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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

#61

Post by meheleventyone »

hef19898 wrote: post #31
meheleventyone wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yeah the classic phrase I've heard is "slow is smooth, smooth is fast, speed is in the efficiency of motion" which is a reminder that by trying to go fast we often get sloppy and it can be faster to be smooth and precise than quick and sloppy.

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

#62

Post by eric_b »

A similar title for this article could be: "How to bodysurf your way out of a tsunami"

Good luck, you're screwed.

If you're a cash flow negative startup even slightly tangentially related to an industry impacted severely by COVID, you're done. This economic shutdown is end of days for a huge number of small businesses.

The media is hyping shutdown until at least May, but I'm seeing more "June and on". If that comes to pass, there will be very few small businesses left standing in the heavily impacted industries. It's going to kill a lot of otherwise healthy businesses too.

The stimulus is mostly a feel good measure for politicians. How many of you have gotten your checks? How many have applied for EIDL loans and received them? How's the PPP going?

Oh I'm sure they'll iron out the kinks, but it'll be too little too late. Hope ya'll are up to date on your Steinbeck, because that's what's coming.

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

#63

Post by zbobet2012 »

yaj54 wrote: post #56
fenwick67 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

That's about perfect

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

#64

Post by notacoward »

kqr wrote: post #52
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…

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 th…

That doesn't quite seem the same. PDSA describes two phases - Plan/Do and Study/Adjust - resulting in two sets of changes to a system. They differ in the sense of big vs little, forward looking vs. backward looking, hence four total. The methodology I described results in one set of changes to the system, with a very different distinction between measurement vs. analysis vs. planning (which in PDSA subsumes the other two in the first phase). I'd say that PDSA is very different from OODA, but that's why it shouldn't even be part of this discussion.

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

#65

Post by WalterBright »

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.

Boyd was an amazing man and his biography is a must read for anyone who wants to accomplish the impossible in life.

https://www.amazon.com/Boyd-Fighter-Pilot-Who-Changed/dp/B01...

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

#66

Post by realtalk_sp »

philosophygeek wrote: post #11

We've had 10 years of frothiness in venture markets. Many employees under 30 don't even know what a downturn looks like. They're used to high pay, constant calls from recruiters, and venture capital flowing into their companies. Even the companies who flop, no big deal, just go down the street to the next company. I worry that that generation is going to have the most difficulty with these changes. They'll wonder why…

For a lot of people who hang out here, this amounts to baseless FUD.

Technology is not going to contract any time soon. Quite the opposite. It's also really hard to build and distribute technology products well. Good software engineers and tech sector employees will continue to be in high demand for quite a while.

There might be an interim period of depressed income but that will also likely correlate with reductions in cost of living, as a consequence of the same macro factors. The key is that a good technology employee making wise career choices will continue to be able to live somewhere towards the front of the standard-of-living curve.

What might be lost for a while are some of the more extreme tail outcomes (in the many millions of $s) that had become a bit too easily realized in this latest iteration of frothy tech bubbles. Not a big deal. Most of us won't notice any difference.

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

#67

Post by look_lookatme »

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…

As far as I can tell the most common realization of the OODA loop is:

Observe (the concept of the OODA loop as if you are the only person to have ever heard of it)

Orient (yourself in front of your computer)

Decide (to log into any random discussion site)

Act (by explaining the OODA loop in a non-concrete pseudophilosophical way to random people on the internet)

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

#68

Post by kop316 »

meheleventyone wrote: post #26
kop316 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes exactly so acting isn't axiomatically the thing to do. Although making a great folly seems like a great way to get lionized in military history. :D Usually when battles are studied in military history, they try to look at it based on what the leader knew then versus what we know now. Hindsight is always 20/20. There are examples of famous battles where even studied now, military strategists say that the losing…

For sure you can make good decisions based on the info available and still lose. You can also make bad decisions and still win. Sometimes decisions that seem vital are totally pointless etc. etc. etc.

...what?

I think you completely missed the point of th OODA loop.

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