Stop Making It So Easy for Your Adversaries to Outmaneuver You
The practice of strategy is “a way to respond to changing conditions and create timely options. The strategy is in the responding and creating . . . and not in the options (e.g., plans and tactics) themselves.” Chet Richards, 2004
We live in a world permeated by ambiguity. Current events both here and abroad are peeling away illusions about predictability, control and even the nature of truth.
More and more, we see insurgent actors seizing power and disrupting the status quo. They’re using “an adroit mix of ambiguity, deception, distribution, and propaganda, all while demonstrating a keen awareness of the moral plane of war and warfare in a way that is serving their ends.” (Friedman, 2015) These sophisticated actors have carefully evolved their strategies to target the vulnerabilities of established power players.
Given this climate of ambiguity and rapid change, is the toolkit most organizations are using to inform their strategy development process actually missing important tools?
This question inspired an investigation into maneuver conflict, a strategic approach grounded in ancient eastern principles of conflict shaping and resolution. In essence, maneuver conflict seeks to harness friction, uncertainty, fluidity and disorder to one’s advantage and inhibit an adversary’s capacity to adapt to changing circumstances. The maneuver mindset aims to dissolve the adversary’s mental and moral cohesion as efficiently as possible in order to avoid a protracted struggle.
As my colleagues and I moved beyond maneuver conflict’s warfighting roots and dug into the underlying concepts, we discovered that there is a lot in this approach that can inform the strategy development process in business, politics and even social change.
Creative adaptation is at the heart of our ability to survive and thrive in an uncertain and ambiguous world. If we want to succeed, we must be able to learn and adapt faster than those who wish to hold us back.
Our team also realized that by explicitly avoiding conflict-based strategies, well-intentioned actors are exposing themselves to threats from adversaries who have no qualms about using such tools against them. Unless we gain a clear understanding of this type of strategy, we have little hope of developing effective ways to counter it.
This article series seeks to spark a conversation around several key questions:
- How do we learn and adapt in the face of uncertainty and constant change?
- When our existing mental models become less useful in addressing the challenges we encounter, how do we generate new ways of looking at the world that help us make wiser decisions?
- What is needed to build a robust strategic repertoire that gives us the agility to quickly identify and exploit opportunities as they arise?
- How can we enhance our capacity to shape the broader political and societal environment?
By examining the risks and opportunities we face using an array of different conceptual frameworks — even, or perhaps especially, those that seem unorthodox — we will be better equipped to accurately perceive reality, make more effective decisions and shape unfolding circumstances to our advantage.
Our intention with this series is for the approaches outlined here to become not just a collection of disparate conceptual frameworks, but rather an integrated approach to strategy development that sees connections between science and business, between logic and intuition, between conflict and cooperation.
Bringing Unconscious Cognitive Limitations to Light
The late Colonel John Boyd, one of the U.S. Air Force’s greatest fighter pilots and arguably maneuver conflict’s biggest champion, had a lot to say about the topic of navigating ambiguity. Boyd asserted that while the randomness of the outside world plays a large role in our sense of uncertainty, people’s inability to properly make sense of their changing reality is the bigger hindrance. When circumstances change, individuals commonly fail to update their mental models and instead continue to see the world as they feel it should be. (McKay, 2014)
It is natural for human beings to operate within fairly narrow conceptual frameworks in their everyday lives — this is how our brains are wired. And yet, these unconscious cognitive limitations may be preventing us from developing effective strategies and achieving our desired results in our work. If we want to generate systemic and enduring progress, we need to move beyond the restrictions of conventional, inward-focused modes of thinking.
A Learning System for Dealing with Uncertainty
John Boyd was renowned for his ability to quickly turn a defensive position into an offensive one in a dogfight, even in an inferior aircraft. He urged students of strategy to achieve what he called “intuitive competence” in creating, employing and dealing with the novelty that permeates human life. (Richards, 2012)
“Ambiguity is central to Boyd’s vision… not something to be feared but something that is a given…We never have complete and perfect information. The best way to succeed is to revel in ambiguity.” (Hammond, as cited in McKay, 2014).
Boyd graphically depicted his theory of how people make sense of their changing reality via the OODA loop (observe, orient, decide, act): a way of thinking about conflict based on the concept of keeping one’s own orientation better matched to reality than one’s opponent can. The side that does so can respond to changes more quickly, shape the situation to its liking, and then exploit the advantage before the opponent can react. (Vandergriff, 2015)
Although the OODA loop has its origins in conflict, the underlying concepts are applicable to any situation in which we’re trying to learn and adapt in the face of rapid change.
In Brett McKay’s superb introduction to the OODA loop, he writes that the power of the framework lies in the ways it makes explicit what is usually implicit. The OODA loop “takes the basic ways we think, decide, and operate in the world — ways that often get confused and jumbled in the face of conflict” — and organizes them into a learning system, a method for dealing with uncertainty. (McKay, 2014)
Note: The framework doesn’t require individuals or organizations to observe, orient, decide, and act, in that order, all the time. It would take too long. Instead, think of the loop as an ongoing, multifaceted, cross-referencing process with orientation at the core. Additionally, imagine that each subsystem within the whole system is going through a series of OODA loops simultaneously.
Boyd’s OODA loop is comprised of the following four components:
Observe
Observation is the act of sensing yourself and the world around you using touch, taste, smell, sight, and hearing. Without observation, we have no way to recognize if/when our current mental models have become outdated. By taking into account new information about our changing environment, we also gain knowledge and understanding that is crucial in forming new mental models. (McKay, 2014)
Potential inputs include unfolding circumstances, outside information, our own unfolding interaction with the environment, and internal feedback loops from the decide and act stages of previous OODA loops.
Orient
Orientation is the act of processing information gathered during the observation stage via a complex set of filters and shaping mechanisms including ideology, belief systems, genetic heritage, cultural predispositions, education, personal experience and knowledge.
- Orientation is the heart of the loop. It is our way of looking at and understanding the world. Orientation creates our expectations of how the world works.
- It shapes the way we interact with the environment and therefore the character of current OODA loops: the way we observe, the way we decide, the way we act. These current loops in turn shape the character of future orientation. (Osinga, 2007)
- One’s orientation ideally evolves to ensure the matchup of the entire loop to its environment through the destruction of existing mental models and the creation of new ones — an ongoing process of analysis and synthesis.
Orientation drives action. The easiest and most reliable way to outmaneuver an adversary is to mess with their orientation so that the resulting actions are ineffective, late, or missing altogether. (Richards, 2014) This emphasis on orientation turns conflict into a learning contest to better maintain awareness of the world of facts. (Richards, 2012)
“Judgment is key. Without judgment, data means nothing. It is not necessarily the one with more information who will come out victorious, it is the one with better judgment, the one who is better at discerning patterns.” (Osinga, 2007)
Decide
Review alternative courses of action and select the preferred course as a hypothesis to be tested. It’s impossible to select a perfectly matching mental model, so we must move forward with an educated guess about which model best corresponds with reality.
Act
Do what you’ve decided to do.
Ideally, use training and experience to assemble a repertoire of potentially effective actions that will flow intuitively, smoothly, and quickly from orientation to accelerate the loop (see “Implicit Guidance & Control” in the diagram above…more on that in the next article). Actions “feed back into the systems as validity checks on the correctness and adequacy of the existing orientation patterns.” (Osinga, 2007)
Everything Flows From Orientation
The OODA loop is an explicit representation of the process that human beings and organizations use to learn and adapt in rapidly changing environments. It places our orientation, the complex set of filters we use to make sense of the world, front and center. When we understand the powerful influence our mental models have on our decision making, we realize the importance of being able to both:
- recognize when current mental models are no longer serving us, and
- update our orientation by taking in new ideas and information that help us make sense of the unfolding reality.
Without these skills, we risk becoming increasingly ineffective in the rapidly changing world in which we live.
Understanding how human beings make decisions in the face of ambiguity helps us cope with uncertainty — and even learn to use it to our advantage — so that we can shape change rather than simply react to it.
Consider how you may have already encountered the ideas outlined here in your own life. Have you ever witnessed a decrease in organizational effectiveness due to people’s inability to properly make sense of their changing reality? In what ways could your own thinking be constraining your progress?
Finally, think about a particularly thorny strategic challenge that your organization is currently facing. How could Boyd’s emphasis on orientation help you see the situation with new eyes?
In the next article, we’ll explore how to shape unfolding circumstances to your advantage by exploiting weaknesses in your adversary’s orientation patterns. We’ll also dive into Boyd’s process for generating a robust toolkit of new, more relevant mental models to guide your actions.
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. (1996, January). The Essence of Winning and Losing. Retrieved from http://pogoarchives.org/m/dni/john_boyd_compendium/essence_of_winning_losing.pdf
Friedman, B. A. (2015, June 1). John Boyd’s revenge: How ISIS got inside our OODA loop. Retrieved from https://medium.com/@bafriedman/john-boyd-s-revenge-8a57d9a53364
McKay, B. and McKay, K. (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
Richards, C. (2004). Certain to Win: The strategy of John Boyd, applied to business. Xlibris Corporation.
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. (2014, July 4). Diseases of orientation [Blog post]. Retrieved from: https://slightlyeastofnew.com/2014/07/04/diseases-of-orientation/
Tremblay, P. D. (2015, April 22). Shaping and adapting: Unlocking the power of Colonel John Boyd’s OODA loop. Retrieved from http://www.pogoarchives.org/straus/shaping-and-adapting-boyd-20150422.pdf
Vandergriff, D. E. (2015, April 28). Unlocking the power of Colonel John Boyd’s OODA loop [Blog post]. Retrieved from http://www.pogo.org/straus/issues/military-people-and-ideas/2015/unlocking-the-power-of-john-boyd-ooda-loop.html
