Adopt This Way of Thinking to Unravel Your Competition
“Following this approach, an organization can act with incredible speed, constantly updating its strategy before an opponent can even figure out what’s happening. But instead of looking erratic, the many units of your organization act in concert to produce a coherent whole. In other words: you look like a blur to your enemies.” Eric Ries
The first article in this series introduced Colonel John Boyd’s OODA loop, a visual representation of the process that human beings use to learn and adapt in rapidly changing environments. Boyd’s framework highlights the critical role that mental models play in our decision making: if our mental models are out of touch with the emerging reality, our resulting decisions and actions will be as well.
A deeper understanding of the OODA loop helps us avoid this pitfall by generating and refining new, more relevant mental models to guide our actions. It also helps us see how to step out of reaction mode and begin shaping the strategic environment to our advantage.
Getting Inside the Adversary’s Loop
In John Boyd’s final depiction of the OODA loop, he highlighted two key flows: one going from orientation to observation and one from orientation to action. He called them “implicit guidance and control,” and they are the most important part of understanding the OODA loop as an aid for evolving tactics, operations, and strategy.
Consider the implications of the following excerpt from Marine Major Paul Tremblay’s insightful paper (Tremblay, 2015) on the misunderstood nature of the OODA loop:
- If action flows nearly instantaneously from orientation, the quickness of the overall loop is accelerated. This has the effect of compressing the time an adversary has to reorient in response to what is happening in their environment.
- The side with the relatively quicker loop will, at times, have a more relevant picture of the unfolding situation because they are shaping it rather than being forced to adapt to it.
- This mismatch in orientation can provide a fleeting opportunity for the quicker side to continue to exploit the effects of the first move, before the slower side understands what is happening.
- It also has the effect of resetting an adversary’s loop by causing confusion — sending them back to the observation phase, back to figuring out how to proceed. (McKay, 2014)
- If the quicker side can maintain this mismatch, the slower side will become increasingly disconnected from the environment and their actions will become increasingly unrelated to the actual situation.
- As this process continues, the relatively slower side continues to generate increasingly irrelevant observations, leading to more disconnected decisions, and so forth. Confusion and disorder increase. This is what Boyd referred to as “getting inside their loop.”
Notice that the power of this phenomenon is not derived from absolute speed, but from relative speed — in particular, how long it takes our side to reorient compared to how long it takes our adversary. (Richards, 2004) Boyd believed that the winner of any conflict is the side that can handle the quickest rate of change.
It’s not just about speed, though. Abrupt, irregular, unexpected maneuvers and rapid changes in tempo can have the same disorienting effect on the adversary, generating hesitation and doubt. Chet Richards, one of Boyd’s close colleagues, describes the process of getting inside an adversary’s loop in this way:
We “make intuitive our ability to conduct experiments on our opponents and to act upon our updated knowledge more quickly than our opponents and more indistinctly and with more irregularity.” (Richards, 2013)
Now that we understand how implicit guidance and control can convey a major strategic advantage, let’s examine its perils.
The Dangers of a Locked Orientation
Whether we want it to or not, orientation exerts strong control over what we observe. This tendency to confirm what we already believe is hardwired into our brains. As a result, implicit guidance and control can actually create a disadvantage if the decision maker’s preconceptions misshape the observations they are sensing. (Tremblay, 2015) The misshapen observations can lock or hijack our orientation by inducing us to perceive and act on what we want to see rather than what actually is.
“First order effects of this disconnect may be initially too small to measure thanks in part to luck, chance, or ambiguity. However, if the cycle goes on unabated, subsequent actions continue to induce dysfunctional behavior back into the entire OODA loop, which then folds back on itself to magnify the mismatch. The cycle not only repeats itself but mutates by amplifying itself…” (Tremblay, 2015)
Another one of Boyd’s close colleagues, Chuck Spinney, named this phenomenon incestuous amplification:
“Incestuous amplification has the effect of closing off the system from its environment, and any activity in a closed system always generates entropy, thereby making it impossible to maintain that system’s coherence. Therefore, without a correction or change that opens the decider’s OODA loop to an effective communication with the real world, the only uncertainty in the outcome is how long an OODA loop driven mad by incestuous amplification can last before it degenerates into chaos, confusion, and disorder.” (Spinney, 2008)
Boyd believed that it’s nearly impossible to recognize incestuous amplification from inside the system. As a result, we must put mechanisms in place to ensure an outside viewpoint and alert us to any incestuous amplification that’s occurring.
However, these kinds of safeguards are insufficient. Because mismatches between our current understanding and the rapidly shifting external world are unavoidable, we also need a robust internal process for resolving such discrepancies once we’ve identified them.
A Feedback Loop for Comprehending, Shaping and Adapting to the World
Many of the popular articles written today about Boyd’s OODA loop oversimplify it to the point of mischaracterization. They emphasize rapid tempo above all else — whoever cycles through their loop faster will win. While rapid tempo certainly has its advantages at the tactical level, Boyd also stressed the importance of developing the best, most relevant mental models possible.
So how do we generate the best mental models possible? We can’t just look to our own personal experiences or use the same formulas over and over again. Instead, we start by actively seeking out the mismatches between our current understanding and our external reality.
By alerting us to the need to reshape our orientation, mismatches present vital learning opportunities. When understood and utilized consciously, they can serve as the driving force behind our generation of new ideas, mental models and strategies.
In his later work, Boyd elaborated on this process of reorientation and proposed a mechanism for how it operates — a “dialectic engine” of sorts. He believed that to understand novel challenges or patterns, we first have to break down our existing mental models into the elemental features that make up such patterns. He called this process analysis. Because every individual brings their own set of experiences and conceptual filters to the table, there are innumerable combinations of elemental features to be discovered.
From there, new conceptual frameworks are created by looking for the elemental features that naturally interconnect with one another to form a higher order, more general elaboration of what is taking place. Boyd called this process synthesis. The new understanding may happen quickly in a flash of insight, or it may take years of trial and error.
When we test the results of the actions that are based upon these new conceptual frameworks, we create a feedback loop for comprehending, shaping and adapting to the world. This intuitive interplay of analysis and synthesis provides a basic framework for generating novelty, addressing mismatches between our mental models and the reality they are supposed to represent, and reshaping our orientation toward that reality as it undergoes change. (Boyd, 1992)
If you’re drawing parallels with the scientific method, you’ve got the right idea. This analytical/synthetic feedback loop is the essence of Boyd’s thinking on how to survive and thrive in a rapidly changing world. A little too abstract? Let’s try an example…
A Thought Experiment
Success against quick-thinking adversaries requires us to think up and try new actions on the fly as well as find new ways to employ our existing set of actions. (Richards, 2012) In his infamous presentations, Boyd liked to take his audience through the following thought experiment:
“Imagine four scenarios: someone skiing, someone power-boating, someone bicycling, and a boy playing with a toy tank. Break down each domain into its component parts: For skiing, there would be snow, chairlifts, skis, hot chocolate, and so on. Within their domain, the parts have directly identifiable relationships with one another. But scramble together the parts from the four domains, and suddenly it’s hard to determine any relationships at all. We are thrown into chaos.
“Now . . . take one part from each scene: From skiing, select the skis; from power boating, the motor; from bicycling, the handlebars; and from the boy with his toy tank, the treads. What do these elements have to do with one another? At first, seemingly nothing — because we still think of them in terms of their original domains. But bring the parts together, and you’ve used your creative pattern-recognition skills to build … a snowmobile! ‘A winner,’ Boyd concluded, ‘is someone who can build snowmobiles … when facing uncertainty and unpredictable change.’ ” (Hammonds, 2002)
Individuals and organizations who have a broad range of knowledge to draw from are better equipped to quickly comprehend and adapt to novel situations. To maintain this kind of variety in response, we first need to build variety into the construction of our orientation patterns.
Developing and Expanding Our Strategic Repertoire
Boyd defined “repertoire” as those actions an individual or organization knows so well that they flow intuitively, smoothly, and quickly straight from our orientation.
As Chet Richards explains, we must achieve excellence in our repertoire — our actions must accomplish what we intend them to accomplish:
“It is not enough, though, to be able to perform the same set of tasks more quickly and more smoothly day after day. Organizations that take only this approach make themselves vulnerable to competitors who observe them carefully, become able to predict these actions, and create new ways to counter them.” (Richards, 2012)
How then do we evolve new repertoires to deal with unfamiliar phenomena or unforeseen change? According to Boyd, the process for generating new actions involves a loop of observation, analysis & synthesis (across a variety of domains or across a variety of competing/independent channels of information), hypothesis, and testing — as illustrated in the figure below.
These circular processes generate novelty in the ways we respond to changing conditions. “The idea is that through repeated looping … as individuals and as organizations, we engineer new options into our repertoire that we can deploy smoothly and intuitively” (Richards, 2012) via an implicit guidance and control link and realize the full power of the OODA loop.
Think about how you gather strategic inspiration for your work. What sources and methods do you currently use? Consider a deep dive into one or two complementary — or even unrelated — domains that could inject some fresh perspective into your thinking. What are the smartest people in those fields discussing?
Where are you pushing up against the limits of your existing mental models in your work? Using the results of your deep dive, can you and your team run a thought experiment like the one above to practice building your own snowmobiles?
In the next article, we’ll explore how to engage with your adversary on the moral plane of conflict and uncover why moral strategy offers the greatest leverage. You’ll also see how Boyd’s ideas about interaction and isolation can help you shape the broader societal and political environment.
Thanks for reading. You can follow me here to read upcoming articles in this series as they are published.
Next in this Series
Sources
Boyd, J. R. (1992, July/August). Conceptual spiral. Retrieved from http://pogoarchives.org/m/dni/john_boyd_compendium/conceptual-spiral-20111100.pdf
Boyd, J. R. (1996, January). The Essence of Winning and Losing. Retrieved from http://pogoarchives.org/m/dni/john_boyd_compendium/essence_of_winning_losing.pdf
Hammonds, K. H. (2002, May 31). The strategy of the fighter pilot. FastCompany.com. Retrieved from https://www.fastcompany.com/44983/strategy-fighter-pilot
McKay, B. (2014, September 15). The Tao of Boyd: How to master the OODA loop [Blog post]. Retrieved from http://www.artofmanliness.com/2014/09/15/ooda-loop/
Osinga, F. P. (2007). Science, strategy and war: The strategic theory of John Boyd. [Kindle version]. Retrieved from Amazon.com
Osinga, F. P. (2015). The enemy as a complex adaptive system: John Boyd and airpower in the postmodern era. In J. A. Olsen (Ed.), Airpower reborn: the strategic concepts of John Warden and John Boyd. [Kindle version, pp. 48–92]. Retrieved from Amazon.com
Richards, C. (2012, March 21). Boyd’s OODA loop: It’s not what you think. Retrieved from: https://fasttransients.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/boydsrealooda_loop.pdf
Richards, C. (2013, March 22). John Boyd, Conceptual Spiral, and the meaning of life. Retrieved from https://fasttransients.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/boyd_cs_meaning_of_life8.pdf
Ries, E. (2008, November 5). Learning from Obama: maneuver warfare on the campaign trail [Blog post]. Retrieved from http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2008/11/learning-from-obama-maneuver-warfare-on.html
Spinney, F. (2008, September 10). Can Obama put down the brie and opt for real change? [Blog post]. Retrieved from http://www.counterpunch.org/2008/09/10/can-obama-put-down-the-brie-and-opt-for-real-change/
Tremblay, P. J. (2015, April 22). Shaping and adapting: Unlocking the power of Colonel John Boyd’s OODA loop. Retrieved from http://www.pogo.org/straus/issues/military-people-and-ideas/2015/unlocking-the-power-of-john-boyd-ooda-loop.html
