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

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

#31

Post by hef19898 »

meheleventyone wrote: post #16
kop316 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tailo…

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…

There is a french saying I first heard back during the 2008 crisis: "It's urgent to wait".

I liked it, consicously waiting might be exaclty what one should do now. Don't rush, wait, and move once you have to.

Like the line in the movie "Shooter": "Slow is precise and precise is fast". Just rushing things now because of reasons can do more demage than good.

EDIT: Typos

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

#32

Post by pjc50 »

Ididntdothis wrote: post #27
pjc50 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When you have people getting £130k for doing React at a fintech company... How much is that as a fraction of the value of an average family home in your location? If there's a big fall in salaries, there's also going to be a big fall in property values.

“If there's a big fall in salaries, there's also going to be a big fall in property values.“ I don’t think so. Rents will go up and housing ownership will be concentrated even more on wealthy people and big companies.

The destruction of AirBnB may push rents down. Hard to see how rent can go up beyond what people can actually afford?

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

#33

Post by dataatemytime »

notacoward wrote: post #17

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 almos…

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.

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

#34

Post by zigzaggy »

hammock wrote: post #15
jph wrote: post #6

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 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…

I highly recommend the biography "Boyd" about this man. I think I got the initial reco from this site.

Agree with this recommendation. Excellent book, great story. Very interesting career.

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

#35

Post by nicwolff »

notacoward wrote: post #17

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 almos…

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.

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

#36

Post by Ididntdothis »

pjc50 wrote: post #32
Ididntdothis wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“If there's a big fall in salaries, there's also going to be a big fall in property values.“ I don’t think so. Rents will go up and housing ownership will be concentrated even more on wealthy people and big companies.

The destruction of AirBnB may push rents down. Hard to see how rent can go up beyond what people can actually afford?

Rent, health care, education and housing cost can go up to a level that it eats up most income for average people. That seems to be the trend.

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

#37

Post by fenwick67 »

nicwolff wrote: post #35
notacoward wrote: post #17

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 almos…

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.

This 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.

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

#38

Post by jimbokun »

meheleventyone wrote: post #16
kop316 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tailo…

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…

> If you're already at the point of being forced to make decisions then you've already screwed up? You're being reactive.

In the case of a global pandemic never seen before in any of our lifetimes, everyone has to be reactive.

And we have already seen a lot of failures from failing to act during this crisis, more so than leaders taking actions that turned out to not be necessary.

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

#40

Post by KineticLensman »

notacoward wrote: post #17

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 almos…

I found it harder to take OODA seriously after I came across "Observe, Overreact, Deny, Apologise".
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