This way of thinking can have a direct impact on how we achieve a bigger impact when working with people. We need to orientate our way of looking to change our perspective and way of acting.
Practices
1. Use the four OODA Loop stages outlined below to:
Review and assess a set of priorities
Allocate resources to people or a project
Refine you ideas ideas from different sources of feedback
2. How will you go about observing and making sense of what is actually happening? What data will you choose to assess and why? What circumstances are prevailing at the time and what what is your experience telling you needs to be analysed and controlled?
3. How will you orientate your thinking so that you know why you are thinking the way you do? What are your professional, personal and cultural habits, biases and blindspots? What opposing perspectives and divergent views will you need to consider to make sense of what you are observing?
4. How will the decisions you come up with fit with your initial assessment of what the issues actually are? How does the data fit with your intuition and worldview?
5. How will the actions you decide to take enable you to assess their impact on the issues originally identified? What new observations are emerging that you will beed to consider next?
Support Information
The OODA Loop was a term used by Colonel John Boyd in the 1950’s. He believed that when at a disadvantage, a competent pilot could still overcome that disadvantage by “Attacking the Mind” of his opponent.
His observations led him to a greater understanding of human reaction times when faced with difficult decisions, especially in complex environments.
The OODA Loop consists of four stages:
Observation – collect data
Orientation – analyse the data
Decision – determine a course of action
Action = implement the decision
This has a direct impact on how we can achieve a bigger impact when working with people. To be a powerful observer we need to orientate our way of looking to change our perspective and way of acting.
This way of paying attention helps us to cope when dealing with ambiguity and uncertainty. We are effectively trying to make sense of a changing context to produce a new mental model of how things can work for us.
The OODA model is based on three philosophical and scientific principles to understand how a randomly changing universe produces confusion, ambiguity, and more uncertainty. Understanding the basics of these principles help us see how we combine an outside-in and an inside-out understanding to address the challenges of VUCA.
In the face of a changing reality, the danger is that “to the man with only a hammer, everything is a nail,” they never stop to ask- “Maybe I need a different tool?”
The OODA Loop is a representation of the process that human beings use to learn, grow, and thrive in a rapidly changing world. It all starts with how we choose to assess and interpret what we observe from our environment, in the feedback we get from our conversations, actions and body sensations. All of this is coloured by our experiences, history, culture and learning. We then declare a new future through our decisions that result in the actions we take.
Erik Kvam has applied the OODA Loop model to Regenerative Decision Making. You can watch the video on Youtube.
