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4 months ago
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John Boyd and The OODA Loop
John Boyd’s OODA loops are more than just an esoteric strategic concept; they’ve earned a huge following online and around the world. In this article, I highlight key points about OODA loops along with a glimpse into the life of John Boyd, their creator. OODA loops are quite intricate once you get into the details, it’s easy to miss some of their subtleties, and they’re often misunderstood (partly because they use the word “loop” when they’re not really loops).
Here’s a short overview, but if you’re curious to learn more, there’s a richer explanation of OODA loops and associated ideas at psychsafety’s parent site, iterum.co.uk. Head over for a much deeper dive in OODA as well as more about John Boyd himself! At Iterum, we focus on the higher level aspects of organisational learning and success, including strategy, tactics, organisation structure and leadership.
Boyd’s background as an air force pilot means that his work is intertwined with military strategy and conflict – if this is a topic you’d prefer to avoid, feel free to jump ahead to the section on “psychological safety at work” below.
“Forty Second Boyd”
Born in Erie, USA, in 1927, John Boyd joined the US Air Force in 1944. His piloting prowess was clear; he excelled at the Nellis Fighter Weapons School and quickly became an instructor. His ability for defeating opponents in less than forty seconds during simulated aerial combat earned him the moniker “Forty Second Boyd” (it’s possible that he awarded himself this nickname, but it still stuck!). One of his signature moves, “flat plating the bird”, where he would dramatically decelerate the aircraft by taking it into a 90 degree vertical to force the pursuer in front (like a Cobra Manoeuvre for those familiar with it), was just part of what made him unbeatable.
“People, Ideas, Hardware. In that order.”
John Boyd
Boyd’s tactical insights began to transform aerial combat from an art form into a science. While studying Thermodynamics at Georgia Tech, he developed Energy-Manoeuvrability (E-M) Theory, recognising that the true advantage in fighter jets came not from speed, size, or firepower, but from their ability to rapidly “dump” and regain energy. His theory ultimately transformed aircraft design, though it was met with much resistance at the time, contrasting with the US military’s predilection for more powerful (and expensive) hardware and “bigger, faster, further.”
OODA Loops
E-M Theory led Boyd to the insight that manoeuvring at a higher tempo than your opponent is key to success – agility, not speed, wins. Through this, he created the concept of the OODA loop, which has uses that extend far beyond flying combat aircraft. The OODA loop, which stands for Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act, is a continuous process that reflects the ongoing nature of decision-making and the ability to adapt swiftly in combat, with each phase feeding into the next (though stages can be skipped or repeated). The term “loops” also reflects the original source of the concept – it’s often the pilot that can pull the tightest loop that can get on their opponent’s tail and into a firing position.
Boyd’s graphical representation of OODA. By Patrick Edwin Moran – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3904554
Stages of the OODA Loop
Observe: This stage involves gathering information and ensuring that you have the means to do so effectively, whether in a fighter jet or within an organisation. This could be observing your competitive landscape, market factors, or political and economic conditions.
Orient: Contextualise what you know, acknowledging that your observations will be filtered through the lens of your own experiences and knowledge. Boyd saw this as the most crucial stage, and it’s also where you consider your own capability and capacity.
Decide: Here, you make a decision based on the orientation phase, which could be an active choice or a deliberate inaction or pause. As Boyd put it, “Decisions without actions are pointless. Actions without decisions are reckless.”
Act: This final stage is where decisions are executed, and it forms a test of the success of the whole loop – which then feeds back into the observation element, looping back through the experimental cycle again. It’s worth noting that stages can be skipped, and that doing nothing and waiting to gather more information, is a valid action.
Misconceptions About OODA Loops
OODA is often oversimplified to mean moving faster than the opponent. But Boyd pointed out that it’s not just about speed, it’s about getting “inside” your opponent’s loop, and/or exploiting their weaknesses – going fast is just one way of doing that. He often spoke about “tempo”, meaning the pace of operating through the loop – this may not be solely about speed but can instead help with disrupting the opponent’s rhythm. The concept of ‘Fingerspitzengefühl’, can be useful here, which is one of those delightful German mashed-word expressions, meaning something like “fingertips feeling”. It refers to the intuitive grasp on a situation gained through expertise, which can significantly increase the tempo of decision-making.
Ok, that’s great but what do I do with all this OODA?
Firstly, as Boyd advised, we shouldn’t be dogmatic about any approach; OODA is adaptable to various situations, from playing table top games to business strategising. Practising OODA loops, even just as thought experiments, can improve your ability to think and respond strategically.
Secondly, there’s no need for just one person to carry the load. The collective proficiency and experience that cultivates fingerspitzengefühl for making quicker decisions often resides with a multidisciplinary team with a mix of talents and skills. When they work together, their combined instincts are better than anyone flying solo. But it can only click into place when the team communications are efficient, fast, and candid, all of which are underpinned by a foundation of psychological safety.
Finally, you’re “doing” OODA whether you know it or not, and your competitors and opponents are too, so you may as well practise it.
A reflective note on Intelligent failures and OODA
Intelligent failures are the result of iterative experimentation in new territory in the pursuit of a goal (see Amy Edmondson’s “Right Kind of Wrong” for more on that topic). In a competitive environment, this is precisely the domain of OODA, where we have a well defined objective, and there is a significant degree of uncertainty and complexity in our environment.
Below is a sketch of how I conceptualise the relationship between OODA and intelligent failures. Feel free to adapt, remix and riff on this idea and let me know what you come up with!
OODA and Intelligent Failures
Further Reading:
Psychological Safety in Aviation
The importance of safe-to-fail wargames
Psychological Safety Open-enrolment Workshops
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Psychological Safety at Work
This essay by Amy Edmondson in Time is absolutely wonderful, and is also one of my favourite parts of her book, The Right Kind of Wrong. I was genuinely taken aback for a moment when I read this in the book, because it’s so rare – indeed, I can barely think of another example – for a business and leadership-oriented publication to so directly address inequity and intersectionality.
“The more I study the research on the psychology, sociology, and economics of inequality, the more massive the undertaking of correcting these societal failures feels. At the very least, as a society, we should aspire to creating a world where everyone has an equal license to fail intelligently. That is not the case today. But I believe that we’re ever so slightly closer to that aspiration than we were even just a few years ago. Recognizing our heteronormative, white lens through which we view the world is an important first step.“
In my opinion, too many leadership and management books and “thought leaders” avoid these topics of inequity and privilege for fear of getting “political”, or losing some of the status or power the authors have managed to accumulate. However I believe that this is where we have an obligation, a duty, to elevate this message: those of us with the privilege and the voice to do so should speak up and make it clear that we cannot talk about psychological safety, about failure, about success, about experimentation and innovation, or indeed about work in general, whilst staying silent about the inequities that women, people of colour, LGBTQIA+ people, neurodiverse folks, people who are physically disabled, and those from less socioeconomically advantaged backgrounds face in the workplace.
And it would seem that those messages are more important than ever. This article from the BBC shows that “US business leaders are pushing back against years of corporate diversity efforts”. The article states “Well-intended DEI policies can have counterproductive effects. For example, quotas can stigmatise some groups if there is no strategy that focuses on inclusion and how to make the quota work.” – of course, this is where inclusion and psychological safety go hand in hand. I believe that psychological safety is essential to inclusion – after all, what good is recruiting a diverse workforce if those diverse voices aren’t heard?
This is an interesting episode of the WB40 podcast, where Matt and Chris are joined by Julia Bellis of Equal Experts. Julia is leading a programme of psychological safety improvement and change in Equal Experts, which is a tech consulting firm. It’s interesting to hear of the tricky dynamics faced by consulting teams when they’re inserted into a client organisation – where the cultures and systems might be less supportive of psychologically safe environments than their own organisation. It was also really interesting to hear Julia’s comment that teams who were being regularly surveyed on psychological safety felt that the measurement was being done “to” them, not “for” them.
Some of the qualitative feedback in one of my client organisations recently was that some managers use “management speak” to intimidate and obfuscate, and this can certainly a behaviour, intentionally or otherwise, to exert control over people and hold on to a bit of power. It’s just one of the many management antipatterns that we work to address, and this is a brilliant clip from “Wankernomics” that illustrates that exact point in a very funny way (apologies for the swearies, and there are many, so don’t click this link in a quiet office! ‘Everyone’s too afraid to speak up in a meeting and say “Simon, what the F%£k are you even talking about?! What the f@£k does scalable deliverables even mean?!“‘
Thanks to my mate Chris for the link.
Finally, this is wonderful. Our resident illustrator Deisa Tremarias helped to make this fabulous project happen, in collaboration with Venezuelan photographer Marcelo Volpe – “The Girl on the Wall”, for the “Fila en Fila” event in San Agustin Del Sur, Venezuela. Check out Deisa’s video of how it came to be.
This week’s poem:
Failing and Flying, by Jack Gilbert
Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It’s the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
Like being there by that summer ocean
on the other side of the island while
love was fading out of her, the stars
burning so extravagantly those nights that
anyone could tell you they would never last.
Every morning she was asleep in my bed
like a visitation, the gentleness in her
like antelope standing in the dawn mist.
Each afternoon I watched her coming back
through the hot stony field after swimming,
the sea light behind her and the huge sky
on the other side of that. Listened to her
while we ate lunch. How can they say
the marriage failed? Like the people who
came back from Provence (when it was Provence)
and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.
I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
but just coming to the end of his triumph.
