OODA this world

I've been extremely privileged (and honoured) to have been included in the OODA Looper series with some very smart people (Sessions One, Two, Three, and Four here so far). They're well worth the watch for a deeper dive, and explore not only OODA and popular conceptions/misconceptions, but how we can expand upon our knowledge of the loops and use them functionally, combat the paucity of application in a meta-complex modern world, and benefit not only organisations and business, but all human decision-making.

I've recently been wondering:

Are we sometimes considering strategic decision-making at scale in the wrong way in terms of organisational reactivity?

How might OODA be represented or work at greater-than-individual complex system level?

I'll break this down below through exploring what can have loops, why, and then how this might change how we look at guiding organisations; none of this is set in stone, and is designed to provoke thoughts rather than provide answers!

In the spirit of the second O, let's spend a few seconds looking at what OODA is, and what it is not.

OODA is a way of understanding how we are continually Observing, Orienting to, Deciding about, and Acting upon things. At the highest level, it's something we repeat to make sense of things and work out what to do; this is true from the hyper-fast decision-making of a fighter pilot, to being in a physical altercation, to minding children, driving a car, washing dirty dishes or getting out of bed. Whatever we do, we are using this to make sense of the past, present and projected future.

OODA is NOT this:

This is only the first - and inaccurate - step to understanding OODA; it's sorely limited in 2D and not a progressive, sequential cycle. In fact, it is best considered as a spiral through time, and it's worth considering we likely have multiple OODA loops running at different cadences concurrently - loops within loops. It really is Turtles all the way down (and up!).

OODA is also not just about "winning by being faster", any more than Agile is just about "winning by being faster". There's a lot more to it. By reducing these concepts to mere cloneable practices and 2D representations, huge amounts of vital qualitative understanding is being lost.

OODA is closer to this:

(Note: I've used a version which I added "Sense" and "reflexive action" to because this might be relevant below, and I feel there's a precursor loop which doesn't interpret data in some cases; the original loop doesn't have these. Implicit Guidance and Control might be where this comes in, but I think there may be an even faster sense/reflexive-react loop in there which doesn't even reach the brain. This model may, of course, be inaccurate!).

So what are we exploring here?

Musing on the complexity of interleaving systems which are themselves complex and not all made of people, I have wondered if we may be considering strategic decision-making at scale in the wrong way in terms of organisational reactivity. There are plenty of excellent ways of identifying strategic or tactical advantage in a number of applications (business, military, et al), and they include the excellent, often holistic, and inter-supportive constructs of The Flow System, some of the work from remote:af, Cynefin and complex adaptive systems theory, OODA, Wardley Maps, and more. This is an initial exploration of how OODA might be represented or work at greater-than-individual level, and how humans can understand and exploit OODA loops better than other creatures.

It's a little in-depth, but bear with me...

Let's consider what we think of when we talk about holism - in effect, a system that encompasses "all others" (for a given context).

The best comprehensible, experiential representation within which all human systems originated and almost all sit is perhaps something we can term Gaia. This isn't in reference to the fantasy version of a world-spirit, or "Mother Nature", but to the more scientific understanding of the ultimate system, of which all our others are a part - our world - and which is made of every biological and non-biological system that exists and can be readily known.

Gaia as a term takes into account the actions, effects, and granularity large and small of everything within it - the only sustainable natural ecosphere currently known to man. By its very nature, it's often taken as an holistic entity. Suffice it to say, most of us persist in viewing even our world from a uniquely (anthropomorphic) human perspective, outside the sciences at least.

Gaia is, in essence, our ultimate Complex Adaptive System - and it's a very deep rabbit hole to explore (where the rabbits may be the size of whales, and the interlinked warrens may extend to the core of the earth).

Deep and Distant OODA loops

So can Gaia as a concept run on an OODA loop?

There's a well-reasoned school of thought which suggests that only an individual can have an OODA loop (although, it's worth noting, not necessarily only humans, and we'll leave sensor networks such as hive minds out for now).

One thing that may set us aside from other creatures is that humans have a possibly unique concept of time. We can make decisions based not only upon feedback and implicit guidance and control, or learned consequence, but hold an awareness of or scenarios as well as short-, mid-, and long-term future consequence, which may also influence the OODA loop's decision-making process. We can simulate even as we loop against reality. Essentially, humans can use some OODA loops to also divine phase space, meaning that we are aware of multiple possibilities, and the potential consequences of those decisions past the immediate feedback.

And it's likely we not only have multiple loops that we can potentially switch between at an individual level, but deeper or more abstracted loops. For example, if you are a hunter, predator and prey compete using OODA loops - whichever uses faster, more accurate loops likely survives. But although as individuals survival may hinge upon the speed of the respective loops (and chance! Chance must not be left out of loops), in species or systemic terms, most competition is with others on your level (even if you hunt together, you have others of your overall species; humans may have tribal OODA loops, for example). You compete with those like you indirectly over time (as well as directly), often without even realising you do so as you employ your direct predator-prey loop, and this is what drives evolution - survival of the luckiest, and just fit enough at the right time.

This suggests at least two loops that may be in play at once: an explicit one, in which you have tangible immediate gain/loss outcomes with a clear end point with direct loops; and an implicit one, where you are automatically in competition with those like you over time, and in a more complex fashion, and the loops are indirect and probably not even consciously known. This is why I'm starting to think about concepts of deep OODA, things that happen so far down in systems we can't control or are not aware of them, and in Session 4, we debated Conscious considered, Unconscious drilled, and Instinctive programmed looping.

The loops employed may change by species, as Andrew has mentioned:

"...survival is probably a mix of physical attributes and tightness of loops, but some species have also evolved to have additional cognitive arsenal"

Amoeba, ants, humans, whales, rats, corvids all likely have different ways of OODAing, and only a few of these examples may have a similar ability to project adjacent possibles (I don't hold that humans are the only ones, but probably the best at it). I wonder if there's a correlation between species which can choose whether to see each other as competition, as well.

So - individuals are not as simple as we might think, and there may be multiple known and multiple unknown loops in play, nested and helixed at once. But then we find some even more fuzzy liminality...

Team OODA

Can a team of humans have a single OODA loop? The above logic suggests not, yet any close-knit team in athletics, military, science, engineering, and other focused endeavours will tell you that there exists a sustainable moment in time of action-symbiosis where humans get as close as they can to being one creature that experiences, thinks and moves as one. We often hear this referred to as being in the zone, and it can be collective as well as individual. It's undeniable that this exists as some kind of team OODA - Ponch Rivera, Ben Ford, Lou Hayes Jr, Ron Rasmussen, and I'm sure many others can attest to having directly experienced this hyper-overlap which is more than mere careful choreography.

Entire tribes may then have OODA loops, where the survive and thrive of the tribe is the guiding focus. Societies, even. It could further be successfully argued that a crowd is a collection of individuals, but a mob is a single stupid creature where the individual intelligence of the members is subordinate to its own (rather insensible) lower-intelligence loop; and the one can become the other quite quickly given the right (or wrong) stimulus. So where does this "distributed OODA loop" genesis from if something isn't a single guiding organism? And how does it maintain?

OODA Harmonics

In session 4 we spoke about whether teams have their own OODA, or whether it's individual loops which are in tune; we spoke about resonances of loops between individuals.

I suspect perhaps there is a little of both, in the same way a school of fish moves as individuals, but since they sense the others around them and react to that incredibly quickly (typically sensing via bioelectric receptors running along their bodies), the whole school moves in an eerie fashion, as if it is a living creature in itself.

I can attest to seeing this in action - as a scuba diver, I've swum into a school of thousands of barracuda, and although I can see individuals and their individual movements, it's hard not to feel you're surrounded by a single, ephemeral creature which sense and reacts to you from every angle at once.

A similar effect takes place in a murmuration of starlings, if for different reasons (a school of fish often exists for many purposes including general movement; a murmuration is usually an active, short-term response to a predator, similar to the crowd/mob transition mentioned above). The loops tighten as threat increases; the changes for what we almost automatically see as a huge entity are sometimes too fast to follow. This is perhaps the ultimate OODA harmonic - all those loops resonating as one, but there is still no strategic decision happening here, no overall consciousness.

Even further down where we might assume simple reactions, a biochemist I know very well chided me for assuming bacteria don't make decisions - apparently colonies placed in different media may behave in a number of ways that might denote a "decision" (exploration, dormancy, adaptation) rather than a simple reaction, but it's as a collective).

I find all this very interesting, because by extrapolation we can at least concede the possibility that these instances occur because of a generative harmonic of the loops within the collective, if not actually a singular guiding "gestalt" of the collective itself. And if that is the case, then yes, I think you could stretch to acknowledging generative looping all the way up to Gaia; the difference here is that Gaia also contains and is influenced by non-biological systems. So where do we differentiate what can experience an OODA loop?

Perhaps not in terms of how humans use and perceive loops, of course, but (going back to discussions on Sense and Observe not being the same above and in Session 3) there is what might be tentatively called a SOIG(R)A loop (Sense, Orient, Implicit Guidance, (Reflexive) Act), where reciprocal feedback over time takes the entire system through generative, evolutionary steps, often via large failures. Life itself is incredibly persistent, but species - and further, individuals - can be quite fragile; it's undeniable that there is some kind of overall sense, response, feedback looping going on, however, or life itself wouldn't exist or evolve.

The ECO Loop (Entangled Complete OODA!) - OODA as Gestalt

This is very similar to the idea within complex systems (especially anthropomorphic ones) that Dave Snowden advocates, which is the Human Sensor Network helping distributed awareness and decision-making - something we tend to do better in groups than alone, Sensemaking on a Gaia scale. Is it still sense-making if it's not being driven by a central intelligence? In terms of how Sensemaking is run, quite likely, but it may not be the human interpretation of "sensing".

We could present mass extinction events here where biological and non-biological elements interact within Gaia for a short-term crisis and where life-diversity explodes afterwards, but let's take a slightly different example of where a system which is partially non-biological survived and thrived through an overwhelming, total, and permanent paradigm shift (analogous in human terms to COVID and business, perhaps).

Nearly a billion years ago, a massive (relatively fast) chain reaction released a huge quantity of a highly toxic gas into the atmosphere; virulently reactive and damaging, all life should have died out as a result. Instead, life managed to adapt to using it - to the point where today almost all life dies extremely quickly without it.

That gas was oxygen, and it was generated by the life it eventually almost killed. This in turn had marked effects on other gases, rocks, and non-biological systems on earth, permanently changing the entire atmosphere, oxidising elements, and more. Gaia - at least the biological parts - sensed, oriented, and reacted using fast and unprecedented feedback loops; as a whole, it continues to evolve. Ben Ford talks about the Algorithm of Adaptation - here it was in action showing how we deal with paradigm shifts/cascades. The whole system doesn't change from the top down - all the parts change in a looping cascade.

The planet changed the life, which in turn further changed the planet, and on ad infinitum. It's reciprocal, and as a complex system, the same holds true for - but is not necessarily acknowledged by - an organisation today.

I made the ECO acronym up. But Lou Hayes Jr shows a great physical example of slinkies within slinkies, which is the original vision suggested by Kim Ballestrin in the second session. Lou further went on to mention latticework, which brings a 3D space element to understanding this better. Gaia contains all the structures within it just like this - latticed, nested, parallel, helixed through time, fractal, and all impressing upon the others in some way. The more we look at nature, the more I think modelling how we work on it makes sense.

So, is this gigantic, slow loop over time which receives both biological and non-biological agent feedback some form of gestalt OODA loop? Or is it just easier to think of it as such collectively whilst it's actually driven by the nested concurrent cascade of far smaller and multiply-complex OODA loops of the biological agencies within it? This could be what Jack Cohen called a lies-to-children approach to simplify how it works (as many metaphors in science can be initially), but it's always important to then highlight the caveat of "this is the best wrong explanation you will make sense of" if you do so.

In nature, there are natural resonances that allow transitions between different states. It may be that resonance is not only what ties OODA loops together to act as one in groups and individuals, but also is required to allow the transition between different types of loops (or perhaps even to speed up/slow down loops to match context - if it's in response to feedback and the real world, there must surely be a resonance with reality implied there too).

At at ever-reducing granular levels (species, groups, individuals, bacteria, and on), it may be fair to accept that harmonics of individual OODA loops influence or guide the evolution and progression of a whole world - our Gaia. Every agent affects every other agent, with unintended and unpredictable consequences - a vast complex adaptive system with compound distributed senses, orientations, decisions, actions and reactions and fast feedback loops. We certainly often refer to our world as a living entity, if not an autonomous organism; it certainly maintains homeostasis.

Which leads us rather neatly to OODA in organisations.

The reason I have plumbed the depths of Gaia is because I'm noticing a trend in business whereby an entity made up of reciprocal biological and non-biological systems, and meta-complex abstract systems, all with varying degrees of influence, is often strategically or tactically driven by the decisions of a small subset - or even one individual - deep within the system's own context. It strikes me that this approach may may not work so effectively for a gestalt complex entity.

Conversely, the modern view of a company often isn't as holistic as the Gaia idea above, and may characterise organisation as an entity in a way that can dehumanise the people who are its literal most valuable assets, whilst often componentising and compartmentalising the integrated systems within.

This is where I'm considering an organisation as Gaia, or even industry sectors. Are we making a fundamental error by considering OODA for a whole organisation to make decisions as if it is an aware entity, without considering the collective harmonics resulting from all nested loops? I am starting to think this might be the case. The phase space awareness must result from the resonant OODA loops within the overall system in some way, and it's interesting that cognition and narrative must be taken into account. A mob doesn't consider adjacent possibles; an organisation does.

Companies are made of people, of biological systems. But they are also made at least in part by non-biological systems, and the people change or react to those systems, based not only on experienced loops but on cognitive loops and expectations. It is the people who direct and evolve an organisation. But there is this other intangible level: Culture may well have its own loop within the whole, as an example, and that really does require interaction with the people, not just the company. Rules are created and hierarchy exists; the difference is that the rules of Gaia are pretty immutable, and the hierarchy self-organises, if flexible, and isn't readily apparent. Bureaucracy CAN change over time, but you can't change that big OODA loop, made of many smaller ones, quickly or easily.

It's also worth mentioning briefly the role of narrative here, which can shape and direct higher level conscious loops, as well as biases, which in our discussions we mention are part of Orientation. Stories and mental patterns are reciprocal and influence decisions (by also involving affective domains; many more of our decisions are emotion based than we think).

Fast loops are generated by the agents/individuals/teams in an organisation, and intermediation can mean higher up loops may be based on inaccurate feedback or data. I hesitate to say components here, as it's dehumanising, but that may be accurate in some cases. The organisation has reciprocal loops. And many loops may be indirect or hidden, yet be affecting the system as dark constraints.

So perhaps in the same way that, within an organisation, culture is driven from the top down by leadership, defined by the actions and inactions of leadership, and disseminated from the bottom up by the interactions between individuals and units (making culture potentially both innovative and disruptive at the same time), OODA may be defined by the biggest (and probably thus slowest) loops which will carry heavy momentum, driven by the smallest loops which will be extremely fast for feedback and context switching (likely in the manner of Complex Adaptive Systems), and the resulting spirals harmonised in a reciprocal resonance. I'm starting to think that if that resonance doesn't exist, the loops will in effect detune and interrupt, or not be transitioned between - potentially disastrous, and perhaps Cynefin's Catastrophic Failure.

Small OODA loops may be how large loops adapt to paradigm shifts or cascades, especially in Gaia-type systems - fast probes, adaptation, exaptation, reaction/response and the building of resilience aren't naturally typical of entire large systems, but of the smaller agent systems within. Over time, or at the right time, they can influence the larger system significantly far more completely than trying to force wholescale change against momentum.

Anyone who's been part of a large-scale transformation can tell you this; as mentioned above, the whole system doesn't change from the top down - all the parts change in a looping cascade. There is a becoming that must occur if you want sustainable change, and it's painful and takes time and emergent practice, because it's contextual and complex.

So should we think about companies more like Gaia in terms of considering OODA?

I think it's worth exploring further, with the caveat of the third ontology (metaphysical and cognitive systems) being included.

Story loops

Returning to narrative, a lot of the potential biases or programmed responses in humans may come from stories. It doesn't always have to be contextual, either - an assemblage of stories can tell us what we should do across cultural or language boundaries ("making the heroic decision is always worthy", for example), so human loops may have deeper influences. Other organisms may have "purer" loops, in a way - humans bring meta-complex tribalism and identities which interweave and conflict, and add multiple cognitive pathways into the mix.

However, another way of looking at stories is in terms of business strategy and values - this is, in essence, a hopeful story of becoming which may influence the decision-making of an organisation. Again as Andrew has pointed out, there will also be multiple conflicting narratives/counternarratives.

Given stories can also change over time, depending on the teller and new information, or can be modified for context, narrative itself may even have its own metaphysical projected OODA loop!

So do all loops involving human systems need to take narrative into account? My feeling is that they probably do.

Business OODA

I want to lastly quote Andrew Blain, who has a lot more experience running businesses at high level than I do, on some valuable considerations for OODA in Business:

• we have a tendency to reduce people in the system to Observe/Act through structure, policies, processes and controls. We deliberately engineer the Orient / Decide part of the loop out of the process for efficiency and variability reduction, hence engineering a lot of the cognition out as well
• this makes structured change easy because we can disseminate new instructions easily and can create really tight loops; thus the organisation is excellent at responding to predictable, codifiable events and it can scale and reduce costs without impacting quality
• however, it reduces the adaptive capacity of the organisation and makes it suboptimal at responding to significant shifts or to unpredictable events
• it also reduces work to being more procedural in nature which isn't super engaging for the participants in the work
• occasionally in a crisis we throw the rulebook out (e.g. Covid) and the organisation can become hyper responsive (although is this hyper response because, in crisis, the organisation runs on the loop of one draconian decision maker - for a short period, the longer gestalt OODA is harmonised down to resonate with their much faster one (in the terms of this article)? - CB).
• however, that introduces a fair bit of risk - whenever we are doing things that are unproven/unpracticed we introduce variability

There's a whole lot more to unpack and discuss here that can be had around how we deal with physical and virtual complex systems, uncertainty, and knowledge.

Final Thoughts

Perhaps the business strategists (Andrew? Nigel?) can consider how you align or unpack all this in business terms; and as for more on OODA Phase Space... I might leave that for better mathematicians than I.

I hope this article has had some interesting thoughts, and I welcome all discussions, comments, and paths taken from here!

Remember, if nothing else, think of OODA as more like this:

And less like this:

And remember an organisation may be more like this: