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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

#51
post #46
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…

The five items under orient are a strange choice.

They refer to one’s internal predispositions and biases as well as those of an organization attempting to respond to a situation. Depending on the situation, genetics could be in reference to height, G-tolerance, etc.

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

#52

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…

Your 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.

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

#53
post #42

There's no doubt action (and speed of adaptability) is important, but I'd also highlight a 2nd virtue - patience. Action for the sake of action is called panic. People who like to control things (executives, leaders, me, etc) often feel like they need to be doing something to have a sense of control in the midst of chaos. The only thing that needs action right now is triage - cost-cutting. Cash flow to survive and ke…

This is such an important point. However, sticking to the "panic only as much as needed" idea is difficult because, sometimes, incentives are skewed to reward panic. Think about all the laws that are passed without regard to the side-effects because "someone ought to do something about this". In peacetime, prepare for war. Before the crisis hits, you should take the time to think through how you and the people around…

Or as Deming liked to say, "Don't just do something -- stand there!"

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

#54

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 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.

That'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.

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

#55

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…

[deleted]

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

#56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm completely new to this acronym but I'm grokking orient as "account for your bayesian priors."

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

#57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OODA 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.

That'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.

Yes, 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.

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

#58

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…

You asserted it, but what makes your metaphor better? What results have you gotten out of it that everyone can learn from?

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

#60
post #58

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…

You asserted it, but what makes your metaphor better? What results have you gotten out of it that everyone can learn from?

It'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.
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