(2020-05-19) Chin Much Ado About The Ooda Loop

Cedric Chin: Much Ado About The OODA Loop. Any discussion about fast adaptation in response to uncertainty should probably begin with John Boyd and the OODA Loop.

Boyd is not without controversy. In the New York Times review of Robert Coram’s hugely entertaining biography of the man, Ronald Spector writes: Coram sometimes tends to minimize some of the real difficulties, aside from conservatism and bureaucratic inertia, in trying to put Boyd's war-fighting ideas into practice

Spector’s review includes these reservations because much that is written about Boyd is either hagiography or criticism

I’m not entirely sure what I think of the overall theory — part of me thinks that it is trite, but another part of me thinks that it gets at something deep and fundamental about survival in uncertain, competitive, adversarial situations

Boyd’s ideas are deceptively simple. A great number of blog posts about the OODA loop miss the point entirely.

Strategic Theory Is ‘Useless’

Boyd’s ideas are problematic for a number of reasons. Let’s talk about the most obvious one first.

the exact contours of military strategy are always determined by the geopolitical realities and the technological capabilities of the day. If you are a military thinker and you want to write a strategic framework that stands the test of time, you would have to predict every geopolitical development and every technological breakthrough in history, because what is useful in one era is often not transferable to another. This is an impossible task.

The alternative, of course, is to climb the ladder of abstraction and detail only the most general, abstract principles that do not change over time. These principles will then act as guardrails as you develop specific new strategies that best fit your particular situation. This is what Boyd did.

Every decade or so, a new set of dominant strategies evolves in business. Certain business leaders stumble upon (or spot, or discover by trial and error) changes in the larger environment that enable new business strategies; they execute those strategies and crush the competition.

At this point, the idea-industrial complex whirs into work: the management consultants will turn the strategy into a set of cookie-cutter recommendations

This marks the beginning of the end of the effectiveness of the strategy. (red queen)

There are exceptions to this cycle. Hamilton Helmer’s 7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy is a notable entry in this genre: Helmers writes about how certain business strategies are more defensible than others

7 Powers is a book about moats, about how certain sources of power allow companies to gain a sustainable competitive advantage and defend their businesses against the rest of the market; these moats are things like building a brand, engaging in regulatory capture, or using network effects to lock out the competition.

no amount of analysis will lead you to the sorts of insight necessary to get to that defensible position in the first place! In other words, moats are always built as a result of strategic savvy — I can tell you that having a powerful brand leads to sustained pricing power, but I cannot tell you how to build a powerful brand in your specific industry

Long term readers of Commonplace would note that this describes the ‘metagame’, something I’ve written about in the past

There is a secondary implication here. If the valuable bit of strategy is coming up with what is novel and unexpected to your adversaries, then reading about strategy isn’t as useful as you might think — or at least, not if your goal is to apply some existing strategy to your unique circumstances.

How do you become the sort of organisation or person who is able to come up with new strategies in the first place?

In 1975, on the eve of his retirement, Boyd began to ask questions that lay at the heart of this topic. One of the first questions he asked was: “As a fighter pilot, fast adaptation against the opponent leads to a kill. Does this apply across all levels of warfare?”

The OODA Loop

By itself, the OODA loop is not particularly interesting. As a decision making model, it is not backed by research, there are no descriptions of the exact mental mechanisms that humans use to execute this loop, and there is very little you can do with it if you think about it alone

I have always been annoyed by the pop-sci version of the OODA loop. The usage of the OODA loop in such circles usually goes like this: in times of uncertainty, you need to go through the OODA loop faster than the competition. Observe more! Orient better! Decide quickly! Then act! Then repeat everything again!

Thankfully, Boyd didn’t stop at the OODA loop. He merely used it as a starting point for a number of vastly more interesting ideas.

Idea 1: Looping Speed

Idea 2: Mess With The Adversary’s Loop

bring about a state of confusion

In reality, orientation is far more important when compared to all the other components of the loop.

it is our enemy’s orientation that we must focus on if we want to fuck them up.

I’ve mentioned before that humans are sensemaking beings, and that we abhor raw information being poured into our brains.

In most cases, our sensemaking takes on the form of generating a narrative.

Other times, we build a mental model of the situation (in the Jean Piaget sense, not the Charlie Munger sense)

This is not a new idea. Here’s philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn, for instance, in Revolutions As Changes Of World-View

Boyd in particular breaks the orientation step down into five components:

Your genetic heritage

The cultural tradition

The previous experiences

The new information

Your ability to analyse and synthesise

Boyd noticed that if you are able to overwhelm your opponent’s ability to orient under uncertainty, your adversary will ‘fold into himself’

In other words, you know you have started to win when you observe the enemy turning inward instead of outwards

How do you do this? Boyd lists three ways:

You may speed up your execution tempo, thus overwhelming your adversary’s ability to orient

You may disorient your enemy, by acting in a sudden, unexpected, forceful way.

You may disrupt your enemy by getting inside his OODA loop — that is, understanding his orientation — and therefore mislead him

This is why the OODA loop is more interesting than first meets the eye. As a model of individual decision making it is simplistic and uninteresting. But as a model of an adversary’s decision making, the OODA loop offers us levers we may use in order to mess with them and win.

Idea 3: Beware Mismatches With Reality in Our Own Orientation

“how the hell do you prevent this from happening to you?” And on this question, Boyd concentrates heavily on the idea of analysis and synthesis.

Recall that there are five elements to the orientation step. Of the five, three are things that you have no control over

Boyd believed that analysis and synthesis lay at the heart of good strategic thinking. Boyd argues that a smart strategic thinker (and a smart thinker … of any kind, really) must do both.

The reasons for this is simple: adversarial competition of any kind is a dynamic system between multiple actors

Boyd argues that good strategic thinkers are able to destroy their mental models, and then recreate them either via analysis or synthesis, and repeatedly cycle through these two modes of thought as new information presents itself.

If you have no ability to predict the future, then the next best thing is to leave yourself open to new information, and then reorient yourself repeatedly when faced with an uncertain, constantly changing environment.

Idea 4: Building Organisations That Can Orient Quickly

how is it possible for a group to simultaneously sustain a rapid pace and with continued adaptation to changing circumstances without losing cohesion or coherence of their overall effort?

*In this, Boyd was heavily influenced by German Blitz operating philosophy.

Blitzkrieg operating philosophy solves this problem by giving lower level commanders the freedom to shape or direct their own activities, while at the same time acting within a larger Schwerpunkt, or ‘strategic objective’.*

To achieve this, Boyd argued that you need to meet a number of organisational design goals.

The first is that there should be absolute trust in the subordinates’s ability to pursue the Schwerpunkt

The second is that the group’s communication should be as implicit as possible — that is, the individuals that make up the units share a common outlook and approach to tactical affairs. (shared language)

In WW2, this was achieved by having a body of professional officers who had received exactly the same training during the years of peace, with (per WW2 Blitzkrieg General Gunther Blumen-tritt): “the same tactical education, the same way of thinking, identical speech, hence a body of officers to whom all tactical conceptions were fully clear.”

How might this look like if you took this operational philosophy and applied it to, say, business?

would look something like Amazon (two-pizza teams executing at the periphery on new business initiatives, with only a loose set of rules to guide them) or Koch Industries (decentralised subsidiaries that operate with no budgetary control, but are instead evaluated on long-term return on invested capital

Boyd argued that a common outlook was the most important component of an organic, decentralised C2 structure

What to Think of Boyd?

I’ve left out elements of Boyd’s work that I think are of less interest to readers of this blog.

What do I make of Boyd? This is really difficult to say. So much of Boyd’s theory exists at the level of first principles. This makes it difficult to evaluate, because first principles are several layers removed from practical application

I’ve spent a lot of time on Commonplace writing about the dangers of chasing ideas from non-practitioners, especially when they have not been proven via actual application

When applied here, Boyd’s ideas don’t fare very well — they live at the lowest level of practical evidence admissible by my hierarchy: that of plausible argument.

What gives me pause is that Boyd’s ideas make sense.

I like what I see, and I think the odds are good that his ideas work. But I’ll have to find ways to test them to figure that out.

Appendix: John Boyd Reading Program: