Real life is messy

As the war in Gaza winds down somewhat and the IDF is gearing up for the next tunnel cleaning operation, I am returning – somewhat reluctantly- to writing semi-sarcastic pieces about lame corporate competitive intelligence practices. After all, competing with the theatre of the absurd- from the Irish PM’s moronic statement about the released child taken hostage as being “lost and found”, to a UN women forum supporting HAMAS butchers/rapists (!), to the principal of a NYC high school being outraged at critics calling his antisemitic and anti-American rioting students radicalized, anything I can add to this will not be even half as insane.?

So, back to business, for now. This time I need to make fun of OODA.?

OODA, the Intelligence Cycle, and CI?

In my recent war game with a high-tech firm, a team role playing a competitor introduced the concept of OODA, as that competitor’s CEO has been fond of it. I was curious.?

Using Bing’s new GPT (pre Sam Altman’s firing, and then post Sam Altman unfiring) and asking what’s OODA, yielded this:?

“The OODA loop is an approach to decision-making developed by retired Air Force Colonel John Boyd based on his decades of experience as a pilot… OODA stands for Observe, Orient, Decide and Act. It is called a loop to underscore the continuous nature of decision-making in dynamic, competitive environments. At a high level, the steps of this process are: 1. Observe: Gain situational awareness via all your senses. 2. Orient: Analyze the information you have gathered. 3. Decide: Choose a course of action based on your analysis. 4. Act: Take action based on your decision.”?

There are two ways to visualize OODA: ?

Or, from Wikimedia,

OK, I am done being serious. This is too much. Don’t worry if you can’t read the wiki diagram. That was your first OODA- you observed it is incomprehensible, you analyzed it quickly as too many arrows, you decided not to care, and you acted by reading my take instead. See, OODA is trivial. We all do it. All the time. Only sometimes we skip some steps, other times we ignore the orientation, and often we don’t even know we already decided.?

See, the ideal OODA is not real.

And then, here is the intelligence cycle

In the CI field, one of the most familiar diagrams is the intelligence cycle. Every time I see one, I feel like I am on a carousel.?

Now comes the important quiz for you: What’s the difference between OODA loop and the Intelligence Cycle?

• Incorrect answer: OODA includes a decision followed by action.
• Correct answer: the colors.?

In other words: In real life, an orderly, circular, perfect feedback loop is a fantasy. Decisions do not follow intelligence, intelligence doesn’t come from planning, feedback is hardly ever provided, and everything is a big mess. Here is the real corporate OODA (which also includes the true intelligence cycle):

However, the fact that the utopian intelligence cycles and OODA are stylized simplification of what in real life is a dynamic process with limited information and half assed results should not discourage CI practitioners. Instead, understanding where the process breaks down is crucial for the full benefits of intelligence to manifest.

Understanding where the process breaks down is crucial for the full benefits of intelligence to manifest.

In a great piece in a military journal The Strategy Bridge, a military scholar suggests using the idea of OODA to find the right timing for attacks. He calls it the “half beat” as he quotes Bruce Lee (yes, the martial art guru): “…successful combatants regulate their speed, so their actions coincide with those of their opponent’s, with the goal being to be able to act at “the exact psychological and physical moment of weakness in an opponent.”

But of course, to do that you need true intelligence, getting into the heads of your competitors, not mere "surface" information. Can your CI team identify moments when your actions will have the best chance of success? And can management act to take advantage of them?

?

Alternative and unpleasant perspective: The nonsense of "best practices"

If a consulting firm uses the intelligence cycle in a slide about "best practices" of CI, drop them quickly. They never actually experienced real-life CI processes.?At most, they were told about temporary, tactical, small "wins" that ended up meaning nothing long term for the CI team.

On an unrelated note, if you believe Bidenomics is working, Palestinians love women, gays, and trans, and 13 million Jews are the cause of the Islamic Jihad on the West, bad CI is your last problem. You need a shrink.

Alas, most are Jewish ??