Evolve your reality loops with Col. John Boyd

This article explores loops and feedback in a loopy and feed-backy way.

Col. John Boyd came up with the OODA loop based on his experience as a combat ace in the VUCA world of the Korean war (and later as instructor who could beat all comers from an inferior position in forty seconds). Since then his feedback loop of Observe->Orient->Decide->Act has grown to legendary status. He saw interconnected loops operating at different levels as fundamental to the way individuals and organisations interact (with each other and the world), developing it into a generalised model of cognition.

Not only is the OODA loop a fascinating model to play with, with myriad applications in the world of decision-making and transformation, it can also make me more manly in a Tao Te Ching sort of way. I'm in :-)

As well as the goto tool of the dogfight ace, and even cops engaged in "defensive tactics", OODA loops are also an excellent gateway into Systems Thinking--the exploration of feedback and relationships in connected systems. Central heating, organisms, mind, economy, planet etc. all systems. And whether we want to be all new age or chiseled flying ace about it, everything really is connected--whether we want to see it or not (the latter being most people's default position).

I am loopy for the OODA loop!

Loops in combat

The initial purpose of the OODA loop. We dogfight 121. I get inside your OODA loops quicker than you get inside mine.

• I force you back to Observe by throwing a wrench in your expectations. I win the fight.
• I run through scenarios in my mind all the way through the OODA. You Act. I go through my pre-rehearsed OODA. I win the fight.

This is a good source of a combat scenario, for patriots only:

Note: as a Brit not sure I qualify as a patriot, but I'm going to keep using the OODA loop until it is taken away. Then I'll have to revert to my fallback self-defence strategy Cynefin, or worse, Togaf.

Dominic Cummings also a proponent:

Negative feedback

Ever got negative feedback? Of course you have: touching a hot stove, an interaction rebuffed, a bad performance review. This is misleading since, formally, negative feedback refers to feeding some of a system's output back into the input to maintain equilibrium and convergence. E.g. too hot->sympathetic nerves open sweat glands->body cools->sympathetic nerves stop firing.

Am speculating here but could this be why imperfections (e.g. diversity) leads to group behaviour convergence as recent research into fireflies shows?

One could speculate further that societal cohesion is due to synchronisation/alignment of our OODA loops and lack of cohesion due to dissonance/divergence.

Note: keep these positive/negative feedback loop diagrams in mind when we talk about clades later

Loops in learning

In the nineties I sat next to the research director of French pharmaceutical Servier on the Eurostar to Paris and had a fascinating conversation where he showed me his PowerPoint model of the brain. As we perceive the world, a loop is formed in the brain and when a circuit is formed confirming the recognition of a pattern, minute amounts of dopamine are released. This is positive reinforcement and it's how the body learns. It's actually more complicated than this and involves:

Wanting=The desire to obtain a reward, mediated by Dopamine

Pleasure=The liking that some rewards bring, mediated by Endogenous Opioids and Endogenous Cannabinoids

He went on to explain the euphoria associated with breakdowns and drops in Dubstep by way of this feedback loop:

• Observe music with its pattern of sounds and beats
• Orient mental model with this incoming pattern
• Decide mental model and incoming patterns match
• Act by moving your body

When around the middle of the track we get a breakdown, some remnants of the pattern match and some don't (the absence of expected beats and/or sounds). The Decide step of the OODA loop is saying yes and no simultaneously since remnants of the pattern confirm the model and missing elements refute it. This builds-up potential difference in the electrical circuits of the mind and we enter the dopamine loop.

Now, when the drop comes back in the Decide step throws out a big "yes" reinforced by all that potential difference giving rise to a bigger dump of neurotransmitter like lightning triggered by a thunderstorm. Result: euphoria. Cf. storytelling, dramatic tension, jokes.

Loops as impulse

I see Taylor Swift in a cool outfit I have to have it THAT WEEK -- fast fashion. I want food I click Uber Eats, I obsessively check LinkedIn when a notification comes in to show someone liking this post (come on, you know you want to!). My OODA loops are working against me, favouring impulsive releases of dopamine over normal dopamine behaviour.

"Lord Business just hacked my brain and I am trapped in the dopamine loop."

This impulse loop addiction reduces our brain's capacity to make good choices. To break free I must hack the hack and fight back.

Taking loops further

Boyd continued to develop his model. This more detailed version breaks down Orient into a complex ecosystem of belief and thought patterns with influence extended to Observe and Act. So how we Orient affects what we Observe and how we Act.

Boyd also differentiated between Forward and Reverse thinking: the latter being our powerful ability to reach outside and combine it with our internal thinking. This build from Ed Brimmer depicting the latest findings of neuroscience as an engine of consciousness (and notice the introduction of goals, missing from our discussions so far):

And a new addition, this post by Chet:

Group dynamics throws in another wrench. Do we have to:

• Orient with each others' Orients?
• Win pecking-order supremacy through rank or OODA loop battles and impose our dominant Orient hegemony on everyone else?

Perhaps these dilemmas are why MBAs score so poorly on the group dynamics spaghetti and marshmallow test and why preschoolers do so well:

And perhaps this is why our Centrica guilds predicated on flat peer structures work: they minimise distortion effects of pecking-order and ego.

My first foray into this topic was through fuzzy cognitive maps, loops in all but name. I first came across these reading Fuzzy Thinking by Bart Kosko. This one explaining positive and negative forces at work in the cocaine trade:

This also gets us into an important interaction factor: excitation (Cocaine price) and inhibition (American police interdiction). Which further gets us into controls systems, cybernetics, systems thinking and reinforcement learning. Niels Pflaeging refers to a similar "flipping" model for reinforcement of cultural change and transformation. Change through constant OODA loop disruption until new stable Orient emerges perhaps?

(And on the dark side, propaganda and bots for preventing this flipping:)

I have recently found an earlier canonical source for flipping courtesy of Daniel Christian Wahl. R. Buckminster-Fuller and his trim-tabs:

And from here just a short hop to systems thinking and this great summary from Miljan Bajic with the famous UN DDT anecdote I keep forgetting the link to that Daniel Wahl and others have cited:

Loops and bridging the reality gap

Our OODA loops help us iteratively develop, gauge and refine our models of reality we build in our finite minds. But there is always a gap to be bridged between them and the infinite complexity of reality itself. And depending on our approach some gaps can be wider and harder to bridge than others. Belief clades are produced:

"The future belongs to Posthumanism, Lindsay. Not to nation-states, not to factions. It belongs to life, and life moves in clades"--Bruce Sterling, Schismatrix 1985 

And like any organism have a tendency to widen over time. This is where the political world in the west is right now, for example where ideologies based on infinite growth extractive economies and climate science head in different directions.

Belief systems as organisms

Let us consider belief systems as organisms subject to positive and negative feedback loops:

A card trick: pick a belief system, any belief system. Could be libertarianism, patriotism, scientific orthodoxy, judaism, death metalism, intersectional feminism etc. these will all grow in clades.

Now consider the following questions:

• What are the positive feedback loops operating on this belief system and how do the effects play out?
• What are the negative feedback loops operating on this belief system and how do the effects play out?
• What would a Goldratt's evaporating clouds analysis of this belief system reveal?
• Consider whether the reality is in fact something like the following, whether these feedback loops are one and the same and viewing them as otherwise is merely a scale distortion, failing to see them as a fractal:

A few oh shit! moments to ponder:

• Is growth extractive market capitalism founded on a scale distortion?
• Do belief systems evolve until they hit a negative feedback threshold?
• Can we steer belief systems with this knowledge or do we just have to watch them grow and collapse according to the laws of entropy?

Puts reality in a whole new and hopefully disturbing context, doesn't it? Found this great diagram from new complexity aggregator site that summarises nicely.

The most urgent task in human sense-making is bridging this reality gap. This is why I like the regenerative movement:

Bridging the gap between appearances and reality is also a factor. Donald Trump talking about keeping a cruise ship with a coronavirus outbreak out of US ports:

“I like the numbers being where they are,” he said. “I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn’t our fault.”

Cf. stigma around e.g. mental illness:

This post on fallibilism, do I patch my loops or am I happy in the loop/bubble I'm in?:

Holding the line

Our Orient mechanisms both resist and are susceptible to change. There is a non-newtonian fluid aspect to them. This presumably related to the Andrew Clay Shafer observation at Map Camp last year that people stop learning when their needs are met.

Mark Smith's cheeky "bad OODA loop" incorporates the cognitive bias codex:

Perhaps the threat in this case is not the enemy plane but the "other" cognitive bias codex/cultural web we are fighting/interacting with? And indeed this traffic is not purely informational with a high signal to noise ratio. We have to assume like any network that the traffic is both benign and adversarial with the possibility of breach and infection.

I can't help but review some recent interactions with climate denialists through this lens. And indeed rather than the integrity of our plane that is at stake, perhaps it is the integrity of our belief systems, our Orient?

Story as loop

I won't go into too much detail but instead cite a recent blog on this topic:

Suffice to say, the hero's journey is also a loop that explores liminalities of transformational change as an individual journeys from the realm of the known to the unknown before returning back again transformed:

Could refusing the call to adventure be our brains choosing to hold the line, maintaining the integrity of a flawed Orient mechanism over reverse thinking, learning and perspective?

So what influences this? A fair bit:

• Tribalism, clades, silos reinforced by biased media including the emphasis of "if it bleeds it leads"
• Perceived risk especially from an "other". Goodies and baddies
• Crude game theory and distorted logic: the enemy of my enemy is my friend, the beliefs of my enemy are not my beliefs. Cf. the primitivism of sympathetic magic to which we are all susceptible

Large loops with lots of slack

This David Ross post quotes Daniel Goleman, explaining that as humans we have a blind-spot for perceiving and acting on longer-term, distant more abstract threats:

Which is compounded by Daniel Ariely's finding that our moral code becomes unstuck here also:

So the more remote we are from consequences the exponentially more distorted selfish and dishonest our choices. Therein lies the problem: our OODA loops are tuned for short-term immediate advantage over long term existential survival. Indeed our global economy is one mother of a large, baggy OODA loop with the challenge that the inevitable environmental reaction has happened late (in terms of our perception and ability to react) and at planetary scale.

• Observe chocolate bar
• Orient with desire for yummy snack rather that realisation that world chocolate demand is destroying rainforest in Ivory Coast
• Decide to preserve waistline and work off chocolate cravings at the gym
• Act by walking out of the shop without the treat

As these large, baggy degenerative loops break down, my money is on more tribal/community/team-based approaches.

Shorter, tighter loops

Short, tighter loops can be defined as:

• Stronger alignment of Orient amongst stakeholders
• Reduced distance (temporal, organisational, physical) between Observe, Decide and Act

In other words tightening the loop between inputs, thoughts, decisions into outputs, actions, outcomes. Here are some examples of this in practice:

• Agile and DevOps, and even MVP
• Flatter organisations and self-organising teams, BetaCodex, Teal etc
• Local energy, food movements
• Waldenizing
• Regenerative agriculture
• The rejection of globalisation
• The circular economy

Of course this can work for and against us. Without Boyd's "Reverse" thinking, our shorter, tighter loops can end up as groupthink. The optimal model must include diversity and inclusion with interaction norms allowing productive disagreements between participants. Cf. Jeff Bezos' disagree and commit missive. Indeed the Amazon flywheel and indeed much of the Amazon philosophy is predicated on curating healthy (from Amazon's perspective) OODA loops:

Loops within loops

The Natural Inclusion theory of Alan Rayner incorporates space into our organism, emphasising flow forms of receptive-responsive energy:

And these flow forms interact and mutually adapt--OODA loops of OODA loops of OODA loops. And indeed words and beliefs are similarly built on other words and beliefs, grounded in subjectivity, in a large loopy stack as discussed by Ludwig Wittgenstein in this post by Benjamin P. Taylor. My own conjecture is that the human mind is a complex mass of interconnected, fractal OODA loop-type structures. Balls of tangled wool:

March to the sound of the loops

Napoleon famously instructed his troops to march to the sound of the guns. The same awareness and resonance principle applies to our OODA loops, as in this Daniel Wahl quote about having a meta OODA feedback loop in our Orient:

"Being able to question our own assumptions and paying attention to how we think and interpret situations is a crucial skill for anybody in a leadership position, and anybody wanting to co-create a regenerative culture."--Daniel Wahl

This leads to the paradox that the more shore-footed and action-oriented we are perhaps the more resistant we are to real personal change. What does this say about leadership? Particularly when game theory comes into play and the relative merits of tactics (short OODA loops) vs. strategy (longer OODA loops).

And just how meta do we go?

"Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? "

People exploit their own and each other's loops all the time. Indeed it can be argued that the most powerful person in the world is turning a great democracy into a totalitarian state via hacking the collective narrative OODA/dopamine loop faster than it can be patched. I wonder if there is a strategy behind it?

“Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat."--Sun Tzu, the Art of War.

Loops and flow

This article:

And here's my reaction to J.Brian's comment:

J. Brian Hennessy, inspiring and fyi John Albrecht, Ben Ford. Think flow first and ooda as response of flow network actors: a type of analogue (flow) to digital (actor) converter, Mark Downham

Evolve our loops, evolve our reality

Col. John Boyd gave us a great model of the mind with the OODA loop. But like software, our individual and collective loops are both hackable and buggy and accumulate Tetris-like technical debt that threaten to overwhelm us in this increasingly VUCA world. So it seems that for us to transform we need to gain clarity, tighten loops that are too loose and loosen loops that are too tight. A considerable amount of work. So how do we do it? The answer in part is with storytelling and words:

Words create worlds. If we map out and socialise these new OODA loops incorporating systems thinking, cognitive bias, hidden narratives, if we make the distant close and the close distant, a new Orient evolves and our loops re-calibrate. This is progress, it is evolution. It may even be survival.

Postscript:

Thanks to Dexter Casey for the Tetris reference.

Post on flow with great commentary from J.Brian Hennessy:

Boyd on Lean and Art of War:

https://www.aglx.consulting/post/boyd-the-fighter-pilot-who-loathed-lean

And 2020 postscript showing similarities between NLP and OODA loops (a must watch!):