability
• Psychology
• Chemistry
• Evolutionary biology (can provide insights into economics)
• History
• Statistics

Because Boyd and Munger are thinking “Big Picture,” their mental model examples are purposely general and abstract. But it’s important to remember that mental models can be specific and concrete

2. Start destroying and creating mental models.

When you’re faced with a new problem, go through the domains above in a checklist-like fashion and ask yourself, “Are there elements from these different mental concepts that can provide insight into my problem?”

Start a journal with your destruction and creation experiments

3. Never stop orienting.

Orientation isn’t just a state you’re in; it’s a process. You’re always orienting. —John Boyd

Because the world around you is constantly changing, orientation is something you can never stop doing. “ABO = Always Be Orienting” should become your mantra.

4. Try to validate mental models before operation.

Ideally, according to Boyd, you want to be fairly confident that your mental models or concepts will work before you actually need to use them.

How do you validate mental models before operation? You study what mental concepts have and haven’t worked in similar situations and then practice, train, and visualize using those mental concepts.

In business, you can read case studies (case study) of what has and hasn’t worked for other companies

When your observations about your environment match up with certain proven mental models, you don’t have to do any destroying and creating, you just have to act. If you look at the complex diagram of the Loop above, you’ll notice that Boyd makes room for the ability to skip the “Decide” step — note the line that goes from “Orient” to “Act” and bypasses “Decide.” Boyd called the ability to quickly orient and act, “Implicit Outcome and Control.”

Decide (Hypothesis)

component in which actors decide among action alternatives generated in the Orientation phase

For Boyd, it’s impossible to select a perfectly matching mental model because:

• We often have imperfect information of our environment
• Even if we had perfect information, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle prevents us from attaining a perfect match-up between our environment and our mental model
• Consequently, when we decide which mental model(s) to use, we’re forced to settle for ones that aren’t perfect, but good enough.

It’s interesting to note that in his final sketch of the OODA Loop, Boyd put “Hypothesis” in parentheses next to “Decide,” suggesting the uncertain nature of our decisions. When we decide, we’re essentially moving forward with our best hypothesis — our best “educated guess” — about which mental model will work. To find out if our hypothesis is correct, we then have to test it, which takes us to our next step:

Act (Test) (experiment)

In his final sketch of the OODA Loop, Boyd has “Test” next to “Act,” again indicating that the OODA Loop is not only a decision process, but a learning system; we are all like scientists perpetually testing our new hypotheses in the real world. We should all be constantly “experimenting,” and gaining new “data” that improves how we operate in every facet of our lives.

Action is how we find out if our mental models are correct.

Ideally, you’ll have multiple actions/tests/experiments going on at the same time so that you can quickly discover the best mental model for a particular situation. ( risk interdependence muddying results? spreading resources too thin?)

The same goes in business. Ideally, you’ll want to try out different strategies at the same time to see which ones work. A/B testing is a good example of this. In A/B testing, marketers or online publications will come up with multiple headlines or copy (orientation!) and deploy them on different segments of their audience at the same time. (those aren't "strategies")

Tempo: To the Swift Goes the Race

*It can guide our individual actions and doesn’t require an “opponent” per se in order to be useful.

But the tool can also be used in situations of conflict and competition, where it’s your OODA Loop going head-to-head against someone else’s. Indeed, this is what the OODA Loop is most famously employed for. Each individual or group is trying to work its way through the Loop more quickly and effectively than their competitors.*

When I met with Curtis Sprague, former US Air Marshal and instructor, he told me that there are two general principles to keep in mind when considering tempo and the OODA Loop.

• First, the individual or organization that can go through successful, consecutive OODA Loops faster than their opponent will win the conflict.

• Second, rapid OODA Looping on your part “resets” your opponent’s OODA Loop by causing confusion — it sends them back to square one;

But simply cycling through your OODA Loop as fast as you can is an incomplete picture of tempo. What often gets overlooked by folks studying the OODA Loop is that when Boyd talked about rapid tempo, he often meant rapid changes in tempo. He argued that when it comes to winning a competition or conflict, our actions need to be surprising, ambiguous, and varying; speeding up and slowing down your actions quickly and irregularly can create confusion just as much and sometimes more than simply blowing through your OODA Loop.

What’s more, when you move from a boots-on-the-ground tactical level to a bigger picture strategic level, Boyd puts less emphasis on fast OODA Looping and instead focuses on developing the best mental concepts possible to win the battle or war. It’s at this “big picture” level, when a strategist is playing the long-game, that he takes into account domains like politics, culture, economics, diplomacy, and espionage.

Conclusion

The OODA Loop makes explicit our implicit decision-making process. By making it explicit, Boyd offered an incomparable strategic tool to everyone from military generals and business executives to coaches and political campaigners to better manage their own decision-making processes.

In addition to being a tool to vanquish your foe, the OODA Loop is a learning engine that allows you or an organization you’re a part of to thrive in a changing environment.