John Boyd, OODA Loops and Strategy
John Boyd and OODA
OODA loops are a fascinating strategic tool, and have something of a cult following in certain parts of the world and the internet. Personally though, I’m just as fascinated by the life and career of their creator, John Boyd, so in this article, I’m going to highlight some of the key fundamentals of OODA, along with insights into John Boyd’s life and career.
Forty Second Boyd
John Boyd was born in 1927 in Erie, USA and joined the US Air Force in 1944. After a brief mission in Korea in 1963, he attended the Fighter Weapons School, where he graduated at the top of his class, and was invited back as an instructor. He earned the nickname “Forty Second Boyd”, due to the challenge he would issue as a flight instructor: starting from a disadvantaged position, he claimed he could defeat any adversary in simulated aerial combat within 40 seconds. He would not only get out of defensive position but get on his opponent’s tail and simulate a kill by shouting “guns! guns! guns!” into the radio. He never lost, partly due to his ability to pull off a manoeuvre called “flat plating the bird”, where he would force the aircraft into a 90 degree vertical, decelerating hard from 400 knots to 150, (like a Cobra Manoeuvre for those familiar with it) and sending the pursuing pilot in front before getting on their tail and shouting “guns guns guns” over the radio. He would call this manoeuvre “watching the crowd go by”.
An F-100 taking off from Nellis AFB circa 1959. The checkerboard pattern on the vertical stabilizer and nose indicates it was a “Hun” from the Fighter Weapons School. It was in the Hun that Boyd became famous as “Forty-Second Boyd”. Credit: USAF photo.
“People, Ideas, Hardware. In that order.”
It was manoeuvres such as this that got Boyd thinking about turning fighter combat into a science, rather than an art. He spent a lot of time working on what he called the “Aerial Attack Study”, which was published in 1964. It comprised evasive, defensive, and offensive manoeuvres as playbooks for combat aircraft, and completely changed the way that the US Air Force, and others, trained their pilots.
Boyd was a real character, flawed in many ways (as are we all), and was known by marious names including the “Mad Major” and the “Ghetto Colonel”, in part because he refused to move out of his small house in a somewhat less salubrious neighbourhood, even though they could afford to.
Energy-Manoeuvrability Theory
While writing this, and subsequently during studies at Georgia Tech while he was learning Thermodynamics, Boyd had an epiphany that would lead to “Energy-Maneuverability Theory”, or E-M Theory as it came to be known, which was revolutionary in itself, but also the precursor to OODA. Boyd knew that it wasn’t speed, firepower, or size that gave fighter jets the winning edge, it was the ability to “dump” and regain energy as quickly as possible – or at least, quicker than your opponent. Developing E-M Theory along with mathematician Thomas Christie took Boyd a long time, often at the expense of his personal and family relationships, and he used it to not just understand aerial combat, but to evaluate and design fighter jets.
In doing so, he was at odds with the US military’s obsession with hardware and predilection for “bigger, faster, further”. Boyd fought many political battles, which earned him as many enemies as allies (in part by showing that many US fighter jets at the time, including those in production, were inferior to their Soviet counterparts). E-M Theory describes a model for the performance of an aircraft, based on the total of kinetic energies, including speed, thrust, drag and weight, and completely changed how military aircraft are designed
If you think about a race car, it’s not just about how fast it can go, but how rapidly it can brake and decelerate, change direction, then accelerate again once through the turn. Just like a race car, EM theory shows how effectively an aircraft can “dump” and regain energy – and it’s this, not flat-out speed, weaponry, or range, that has the greatest influence on combat success.
OODA Loops
E-M Theory led Boyd directly to the insight that manoeuvring at a higher tempo than your opponent is key to success. Through this, he created the concept of the OODA loop, which has uses that extend far beyond flying fast planes:
- Observe: Gain situational awareness via all your senses
- Orient: Contextualise what you observe based on everything you know
- Decide: Formulate the optimal course of action
- Act: Execute on your decision without delay
This is called a loop in order to reflect the cyclical, repeated aspect of flowing through decision cycles (though stages can be skipped or repeated) but it also reflects the original source of the concept – it’s the fighter pilot that can pull the tightest loop that can get on their opponent’s tail and into a firing position. This relies on the technical capability of the aircraft as well as the pilot’s skill and experience.
The OODA loop may at face value look like a similar decision cycle approach to ideas such as Deming’s PDSA loop, but as OODA enthusiasts will tell you, it’s much more complicated than that (and isn’t really a loop). Let’s take a quick look at each element:
Observe:
This is gathering information, so it’s important to create an environment where that’s possible. In a fighter jet, that means being able to see all around from your cockpit, rather than have half your visibility obscured. In organisations, this means having good systems and processes to feed critical data and information to the right people, quickly. It means observing your competitive landscape, market factors, economic and political conditions, etc. In gaming or sports, it means being able to see what your opponent is doing, so you can decode whether they’re trying to mislead you. It’s also about being selective in your observations though – the world is complex, and there’s always more information than you can possibly process.
Orient:
This is the most crucial stage according to Boyd. Our perspective is filtered through our past experiences, context and history – Boyd makes particular note to consider our traditions, heritage, abilities, and experience. Orientation involves using mental models of the world and building an accurate-as-possible picture of the situation. In an organisation, we may practise simulations to improve our orientation capability. Importantly, the orient stage is where we consider our own capability and capacity: what’s our current state? What skills and capabilities do we have? What resources do we have at our disposal? Are we tired, hungry, or stressed? How much does this situation reflect what we’ve trained for? And we’re constantly re-orienting – as new information comes in, we need to process it, and see how that affects our orientation.
Note: Boyd was a voracious reader, and a proponent of Sun Tzu’s philosophies. These two stages reflect Sun Tzu in “The Art of War”:
“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”
Decide:
This is effectively deciding on your hypothesis and experiment of choice. Decisions are only our best guesses of the most appropriate course of action. In chess, that might be your pawn to H6 to force your opponent’s rook out of safety. In boxing, a feint to the left, setting up for a jab to the right. In the commercial world, releasing a product to an emerging market to test viability. Equally, “Do nothing, and wait for your opponent to make a move.” is an acceptable decision to make in some cases.
We might employ data, heuristics, team practices, and importantly, the cultural environments to help us make more rapid decisions. Importantly, we need to ensure that we’re setting ourselves up to learn the most that we can from the actions we take. When we get back to “Observe”, we don’t want to find that we’ve neglected to create a system that allows us to determine the success of our decisions!
Act:
We do the thing. And, of course, we must do our best to do it well. This is where our training, practice, tooling, resources, planning and ambition all come together to deliver to the best of our ability, whether we’re playing soccer or releasing a new product to the market. We’re not just acting, we’re testing how successful it was – which then feeds back into the observation element.
Boyd’s graphical representation of OODA. By Patrick Edwin Moran – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3904554
“Decisions without actions are pointless. Actions without decisions are reckless.”
Boyd introduced the concept of OODA loops in his paper, “Patterns of Conflict”, a nearly 200-slide briefing on the complexities of conflict and strategy, including OODA loops and guerilla vs attrition warfare. “Patterns” (as it became known) has been widely regarded as one of the most influential works of combat theory of all time and led to Boyd being called “America’s greatest military theorist” by some.
Whether or not you’re aware of the concept of OODA, you are practising them, probably every day. Whether we’re running a business and making strategic decisions, playing a game of chess, competing in sport, involved in politics, or anything else that involves some sort of competition (friendly or otherwise), you’re “doing” OODA. You’re observing the environment, evaluating your own position and capabilities, making decisions, and acting on them.
Tempo
However, OODA is often misunderstood. It’s not just about going faster through the loop than your opponent(s). Boyd often used the term “tempo” to describe the pace at which one could flow through the loop and tempo can be both offensive and defensive. It helps you get in front of the competition, and evade them when they’re on your tail. Boyd pointed out that it’s not just about speed, it’s about getting “inside” your opponent’s loop – going fast is just one way of doing that. While greater speed often (but not always) confers an advantage, viewing the OODA Loop through the lens of “faster is better” over-simplifies the model.
Sowing Confusion and Disarray
One way to get inside your opponent’s loop is to disrupt it. By sowing confusion and sending false signals, you can lead your opponent to make decisions based on false information. Examples include a chess player who sacrifices their queen to lead their opponent into a checkmate, a boxer who feints a body blow, a politician who announces an absurd new policy to take attention away from their true intent, or the business press release describing a misleading strategy to lead their competitors away from the true objective. Sowing confusion and discord in your opponent’s teams and organisations will slow them down, hinder their ability to make decisions, or even lead them to make wrong ones.
Fingerspitzengefühl
But it’s still not enough to just have a high tempo OODA loop or to confuse your opponent. Just as you don’t beat a champion boxer by simply making faster decisions, Boyd describes the fundamental concept of Fingerspitzengefühl (one of those delightful German mashed-word expressions, which in this case means something like “fingertips feeling”) – there’s no substitute for expertise. Fingerspitzengefühl is the intuitive understanding of a situation that comes with a great deal of expertise, experience, and study. Fingerspitzengefühl enables one to use intuition and “gut feel” at the observation and orient phases (you can see ‘implicit guidance and control’ in Boyd’s diagram, demonstrating this aspect of a loopback), leading to a much higher tempo OODA loop. This expert intuition is described by Napoléon during the Battle of Austerlitz in 1805. Sometimes called the “Battle of the Three Emperors,” where not only did Napoléon prevail against a numerically superior force, his victory was so decisive that it forced the Austrians and Russians to withdraw from the war. “Napoléon was so successful at knowing what opposing generals were thinking that he wrote Josephine that there were times when he felt he was leading both armies.” (Coram)
And this expertise and experience that builds fingerspitzengefühl doesn’t need to be just one person: if we have a multi-disciplinary, highly skilled and experienced team, together, they have a greater fingerspitzengefühl than they do alone – but only if their communication patterns are effective, rapid, and candid. This, of course, requires psychological safety.
Schwerpunkt
Boyd also introduces another glorious German word: schwerpunkt. Schwerpunkt, meaning the primary focus, or centre of effort, is your goal, whether as an individual or an organisation. Your schwerpunkt must be clear and well defined, and in an adversarial context, requires you to identify your opponent’s main weakness, so that you can focus your efforts on exploiting it. Boyd also said “You synchronize watches, not people.” meaning that in organisations where different teams move at different paces, synchronisation means you’ll end up going as slow as the slowest team (this is also the point that Goldratt makes in his Theory of Constraints). So: align your teams to your schwerpunkt, don’t synchronise them.
Boyd, together with his “acolytes” Michael Wyly, Pierre Sprey, Ray Leopold, Chuck Spinney, Jim Burton, and Tom Christie changed the way that fighter pilots were taught, changed the way aircraft are designed, and changed the way conflicts are fought.
Ok, that’s great but what do I do with all this OODA?
First of all, As Boyd would say, “don’t let doctrine become dogma”. There’s no strict way to employ OODA in your context, so you can use it however you like, and evolve and adapt it as you see fit. Never let someone tell you you’re doing OODA wrongly. Next time you’re playing a game with friends, see if you can imagine yourself flowing through the different elements of OODA, Observing, Orienting, Deciding and Acting. Or, if you’re in an organisation and able to do so, try out practising it with folks in your teams, either as simulation exercises, or next time you’re having to make strategic or commercial decisions and planning.
In our strategy work with clients, we run OODA-based workshops to flesh out strategy and tactics in the marketplace.
Finally, you’re “doing” OODA whether you know it or not, as are your competitors and opponents, so you may as well practise it. As Boyd said:
“This stuff has got to be implicit, if it is explicit, you can’t do it fast enough.”
I hope this brief journey through John Boyd’s work and a focus on OODA was interesting. If you’d like to dive deeper, I recommend Robert Coram’s book “Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War”
Further Reading:
A collection of Boyd’s, and his acolytes, articles, collated by Chet Richards himself.
Energy-Manoeuvrability (E-M) Theory
Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War”
A THINKING CULTURE ACCELERATES THE RATE OF CHANGE: John Boyd, David Marquet and the Future of United States Military – Jason R. Bingham, Major, USAF
The OODA Loopers Session 6 – The Finale with Dave Snowden (Video)
Related psychological safety articles:
Psychological Safety in Aviation
The importance of safe-to-fail wargames