Useful Ways of Looking

Useful Ways of Looking is a series on concepts I often reference. You could think of them as mental models, or primitives, or keys, or, well, Ways of Looking. You probably landed here because I referenced one and sent you this link for further explanation!

The Useful Ways of Looking are not necessarily true, but they are — as the name suggests — often useful. Finding where to skillfully apply them is part of the job.

In brief

Loop through Observing, Orienting, Deciding, and Acting — with a special emphasis on Orientation, and on cycling back to it as quickly as possible; it works for fighter pilots and can work for you, too.

More context

Colonel John Boyd’s “OODA loop” approach is a decision-making construct originally developed for combat operations, but which can be equally applied to any decision process.

The heart of the concept is to loop through four steps: Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act.

First, you Observe the situation, collecting data about the environment and circumstances.

Then you feed this forward to the most critical step — Orienting — where you generate your mental model of (or, perhaps, Way of Looking at) what’s going on. You include the observations, your experience, analysis, intuition, doctrine, culture — everything.

Canonically, you then create a hypothesis of the correct approach and Decide. And finally, you Act, and then loop back to Observation as quickly as you can.

In practice, though, the Action often flows almost automatically once the Orientation is right. There’s little thought or hypothesis-making required if you are corrected Oriented. Boyd called this “implicit guidance & control.”

A key insight of the OODA loop is that you want to cycle through it as quickly as possible. However, the reason for this is commonly misunderstood.

Most people assume you want fast loops so you can take as many Actions as possible. More Actions is more progress, right?

But as we’ve covered in sister UWoL pieces on Theory of Constraints and Parkinson’s Law, Generalized, Action is not always the most important bit. Often, it’s the Orientation (or, in ToC and Parkinson’s Law parlance, “constraint” or “frame” or “bottleneck” definition) that matters most.

So: you want a fast OODA loop cycle in order to refine your Orientation as quickly as possible. The faster you get to a useful Orientation for the moment (which may be shifting rapidly!), the faster and easier you get to a useful Action and accomplishment of your objective.

When a situation feels unclear or overwhelming, step back and apply this model. Make Observations, Orient to the data (perhaps using a Useful Way of Looking…), then Decide, Act, and immediately Observe the outcomes, beginning the cycle anew — with a special focus on re-Orienting intentionally each time. If done well, clear actions should flow quickly.

In justifying why this approach works, Boyd — again, writing at least superficially about combat operations — references mathematician Kurt Gödel’s work on incompleteness, plus Heisenberg’s on uncertainty, and the second law of thermodynamics, and argues:

We cannot determine the character or nature of … a system within itself

His point — which has echoes of UWoL pieces Ways of Looking and Useful vs. Correct — is that when we’re inside a system trying to solve a “problem,” we cannot affirmatively and completely define the system. There is no “objective reality” or “correct assessment” from within the system — there are only our Observations, which themselves are filtered through our minds. Or, in Boyd’s words:

Machines don’t fight wars, people do and they use their minds

So instead, we must Orient to whatever data we have, Decide, Act, and then re-Orient as quickly as possible. Sitting around and trying to fully build a complete model — without undertaking Actions whose results we can Observe and incorporate into our Orientation — is a fruitless endeavor.

Your most powerful lever is the ability to recognize that the system is malleable, and by choosing your Orientation — your Way of Looking — you can flow through to Actions, output, and the achievement of your objective.

Further readings

Boyd’s essay Destruction and Creation.

Boyd mentee Chuck Spinney’s Evolutionary Epistemology — a commentary on Boyd’s essay above.

Another Boyd collaborator, Chet Richards, has a good overview article on the OODA Loop specifically.

Lots more Boyd content is available on this archive site.

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