Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

steveblank.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 80 posts

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

#41

Post by danaliv »

A similar model taught to pilots is DECIDE:

  - Detect that change has occurred
  - Estimate the need to counter or react to the change
  - Choose a desirable outcome
  - Identify actions to achieve the outcome
  - Do the necessary action
  - Evaluate the effects of the action
It suffers a bit from being a backronym, and I don't know anyone who explicitly applies it "in real life," but I do emphasize the last item with students because it's so often overlooked. A lot of people will see a need for a change, do something to make the change, and then fail to notice that the desired outcome wasn't achieved.

I see this omission in software systems a lot too, which manifests as a lack of monitoring, control, verification, and/or alerting. An ETL process that doesn't verify the correctness of its output, for example.

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

#42

Post by kirse »

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 keep payroll going for the next 12-18 months. Once the safety net is in place, the mood changes from frantic survival to calm.

At that point, the ratio of thinking:acting time should arguably double. Recessions take plenty of time to unwind. Take 30 days (not 2) to gather information from across the org and evaluate trending opportunities. “Measure twice, cut once.” applies to pivots, too.

Re-developing new models for recognizing opportunities and a new decision framework for when to act upon those opportunities takes time. The folks who spend more time thinking about where the puck is going to be vs. reacting to its every jitter are the ones who will come out ahead.

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

#43

Post by meheleventyone »

jimbokun wrote: post #38
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…

> 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.

We’ve definitely seen a lot of bad decision making and I’d agree a lot of that has been due to people being caught off foot and having to be reactive.

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

#44

Post by notacoward »

KineticLensman wrote: post #40
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".

HAHAHA! Good one. Thank you.

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

#45

Post by notacoward »

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.

There's the pain I was talking about. Ow ow ow.

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

#46

Post by dqpb »

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…

The five items under orient are a strange choice.

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

#47

Post by aidos »

vba wrote: post #28
aidos wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've been trying to hire since last year and have really struggled because rates devs have been looking for on the market are well above what we could see them returning value-wise for their experience level (that's just the nature of the market, I get it). When you have people getting £130k for doing React at a fintech company... well, I just hope people are prepared for the market changes that are underway. Honest…

£130k for a react job (or any software engineer job) in the UK? Where?

London

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

#48

Post by 1123581321 »

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 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.

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

#49

Post by arctangent »

While OODA is an interesting and increasingly popular concept, it is really only useful when applied to very short intervals of time. You can and should expect that an opponent with "a reasonable amount" of time will make the correct response. In business that timeframe is much longer than the few minutes or seconds a modern aerial duel might be concluded in.

The general idea of OODA is that if you can "play fast" you can beat someone who can otherwise "play better". Think about how blitz chess differs from traditional multi-hour games, even though the rules of play are the same: for example it is often possible to exert time pressure by playing "confusing moves". This concept of "fast play" translates into the business timeframe more as the concept of "agility" (to be contrasted with large-company "inertia"), whereas businesses only try to confuse one another on television or by accident :-)

Concepts similar to OODA but more applicable to a business context and timeframe would include PDCA [1] and DMAIC [2].

PDCA a.k.a. the "Deming cycle" stands for "Plan, Do, Check, Adjust" and is closely related to the concept of "kaizen" [3] (or "continuous improvement"). PDCA happens in timeframes that can best be described as a "short project" (or a "kaizen event").

DMAIC ("Define, Measure, Analyse, Improve, Control") on the other hand is a framework commonly used for larger business interventions where the stakes are higher, more project members are needed, more structure is required and so on. It is a key feature of the Six Sigma [4] approach as well as Lean Six Sigma [5].

Note: I'm sure there are other valid approaches too. I'm just mentioning the ones I am familiar with in case anyone else is interested in methods to help businesses improve and respond to change.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDCA

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMAIC

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaizen

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Sigma

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean_Six_Sigma

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

#50

Post by takinola »

kirse wrote: 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 you need to behave and what is likely to trip you up. Don't assume you will do the right thing. Plan to do the right thing.
Post reply on HN