The OODA Loop: How Fighter Pilots Make Fast and Accurate Decisions • Hacker News Board

Re: The OODA Loop: How Fighter Pilots Make Fast and Accurate Decisions

#61

Post by npatrick04 » Mon, Mar 15, 2021, 4:41 PM UTC

EthanHeilman wrote: post #26

WJW wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree that the OODA loop is most often presented as a (fairly obvious) decision model for individuals, the model itself is not the big idea. Rather, the primary value comes from the realization that in a competition (like war, or business, or sports, etc) between two or more individuals/groups the ones who can "cycle through" the OODA loop will be able to adapt faster and often gain the upper hand through sup…

>I also don't agree with your claim that you can't "practice" the loop on an individual level. To further agree with what you are saying... In many sports: people put work in to run their OODA loop faster even they don't call it that. People watch videos of their opponents to learn how to more quickly orient their opponents actions with the context of the sport. In engineering: unittests, debuggers and IDEs are all d…

One of the best ways to slow down an opponents OODA loop in soccer is to choose inconsistent actions from play to play. As a forward receiving the ball from defense: dribble (with speed changes), pass back, pass across, etc.

It was pretty awesome hearing my son's team making this type of observation on the field as the opposition repeated the same offensive play, and adapt their response.

Re: The OODA Loop: How Fighter Pilots Make Fast and Accurate Decisions

#62

Post by Jtsummers » Mon, Mar 15, 2021, 4:57 PM UTC

craftinator wrote: post #56

ghgdynb1 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure, I'm not an expert in this and I've never been in the military. However, I bet there's little to nothing uniquely good about OODA over the alternatives you mention. My guess is that having a standardized rapid decision making framework is valuable compared to the frantic scramble that might take place otherwise.

A couple of additional benefits of OODA loops, not editing my original because I'm on mobile: It really helps prevent micromanaging, because it encourages the team leader to only change orders in response to a change in what they've observed. It's very useful in after action debriefing ("debugging" for the HN crowd), because specific questions can be asked about where in the OODA loop a fault occured. Did you observe…

"after action debriefing" = retrospective. A critical part of agile processes that's often ignored. It permits not just the examination of the product under development, but the processes that are in use.

It's a crucial difference between most organizations and proper "learning organizations". Most organizations (here I mean from team on up to large corporations) do not sufficiently introspect and retrospect to discover their own flaws (and we all have flaws). Learning organizations incorporate those two activities into their culture and methods in order to properly react to their competition and satisfy their customers.

Re: The OODA Loop: How Fighter Pilots Make Fast and Accurate Decisions

#63

Post by rootsudo » Mon, Mar 15, 2021, 5:03 PM UTC

As with many things in aviation, it's checklist, redundancy and training.

Things go wrong with you skip one and become very expensive or deadly quick.

Re: The OODA Loop: How Fighter Pilots Make Fast and Accurate Decisions

#64

Post by apress » Mon, Mar 15, 2021, 5:14 PM UTC

JSeymourATL wrote: post #4

Related: terrific biography. Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War by Robert Coram > https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38840.Boyd

Chip design guru Jim Keller told me this was one of his favorite books (and highly influenced his business approach) when I interviewed him last year. https://fortune.com/longform/microchip-designer-jim-keller-i...

Re: The OODA Loop: How Fighter Pilots Make Fast and Accurate Decisions

#65

Post by lb1lf » Mon, Mar 15, 2021, 5:20 PM UTC

la6471 wrote: post #39

WJW wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. The OODA loop model describes how you can win a competition by responding to a changing situation on the battlefield faster than your opponent. The Lean Startup describes basically the same thing but for civilian companies, and where the opponent is "the market" rather than a more well defined enemy. "The Art of Action" by Stephen Bungay is also a very good book on this subject.

Unfortunately people bring this hyper competitive mentality in meetings and other situations where collaboration would be more beneficial than competition. I am specifically referring to the impulse some people have in making quick decisions without due diligence , just to stay in charge or for other ulterior motives. And when the majority acts like that more reasonable voices gets drowned in the din. While heathy co…

-At a former employer, we suddenly found ourselves with a fresh hire manager who subscribed wholeheartedly to the 'Move fast and break things' mindset. Additionally, he had a very strong urge to show everybody who had the last word.

Only problem was, we built heavy machinery (Think low megawatt range) - so 'breaking a build' most often meant something blew up - in the quite literal sense.

Took a little getting used to, that.

Re: The OODA Loop: How Fighter Pilots Make Fast and Accurate Decisions

#66

Post by dheera » Mon, Mar 15, 2021, 5:23 PM UTC

Jtsummers wrote: post #48

dheera wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm unclear as to what's novel about OODA. Can someone give me an alternative model for context? It seems like all other permutations, e.g. DOAO or ADOO or DOOA wouldn't make sense, so what is the "eureka" about OODA? Also, separately, it just sounds to me like perception (OO), planning (D), control (A) renamed so I'm still not seeing what's novel about it.

The eureka was giving it a name in order to articulate its importance in tactical and strategic thinking. That's really it. Other people, throughout history, have operated in the same fashion but either not described what they did or described it in different terms.

Hmm interesting. Maybe I should give a name to shoveling dirt. Look, Align, Poke, Scoop. LAPS. The most efficient way to get the most dirt shoveled is the LAPS loop. It's revolutionary. Can I be famous?

Re: The OODA Loop: How Fighter Pilots Make Fast and Accurate Decisions

#67

Post by zoomablemind » Mon, Mar 15, 2021, 5:27 PM UTC

I agree with the points made here that OODA is just as good as any other mental technique acronym.

The mental frameworks for decisionmaking under time constraint and information overload are inevitably too rational. Their main objective is to be able to act in progressively efficient manner. However simply relying on these frameworks as prescribed under the real constraints will lead to even higher information overload and thus loss of time.

In fast-flowing situations human actions tend to follow the emotional reaction route, bypassing the the slower rational reasoning. Emotional route is faster, but success of such reaction depends heavily on the learned behavior. Closing your eyes to "hide" is obviously not going to help one to flee a danger.

So, using any kind of mental framework is the most valuable in training. This helps transform the reasoned actions into learned behavior to be [hopefully] triggered as a reaction under the constraints.

Re: The OODA Loop: How Fighter Pilots Make Fast and Accurate Decisions

#68

Post by JshWright » Mon, Mar 15, 2021, 5:32 PM UTC

arethuza wrote: post #49

JshWright wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as you keep the "act" small in scale (and you continue to loop through the steps), this is probably the best approach in most circumstances. If for no other reason than is break you out of the initial tendency many people have to freeze when confronted with crisis.

I'm sure I've been told by someone who had been trained as an officer in the British army that they were very much trained to have a "Bias for Action" - i.e. the worst thing you could in most situations would be to get caught in their version of "analysis paralysis". Of course, he told me this with impeccable self deprecating humour (presumably also part of their training) - so difficult to tell how serious he was be…

Yeah, my take also comes from prior training (as a firefighter/paramedic). Start moving towards/away from the problem (which direction depends on your own personal defaults and risk tolerance). You don't need to figure everything out before you start moving.

Re: The OODA Loop: How Fighter Pilots Make Fast and Accurate Decisions

#69

Post by dragonwriter » Mon, Mar 15, 2021, 5:37 PM UTC

dheera wrote: post #34

nateberkopec wrote: post #7

For anyone interested in OODA, the Robert Coram biography of John Boyd, and "Certain to Win" by the Boyd disciple Chet Richards are good entry points. The value of OODA isn't really in providing a model for individual-level decisionmaking. The value is as a model for intra-organizational conflict: that one obtains strategic advantage (i.e. tempo) by running through one's OODA loop faster than competitors or opponents…

I'm unclear as to what's novel about OODA. Can someone give me an alternative model for context? It seems like all other permutations, e.g. DOAO or ADOO or DOOA wouldn't make sense, so what is the "eureka" about OODA? Also, separately, it just sounds to me like perception (OO), planning (D), control (A) renamed so I'm still not seeing what's novel about it.

> I'm unclear as to what's novel about OODA.

Well, it's almost 70 years old, so, literally, nothing about it is novel.

> It seems like all other permutations, e.g. DOAO or ADOO or DOOA wouldn't make sense

But it didn't emerge in a context where the four stages were taken as given but people were just trying to figure out how to order them.

Nor did it emerge as a novel thing people should do. OODA, at the level of the acronym and it's expansion, is a description of a fairly simple observation of what people inherently do. It's also the organizational outline for a body of work on how they ought to do each part of it (delivered by its originator, John Boyd, in in-person briefings that apparently ran up to 5 hours, and in quite large written works by people downstream from Boyd.)

Re: The OODA Loop: How Fighter Pilots Make Fast and Accurate Decisions

#70

Post by Jtsummers » Mon, Mar 15, 2021, 5:37 PM UTC

edrxty wrote: post #58

joosters wrote: post #27

Before stating *how* fighter pilots make fast and accurate decisions, surely we need to study *if* fighter pilots make fast and accurate decisions? I mean, do they really? What evidence is there that pilots are great, or even above average, decision makers?

Ding ding ding! This thread is cargo culting hard. This is just a tool for making decisions in stressful situations buy forcing a separation of planning and acting so you don't flop around frantically. It's not a tool for organizations or your startup. Maybe it works for that but its applicability to you're startup should be proven independently.

OODA is related to other feedback-loop ideas like PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-Act, Deming/Shewart Cycle) which works at both a tactical and strategic level (but at obviously different tempos, if that's not obvious I don't know what to say). It should be seen primarily in contrast to two other options: Haphazard ad hoc, primarily reactive, approaches; long term commitments to plans that turn out to produce the wrong thing (because they lacked feedback, aka classic Waterfall).