Source: Farnam Street
“What is strategy? A mental tapestry of changing intentions for harmonizing and focusing our efforts as a basis for realizing some aim or purpose in an unfolding and often unforeseen world of many bewildering events and many contending interests.””
What techniques do people use in the most extreme situations to make decisions?
What can we learn from them to help us make more rational and quick decisions?If these techniques work in the most drastic scenarios, they have a good chance of working for us. This is why military mental models can have such wide, useful applications outside their original context.
Military mental models are constantly tested in the laboratory of conflict. If they weren’t agile, versatile, and effective, they would quickly be replaced by others. Military leaders and strategists invest a great deal of time in developing and teaching decision-making processes.
One strategy that I’ve found repeatedly effective is the OODA loop.
Developed by strategist and U.S. Air Force Colonel John Boyd, the OODA loop is a practical concept designed to be the foundation of rational thinking in confusing or chaotic situations. OODA stands for Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act.
Boyd developed the strategy for fighter pilots. However, like all good mental models, it can be extended into other fields. We used it at the intelligence agency I used to work at. I know lawyers, police officers, doctors, businesspeople, politicians, athletes, and coaches who use it.
Fighter pilots have to work fast. Taking a second too long to make a decision can cost them their lives.
As anyone who has ever watched Top Gun knows, pilots have a lot of decisions and processes to juggle when they’re in dogfights (close-range aerial battles). Pilots move at high speeds and need to avoid enemies while tracking them and keeping a contextual knowledge of objectives, terrains, fuel, and other key variables.Dogfights are nasty. I’ve talked to pilots who’ve been in them. They want the fights to be over as quickly as possible. The longer they go, the higher the chances that something goes wrong. Pilots need to rely on their creativity and decision-making abilities to survive. There is no game plan to follow, no schedule or to-do list. There is only the present moment when everything hangs in the balance.
Forty-Second Boyd
Boyd was no armchair strategist. He developed his ideas during his own time as a fighter pilot. He earned the nickname “Forty-Second Boyd” for his ability to win any fight in under 40 seconds.
In a tribute written after Boyd’s death, General C.C. Krulak described him as “a towering intellect who made unsurpassed contributions to the American art of war. Indeed, he was one of the central architects of the reform of military thought…. From John Boyd we learned about competitive decision making on the battlefield—compressing time, using time as an ally.”
Reflecting Robert Greene’s maxim that everything is material, Boyd spent his career observing people and organizations. How do they adapt to changeable environments in conflicts, business, and other situations?
Over time, he deduced that these situations are characterized by uncertainty. Dogmatic, rigid theories are unsuitable for chaotic situations. Rather than trying to rise through the military ranks, Boyd focused on using his position as colonel to compose a theory of the universal logic of war.
Boyd was known to ask his mentees the poignant question, “Do you want to be someone, or do you want to do something?” In his own life, he certainly focused on the latter path and, as a result, left us ideas with tangible value. The OODA loop is just one of many.
The Four Parts of the OODA Loop
Let’s break down the four parts of the OODA loop and see how they fit together.
OODA stands for Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. The description of it as a loop is crucial. Boyd intended the four steps to be repeated again and again until a conflict finishes. Although most depictions of the OODA loop portray it as a superficial idea, there is a lot of depth to it. Using it should be simple, but it has a rich basis in interdisciplinary knowledge.
1: Observe
The first step in the OODA Loop is to observe. At this stage, the main focus is to build a comprehensive picture of the situation with as much accuracy as possible.
A fighter pilot needs to consider: What is immediately affecting me? What is affecting my opponent? What could affect us later on? Can I make any predictions, and how accurate were my prior ones? A pilot’s environment changes rapidly, so these observations need to be broad and fluid.
And information alone is not enough. The observation stage requires awareness of the overarching meaning of the information. It also necessitates separating the information which is relevant for a particular decision from that which is not. You have to add context to the variables.
The observation stage is vital in decision-making processes.
For example, faced with a patient in an emergency ward, a doctor needs to start by gathering as much foundational knowledge as possible. That might be the patient’s blood pressure, pulse, age, underlying health conditions, and reason for admission. At the same time, the doctor needs to discard irrelevant information and figure out which facts are relevant for this precise situation. Only by putting the pieces together can she make a fast decision about the best way to treat the patient. The more experienced a doctor is, the more factors she is able to take into account, including subtle ones, such as a patient’s speech patterns, his body language, and the absence (rather than presence) of certain signs.
2: Orient
Orientation, the second stage of the OODA loop, is frequently misunderstood or skipped because it is less intuitive than the other stages. Boyd referred to it as the schwerpunkt, a German term which loosely translates to “the main emphasis.” In this context, to orient is to recognize the barriers that might interfere with the other parts of the process.
Without an awareness of these barriers, the subsequent decision cannot be a fully rational one. Orienting is all about connecting with reality, not with a false version of events filtered through the lens of cognitive biases and shortcuts.
Including this step, rather than jumping straight to making a decision, gives us an edge over the competition. Even if we are at a disadvantage to begin with, having fewer resources or less information, Boyd maintained that the Orient step ensures that we can outsmart an opponent.
For Western nations, cyber-crime is a huge threat — mostly because for the first time ever, they can’t outsmart, outspend, or out-resource the competition. Boyd has some lessons for them.
Boyd believed that four main barriers prevent us from seeing information in an unbiased manner:
- Our cultural traditions
- Our genetic heritage
- Our ability to analyze and synthesize
- The influx of new information — it is hard to make sense of observations when the situation keeps changing
Boyd was one of the first people to discuss the importance of building a toolbox of mental models, prior to Charlie Munger’s popularization of the concept among investors.
Boyd believed in “destructive deduction” — taking note of incorrect assumptions and biases and then replacing them with fundamental, versatile mental models. Only then can we begin to garner a reality-oriented picture of the situation, which will inform subsequent decisions.
Boyd employed a brilliant metaphor for this — a snowmobile. In one talk, he described how a snowmobile comprises elements of different devices. The caterpillar treads of a tank, skis, the outboard motor of a boat, the handlebars of a bike — each of those elements is useless alone, but combining them creates a functional vehicle.
As Boyd put it: “A loser is someone (individual or group) who cannot build snowmobiles when facing uncertainty and unpredictable change; whereas a winner is someone (individual or group) who can build snowmobiles, and employ them in an appropriate fashion, when facing uncertainty…
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