Concepts: The SODA Loop

Using mindful attention to improve performance.

The questions:

• How do I build skills and improve performance?
• How does attention relate to my beliefs? How do beliefs relate to my performance?
• What am I paying attention to today? Why? How will that put me in a better place tomorrow?

Highlights:

• My brain automatically filters information and automatically links information together. The filtering and linking are so remarkable that most of the time I don’t realize what I’m linking together and I don’t miss what I’m ignoring.
• I have to work hard to understand my beliefs, all those connections I’ve made in the past which shape my awareness and shape how I view the world. I have to work hard not to assume everyone else has the same beliefs.
• I’m tempted to focus on an outcome and decisions about specific actions to take to get to that outcome. When I concentrate on an outcome my access to the information in my head often gets worse. The focused attention on an imagined outcome reduces my awareness of the world around me and distorts my underlying beliefs.

An Alternative Approach:

If I focus on behavior, the links between signals and actions, better outcomes will happen naturally.

If I don’t tunnel vision on outcome but instead focus on the whole decision loop: signals received through the senses, orientation to context, deciding on the best path based on context, details of the actions I’m taking and how the signals change based on my actions, I will improve my performance.

Narratives explaining the SODA Loop

Flow & The Short Game

Ken said “go!” so I went.

It wasn’t a huge wave but it was thick and I was late.

I was surfing Sunset on the North Shore of Oahu with my friends Bob and Jeff.

The Ken that told me to go was Ken Bradshaw, big wave pioneer. My friend Jeff has a signed, framed, poster on his wall of Mr. Bradshaw riding a 85+ foot wave at Outside Log Cabins on the North Shore of Oahu in 1996.

The wave I took off on was a lot smaller than Mr. Bradshaw’s wave from the poster but the wave was still bigger than I was.

Surfing is an amazing sport. It’s a lot like snowboarding or skiing but the mass of energy you’re riding is moving and changing shape while you are riding it.

Jack London described surfing as a state of perpetual falling. If you get your path right, you’re falling at the same rate the water is rising up under you. That falling generates speed across the face of the wave.

To get my path right on that wave at Sunset a couple of things had to happen, I had to stand up and I had to turn.

Since I was late on my take off, I had less time to stand up and less time to turn.

Waves change from a bump to a wall to a cave when they reach the impact zone.

In surfing, the difference between an amazing ride and a brutal wipeout is largely dependent on where you are on the wave when it changes shape.

Even on smaller days the wave at Sunset rumbles and growls as it rolls across the reef, which means even on smaller days there are consequences to small mistakes.

When I went from lying on the board to standing on the board the wave had gone from bump to wall.

More out of instinct than any kind of conscious decision, I grabbed the outside rail of the board so I could put more pressure on the fins and more pressure on the inside rail.

I needed all the pressure I could get on the fins and inside rail to get the nose of the board pointed down the line before it buried itself in the bottom of the wave.

As the nose of the board came around, the lip of the wave threw out over my head.

The ride was amazing.

Effort & The Long Game

At the opposite end of the effort and enjoyment spectrum from surfing is the Joint Planning Process (JPP), formerly known as the Military Decision Making Process (MDMP).

Surfing has periods of ecstasy from effortless flow.

Military planning and military decision making is not effortless. The majority of the time it is not enjoyable either.

Surfing is a fast feedback loop where a ton of sensory information about a rapidly changing environment is quickly taken in and converted to action. Feedback is instantaneous and unmistakable. Amazing ride or wipeout.

Military planning can be agonizingly slow with little or no feedback. At least half of the time, military planning is dedicated to making sure something bad doesn’t happen in the distant future.

Our brains have an astounding ability to operate everywhere on this spectrum, from instantaneous decisions with instantaneous feedback to deeply conceptual decisions with agonizingly slow feedback loops.

The OODA Loop and the SODA Loop

In the 1970’s the Fighter Pilot John “Forty-Second” Boyd shared his Observe-Orient-Decide-Act or OODA Loop concept of decision cycles.

He was called “Forty-Second” Boyd because when he was an instructor at the Air Force Weapons School he could defeat any student in a dogfight in less than forty seconds.

Boyd’s deep understanding of aircraft performance enabled him to rapidly orient to the tactical situation and rapidly make decisions as the situation changed.

Although we as people have perception which is dominated by what we observe, our brains have an amazing ability to take in information from all over our bodies and make sense of the world around us.

An example of this amazing capability to filter information and link information to action is Daniel Kish.

Daniel’s eyes were removed when he was 13 months old because of an aggressive type of cancer. He learned how to ride a bike when he was 5.

He uses his ears and some clicks he makes with his tongue to navigate the world around him. Despite the fact he has no eyes, he’s able to ride a bike through forests and in traffic just by paying attention to what he can hear.

The SODA (Sense-Orient-Decide-Act) Loop is a slight variation on Boyd’s OODA Loop.

The variation highlights the contributions of the rest of the senses to our decisions and also highlights the tunnel vision which occurs when making decisions.

The word decision literally means “cutting off.” For a decision to be made, a lot of information has to be discounted.

Some of this discounting of information is intentional but most of the information coming from our senses is eliminated without our awareness. The filtering happens because of the way we’re wired.

This cutting off of information, if done right, is a good thing. Unlike a physical cut, decisions done right produce pleasure and provide happiness.

Much of the ecstasy in surfing comes from the focus which happens when everything comes together just right.

In The Rise of Superman, Steven Kotler describes clear goals, immediate feedback, and a high challenge-to-skill ratio as the conditions which produce flow.

During intense moments of flow there is no noise, peripheral vision narrows and time slows. For seconds or micro-seconds the brain is happy and blissfully focused on doing just one thing very, very well.

The Iceberg & Everything Else

For a few fractions of a second on that wave at Sunset my world consisted only of that small space inside that tube.

For the other ~400,000 seconds I was awake that week my world was a mix of both the good (my wife and my kids) and the exhausting (bills and bureaucracy) which normally take up my time.

For 99.999% of that week all these parts of “normal” life had to compete for a very small patch of extremely limited real estate at the very front of my brain.

My brain works pretty well except for the times when it doesn’t.

Our brains do a remarkable job of filtering information, linking information together and linking information to action.

Our brains do such a remarkable job that most of the time we don’t miss what we’re missing.

Life can get a little crazy and I can only pay attention to a few things at one time.

This means I have a limited awareness of the world around me and a limited awareness of what’s going on inside my head (my beliefs).

I have to work really hard to understand my beliefs, all those connections I’ve made in the past which shape my decisions and shape how I view the world. I have to pay attention to understand the beliefs of others.

When I imagine an outcome the situation gets worse. My awareness shrinks and my beliefs get distorted by the outcome I’m picturing.

I only have enough attention to handle one or two things at a time, which means most of the time I’m “multi-switching” between conversations, to-do lists and trying to remember what I was going to say or what I was supposed to be doing.

We all have limits on our awareness. Our awareness of the world around us is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what is going on in our heads.

Underneath the surface, below my consciousness, there is a lot more going on that I am rarely mindful of.

All that hidden information below the surface is influencing my perception and my decisions, often without me realizing it.

We simply don’t have enough attention space to be aware of all of our sensations and all of the beliefs generating our perceptions at the same time.

Being Ready

General Dwight D. Eisenhower described the plan as useless but the planning process as priceless.

The military planning process is slow and methodical.

The writing, revision and approval process for the war plans which sit on the shelf in case of conflict can take months.

The value of the military planning process isn’t a plan which can be followed step by step without change throughout an operation.

The value of the process is carving out deliberate time pre-thinking a contingency to pre-identify important information and reduce the amount of time it takes to get oriented during a crisis.

Application:

Performance is more than just having the right information. Skill is the ability to link together information, action and outcome.

Attention is limited and precious. What am I spending it on? What am I paying attention to? What’s taking up that limited and precious real estate at the tip of the iceberg?

What’s going on below the surface? What beliefs are directing my attention? Why do I believe this thing I’m “paying” for with my attention is important?

What SODA straws am I looking through? What am I missing?