OODA Loops
The Doctrine of Metaphor Frameworks
How mighty you win a race when your opponent is faster than you are?
How might you defeat an enemy who’s stronger, faster, and more skilled than you are?
How might you defeat an enemy with better technology than you have?
Nicknamed Genghis John and Ghetto John for his rough and tumble interpersonal style, John Boyd had a reason to be upset.
Boyd was facing a seemingly insurmountable task: how to defeat an enemy that was faster, stronger, and more skilled than his team. In the mid-fifties, the Russians had superior fighter planes, and there wasn’t much the US could do about that problem in a short period of time.
Facing superior technology, loss upon loss mounted in the battlefield. Something had to be done. Upon analyzing the challenge of winning a battle against an enemy with better technology, Boyd came up with a genius idea.
The key is to obscure your intentions and make them unpredictable to your opponent while you simultaneously clarify his intentions. That is, operate at a faster tempo to generate rapidly changing conditions that inhibit your opponent from adapting or reacting to those changes and that suppress or destroy his awareness. Thus, a hodgepodge of confusion and disorder occur to cause him to over- or under-react to conditions or activities that appear to be uncertain, ambiguous, or incomprehensible.
- Boyd
Boyd realized that the only way to win was confusion.
The Art & Science of Confusion
Confusion? Yes, confusion.
Boyd realized that the only way the Americans were going to defeat their superior counterpart was by confusing their enemy in the air.
He distilled the art of confusion in his treatise Patterns of Conflict.
At the heart of Patterns of Conflict lies the OODA Loop. Most business-folk use the concept of the OODA Loop when trying to understand a system and the users within it.
Winning With The OODA Loop
OODA stands for:
Observe
Orient
Decide
Act
Observe the situation, Orient aka understand yourself in relation to the situation, make a Decision, take Action. Wash, rinse, repeat.
The second O, orientation—as the repository of our genetic heritage, cultural tradition, and previous experiences—is the most important part of the O-O-D-A loop since it shapes the way we observe, the way we decide, the way we act.
- Boyd
The Key to Success - Hacking OODA Loops
In Patterns of Conflict, Boyd argues that by hacking your opponent's OODA Loops, you can confuse them. When they're confused, that's when you strike.
What if you observe something that' isn’t there? What if you misunderstand what’s going to happen next? What if you make the wrong decision? What if you take the wrong course of action?
These fears, uncertainties and doubts are what John Boyd was preying on. He knew that a plane was only as good as the pilot’s ability to understand and predict the future.
