COLONEL BOYD & THE OODA
There are four simple words that to a fighter pilot can mean all the difference between winning and losing a dogfight. Between living or dying. And while it’s been a long time since any blood was shed in the car market, the tea category or the supermarket aisle, anyone who is serious about marketing and brands could do worse than follow the guidance of those four words that make up what Colonel John Boyd called the the OODA Loop.
Before rising to the position of a chief strategist during the Gulf War and helping plan operation Desert Storm, Boyd had been a fighter pilot in the Korean War and even helped design the F-16 fighter jet, still one of the nimblest fighters in the sky. But it is the OODA Loop and the theory of strategy it encompasses for which he is best known.
While the loop was created to help pilots understand how to get the better of their opponents, because of the way the theory was developed, it has far wider applications. In developing it, like all great thinkers, Boyd studied writings that seemed as far removed from a flight school manual as one could possibly get; Quantum Physics, Philosophy and Thermodynamics to name three. But it’s precisely because of these varied influences that his theory of competition, so elegantly explained by the loop, has such broad application.
The three biggest influences had nothing to with aerial combat, but everything to do with the world and our reality: Gödel’s Theory of Incompleteness – we can never have a complete understanding of reality and must constantly redefine our perspective; Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle – there are limitations as to how precisely we can observe reality and Newton’s Second Law of Thermodynamics – every closed system tends towards entropy.
These all point to a world that is unstable, irregular and disorderly and in such a world, the first to make a “rapid assessment and adaptation to a complex and rapidly changing environment that you cannot control,” would have the upper hand. The OODA Loop provides the framework to ensure that. A framework for critical agility.
Boyd believed that in any competitive situation, the first to move effectively through the loop of Observing, Orienting, Deciding and Acting would gain the upper hand. If we imagine the loop as one that becomes bigger and bigger the more time that’s taken, then we can see why Boyd referred to one competitor moving more efficiently than the other as “operating inside the enemy’s loop.”
Did it work? Well, he didn’t get the nickname of 40-second Boyd for nothing. There was a standing bet between him and other pilots: he would start in a position of disadvantage e.g. with another pilot on his tail and, within forty seconds he would have had out-manoeuvred that pilot and end up in a position of advantage over them.
The bet was $40. He never lost.
But what about business? Well, just like in war, the number and quality of resources at hand are important, but in the end, it will all come down to one thing; outmanoeuvring your competitors. And to achieve that, just like in a dogfight, agility is key.
Keith H. Hammonds, writing for Fast Company, tells the story of how after a fire seriously damaged a mobile-phone chip factory belonging to Philips, Nokia reacted immediately, even sending employees to help the recovery of its supplier. Ericsson shared the same supplier, but did nothing, waiting for the supply chain to become operational again. While Ericsson was losing months’ worth of production, Nokia capitalized by pushing new phones and grabbing market share. Nokia got inside Ericsson’s loop. Ericsson ultimately ended up having to outsource all its production.
Boyd was, in fact, of the opinion that the entire focus of competition should be this getting inside of the enemy’s loop by acting quickly to outthink them, because it makes us “appear ambiguous” and this will create more “confusion and disorder” for them. The point is to make it difficult for our competitors to carry on. A principle which holds as true for business as it did for the strategies of the Greeks at the Battle of Marathon, Napoleon, and the Germans with their Blitzkrieg methods, all of which he drew on in his nearly fifty years of research.
But there is a word or two of caution from Boyd himself, to anybody attempting to use the loop: because of the way observation is affected by one’s orientation i.e. culture & heritage and how the decisions we take (and the actions we make) will change the world around us, the last step of the loop provides feedback for the first and a new world is observed, requiring fresh decisions and actions.
According to Boyd, “there is no way out, we must continue the whirl of reorientation, mismatches, analysis / synthesis over and over again ad infinitum.”
But if that never-ending loop is keeping you one step ahead of your enemies, then why on Earth would you want to eject?
