(2018-04-13) Rao The Use And Misuse Of The Ooda Loop

Venkatesh Rao: The Use and Misuse of the OODA Loop. Boyd's famous OODA loop (observe-orient-decide-act) is probably the most misunderstood and misused diagram of practical significance in decision making.

It is to decision-making what the five elements (earth/fire/water/wind/ether) model from alchemy is to modern chemistry. Or what Freud's id-ego-superego model is to neuroscience. It is in fact the same sort of model as Freud's: a prescient analytical model that attempts to describe cognition rather than a synthetic model that attempts to directly prescribe it.

As with Freud's theories, the problem with the OODA loop is that it was prematurely codified and popularized as an abstract conceptual superstructure before the empirical foundations had matured sufficiently. The map was drawn before the territory was properly explored. The empirical foundations of the two are actually the same: neuroscience, group dynamics (families being the key special case for Freud, military action for Boyd), organizational mapping, social network analysis, and so forth.

The concepts of the OODA loop, like alchemical and Freudian concepts, are still useful so long as you recognize their limits, and approach them with a sufficiently poetic sensibility.

Starting with the way the diagram is usually drawn, which is frankly terrible

the OODA loop is best thought of not a single prescriptive diagram, but as a class of description diagrams that can capture the state of a decision-making system/mind of a decision maker, using a visual alphabet of four primitive elements (observe, orient, decide, act).
In other words, it is not so much a diagram as a diagramming language.

The useful way to draw the OODA loop has only two rules:

• Make orientation distinct: For reasons I'll get to, orientation is categorically different from the other 3, so make it visually distinct.
• Model a decision-making condition, not the idea of the loop: This means only drawing active flow arrows where information of some significance is flowing.

The OODA diagraming language is to Boyd's theories what Transactional Analysis is to Freud's

As you might expect, the result (which you will find in Berne's famous book, Games People Play) is a combinatorial universe of game types

In fact, you could argue that TA is actually OODA for interpersonal interactions, with the diagramming being focused on the actors rather than the action.

Three Misreadings

The bureaucratic misreading:

fetishizing the map to the point that you become blind to the territory.

I see this kind of misreading most often when consultants, middle managers (especially ones in staff roles), and other support types project their own lack of direct agency onto the situation.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, diagram the situation.

The mystical misreading:

turn the OODA loop diagram into something like a divination tool for "What Would Boyd Do?"

As an agility book-keeping system:

This kind of misreading is most common in Silicon Valley

If you're doing something like this, you probably have bigger problems than an illiterate OODA loop, like not being product-driven enough, or lacking a sense of true north in the market.

Faster Tempo

What makes the error a persistent one that gets perpetuated is that increasing your operating tempo is often the right thing to do, so naive Bayesianism would have you accelerating all the time.

Here's a better rule-of-thumb on tempo.
You should aim to operate at a faster tempo in some situations all of the time, all situations some of the time, but not all the situations, all the time.

depending on the situation, the right tempo might actually be very slow. This is reflected in the interestingly paradoxical special-forces dictum: slow is smooth, smooth is fast

You don't rush headlong into uncertainty with a battle cry of "Tempo, tempo tempo!" and a fixed two-week pivot schedule synchronized with feature releases.

The Territory of the Map

the Orient part is sort off of to one side, generating interruptions, overrides, and exceptional course corrections, while the other three flow into each other serially, generating a smoother base behavior

Reading the Diagram

what decision-making condition is it portraying? I've illustrated 6 very common ones above, which I'll describe here.

Half the time, just getting the qualitative diagram right will solve your problem

Let's say a little bit more about adversaries, since the strength of OODA-thinking is its incorporation of adversaries.

There is Always an Adversary

It is useful for modeling any kind of non-aligned intentions in a situation.
Starting with the inside of your own head.

Here is a bunch of diagramming problems for you to think about:

It takes effort, it takes practice, and is rarely as useful as you think it is going to be.

It's a lot of fun to do though, even if all it does is get you primed or warmed up for using some other decision-making approach.

When to Use OODA DIagramming

OODA diagramming is good for figuring out how you're stuck, and how to try and shift your behavior patterns so you get unstuck, especially when the adversarial element in the situation is strong.