# OODA Loop ## The Idea in Brief The side that cycles faster wins. Observe, Orient, Decide, Act—then do it again before your opponent has finished their first loop. John Boyd developed this for fighter pilots, but it applies anywhere you face uncertainty and competition: business, crisis management, even personal decisions. Speed of iteration beats quality of any single decision. --- ## Key Concepts ### The Four Stages **Observe** — Gather information. What's actually happening? Not what you expected, not what you hoped for—what's in front of you now. **Orient** — Make sense of it. This is where most people underinvest. Orientation isn't just "situational awareness"—it's filtering observation through experience, culture, training, and mental models. Two people can observe the same thing and orient completely differently. Boyd considered this the centre of gravity of the whole loop. **Decide** — Choose a course of action. Not agonise—choose. A decent decision now beats a perfect decision too late. **Act** — Execute. The action changes the environment, which gives you new things to observe. The loop continues. ### Speed Matters Boyd's core insight: you don't need to be right every time, you need to iterate faster than the other side. If you can complete two loops while they complete one, you're acting on fresher information while they're still reacting to outdated conditions. This is why startups beat incumbents—faster loops, not better initial plans. ### Orientation Is Everything Most simplifications of OODA emphasise speed: observe fast, decide fast, act fast. Boyd emphasised orientation. Your filters determine what you see and how you interpret it. Orientation is where biases live, where training pays off, where cultural assumptions help or hurt. Get orientation wrong and you'll cycle quickly toward the wrong conclusions. --- ## Implications **In business:** Shorten your feedback loops. The monthly planning cycle loses to the weekly review. The annual strategy refresh loses to continuous sensing. The company that learns fastest wins. **In crisis:** When the situation is fluid, stop waiting for complete information. Make a decision, act, observe the result, adjust. Paralysis is worse than being wrong. **In personal decisions:** Treat life as a series of experiments, not irreversible commitments. Observe what happens, reorient, try again. The goal isn't to get it right the first time—it's to learn faster than you would by waiting. --- ## Sources - [[Superforecasting]] — Tetlock's superforecasters are OODA machines: they update frequently, weight evidence carefully, and don't anchor on initial estimates - [[Thinking in Bets]] — Duke on decision-making under uncertainty; the goal is to iterate toward better calibration --- ## See in Notes - [How Decisions Compound](https://www.anishpatel.co/how-decisions-compound/) — The learning loop: how four questions, asked continuously, turn decisions into compounding advantage - [Inverse Response](https://www.anishpatel.co/inverse-response/) — Some systems move the wrong way first; the discipline of holding steady through the dip - [Unstable by Design](https://www.anishpatel.co/unstable-by-design/) — Match your response speed to your system's instability - [Just Dribble](https://www.anishpatel.co/just-dribble/) — Plans create understanding, not prediction; adapt when reality diverges - [Hidden Bottleneck](https://www.anishpatel.co/hidden-bottleneck/) — The constraint is decision speed, not execution speed