[iwar] [fc:The.Boyd.cycle.(OODA.loop)]

From: Fred Cohen (fc@all.net)
Date: 2002-05-16 16:59:02
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 The Strategy of the Fighter Pilot Business is a dogfight. Your job as a 
leader: Outmaneuver the competition, respond decisively to fast-changing 
conditions, and defeat your rivals. That's why the OODA loop, the brainchild 
of "40 Second" Boyd, an unconventional fighter pilot, is one of today's most 
important ideas in battle or in business. 
by Keith H. Hammonds
photographs by Fredrik Broden 
from FC issue , page 98

(C) past The F-16 fighter jet is, as supersonic military aircraft go, a 
modest machine. It measures just 49 feet long and 31 feet wide from wingtip 
to missile-capped wingtip, and it weighs about half as much as its U.S. Air 
Force predecessor, the F-15. With a top speed of 1,350 MPH, it lags the F-15 
and other big planes. It can't fly as high or as far. But in battle, the F-16 
defies physics. Its design allows extreme maneuvers, even at low speeds. It 
dumps and regains energy in an instant, and despite its light weight, it can 
withstand nine times the force of gravity -- which enables some serious 
twisting and rolling. Pilots jag and flip with subtle nudges to a sensitive 
electronic flight-control system. The plane is unthinkably agile. Picture a 
young Michael Jordan with 29,100 pounds of thrust. Now think of your company: 
Is it an F-16 or an Aeroflot turboprop? In business, success isn't simply a 
matter of being quickest to market, of spending the most, or of selling the 
highest-quality products. You can win by using any of those methods but only 
if you do one thing more: Outmaneuver the other guy. You have to decode the 
environment before he does, act decisively, and then capitalize on his 
initial confusion by confusing him some more. Agility is the essence of 
strategy in war and in business. John R. Boyd knew this. He knew it 
instinctively in the early 1950s when, as a young U.S. Air Force fighter 
pilot -- cocky even by fighter-pilot standards -- he issued a standing 
challenge to all comers: Starting from a position of disadvantage, he'd have 
his jet on their tail within 40 seconds, or he'd pay out $40. Legend has it 
that he never lost. His unfailing ability to win any dogfight in 40 seconds 
or less earned him his nickname: "40 Second" Boyd. Boyd applied his intuitive 
understanding of energy maneuverability to the study of aeronautics. In the 
1970s, he helped design and champion the F-16, an aluminum manifestation of 
everything he knew about competition. Then he focused his tenacious intellect 
on something grander, an expression of agility that, for him and others, 
became a consuming passion: the OODA loop. Observation; orientation; 
decision; action. On the face of it, Boyd's loop is a simple reckoning of how 
human beings make tactical decisions. But it's also an elegant framework for 
creating competitive advantage. Operating "inside" an adversary's OODA loop 
-- that is, acting quickly to outthink and outmaneuver rivals -- will, Boyd 
wrote, "make us appear ambiguous, [and] thereby generate confusion and 
disorder." The product of a singular, half-century-long journey through the 
realms of science, history, and moral philosophy, Boyd's ideas both augment 
and challenge conventional thinking about organizations and conflict. Boyd 
himself, a cigar-smoking maverick, enjoyed distinctive unpopularity in 
official Pentagon circles. But even among critics, his OODA loop was much 
harder to dismiss. The concept is just as powerful when applied to business. 
The convergence of rapidly globalizing competition, real-time communication, 
and smarter information technology has led to a reinvention of the meaning 
and practice of strategy. What do you do in the semiconductor industry and 
other sectors where the time advantage of proprietary technology is 
collapsing even as the cost of developing it explodes? Companies in 
manufacturing, telecommunications, retail -- in nearly every business -- are 
discovering that fashion, fad, and fickle customers require constant 
vigilance and adjustment. We operate in a video-game world where time is 
compressing, information goes everywhere, and the rules of the game change 
abruptly and continuously. All of which makes the OODA loop more powerful 
than ever. Want to outthink and outexecute the competition in the air or on 
the ground, in combat or in business? Want to test out new ideas, get 
feedback from your customers, adjust your product accordingly, and launch a 
new version -- before your competition even senses the opportunity? Then 
learn how to make the OODA loop the centerpiece of your strategy process. 
The Birth of the OODA Loop
Colonel John R. Boyd retired from the U.S. Air Force in 1975. That he never 
was promoted to general says much about his tenuous relationship with the 
military. Though widely acknowledged as a dazzling strategist, his impolitic, 
in-your-face bravado clashed with the staid Air Force culture. From his 
cramped second-floor office at the Pentagon, he waged an assault on the 
military leadership's bureaucracy and corruption that lasted more than a 
decade. He spent a lot of that time thinking. He devoured the writings of 
Heisenberg, Newton, and Sun Tzu and read thousands of books, journal 
articles, and newspapers. During that period, he came to his idea of the OODA 
loop and, beyond that, to a sort of unified theory of competitiveness. The 
world knows relatively little about any of this, in part because Boyd refused 
to write much down. He insisted on presenting his thinking in a 14-hour 
briefing titled "A Discourse on Winning and Losing." He was a striking 
speaker, witty and vigorous. But the 300-odd typewritten and hand-sketched 
pages of overhead slides that survive him are not especially compelling. The 
single work that he committed to paper before his death in 1997, a 12-page 
treatise called "Destruction and Creation," is daunting. "It's got the 
specific gravity of uranium," observes writer Robert Coram, whose biography, 
Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War ( Little Brown ), will 
appear in November. "Boyd was a difficult man," admits Franklin "Chuck" 
Spinney. It has fallen to Spinney to parse, smooth, and preach Boyd's gospel. 
Spinney is an unapologetic disciple: He worked with Boyd for more than two 
decades, and he shares his mentor's brusque manner and healthy disregard for 
nearly everything official. Like Boyd before him, Spinney is a professional 
irritant at the Pentagon, disliked by many military leaders but secure in his 
position, thanks to his unique talent and his many political connections. He 
toils in Boyd's old office. "Have you seen the thought experiment?" Spinney 
demands, hopefully. The best response is "no" -- because in Boyd's absence, 
the experiment and Spinney's own oral presentation, "Evolutionary 
Epistimology" ( accompanied by PowerPoint slides instead of overheads ), may 
be the only reasonable way to come to terms with Boyd's often tortuous 
thinking. On to the experiment. Imagine four scenarios: someone skiing, 
someone power-boating, someone bicycling, and a boy playing with a toy tank. 
Break down each domain into its component parts: For skiing, there would be 
snow, chairlifts, skis, hot chocolate, and so on. Within their domain, the 
parts have directly identifiable relationships with one another. But scramble 
together the parts from the four domains, and suddenly it's hard to determine 
any relationships at all. We are thrown into chaos. Now, Spinney instructs, 
take one part from each scene: From skiing, select the skis; from power 
boating, the motor; from bicycling, the handlebars; and from the boy with his 
toy tank, the treads. What do these elements have to do with one another? At 
first, seemingly nothing -- because we still think of them in terms of their 
original domains. But bring the parts together, and you've used your creative 
pattern-recognition skills to build ... a snowmobile! "A winner," Boyd 
concluded, "is someone who can build snowmobiles ... when facing uncertainty 
and unpredictable change." 
The Uses of the OODA Loop
This kind of stuff generally ticks off actual fliers, who proudly proclaim 
themselves "dumb fighter pilots" and tend to shun anything that smells of 
intellectual extravagance. "I've never been inside anyone's OODA loop," Major 
Chris Peloza says dryly, rolling his eyes. Peloza has flown F-16s in the Air 
Force and the Air National Guard for 16 years. He's never heard of Boyd, and 
he doesn't know what OODA stands for. But he knows exactly what it means. An 
effective pilot explodes his rival's comfortable view of the universe. With 
his familiar clues hopelessly scrambled, a rival under pressure will usually 
try to interpret the mess from his accustomed perspective. While the confused 
rival struggles -- and before he has a chance to figure out the pattern that 
will yield the dogfight equivalent of a snowmobile -- the savvy pilot quickly 
executes yet another set of maneuvers, once more scrambling the parts and 
further feeding his opponent's confusion. Ultimately, Boyd wrote, the winner 
"collapses his [adversary's] ability to carry on." You win the competition by 
destroying your opponent's frame of reference. Boyd most often couched this 
phenomenon in a military context. His monumental research and reading let him 
draw from such strategies as the Battle of Marathon ( Greece versus Persia, 
490 BC ) and Napoleon's tactics at Waterloo. Germany's blitzkrieg method in 
World War II led the country to "conquer an entire region in the quickest 
possible time by gaining initial surprise and exploiting ... fast 
tempo/fluidity of action ... as basis to repeatedly penetrate, splinter, 
envelop, and roll-up/wipe-out disconnected remnants of [the] adversary 
organism." "In Boyd's notion of conflict, the target is always your 
opponent's mind," says Grant Hammond, director of the Center for Strategy and 
Technology at the Air War College and author of The Mind of War: John Boyd 
and American Security ( Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001 ). In his own 
work, Boyd didn't apply his principles to business strategy and market share, 
says Hammond, "but the analogy still holds. It's all about rapid assessment 
and adaptation to a complex and rapidly changing environment that you can't 
control." In fact, Boyd's ideas translate seamlessly into business. In a 
groundbreaking article published in 1988 in the Harvard Business Review 
titled "Fast-Cycle Capability for Competitive Power," Joseph L. Bower of 
Harvard Business School and Thomas M. Hout, a partner at Boston Consulting 
Group, actually cited the OODA loop -- although not its author. ( Years 
later, Boyd called Hout to rectify the oversight. ) "The OODA loop limbers up 
your organization," Hout says now. "It keeps you constantly worried about the 
next cycle," about making rapid, incremental improvements that throw off 
competitors. Bower and Hout's classic example -- and one that Boyd also 
studied -- was Toyota, which designed its organization to speed information, 
decisions, and materials through four interrelated cycles: product 
development, ordering, plant scheduling, and production. Self-organized, 
multifunctional teams at Toyota, they observed, developed products and 
manufacturing processes in response to demand, turning out new models in just 
three years compared with Detroit's cycle of four or five. Systems like 
Toyota's worked so well, Boyd argued, because of schwerpunkt, a German term 
meaning organizational focus. Schwerpunkt, Boyd wrote, "represents a unifying 
medium that provides a directed way to tie initiative of many subordinate 
actions with superior intent as a basis to diminish friction and compress 
time." That is, employees decide and act locally, but they are guided by a 
keen understanding of the bigger picture. In effective organizations, 
schwerpunkt connects vibrant OODA loops that are operating concurrently at 
several levels. Workers close to the action stick to tactical loops, and 
their supervisors travel in operational loops, while leaders navigate much 
broader strategic and political loops. The loops inform each other: If 
everything is clicking, feedback from the tactical loops will guide decisions 
at higher loops and vice versa. Consider this recent event. In March 2000, 
fire seriously damaged the New Mexico mobile-phone chip factory of Philips 
Electronics. Nokia reacted immediately, sending employees to help Philips 
recover, demanding production from other Philips fabs, and seeking out 
alternative suppliers. Ericsson, supplied by the same factory, sat on its 
hands -- and lost months' worth of production. Nokia capitalized on 
Ericsson's disarray by pushing new phones, allowing Nokia to grab even more 
market share and ultimately forcing Ericsson to outsource production. Nokia 
didn't explicitly check through every point in the OODA loop, of course. 
"That part of Boyd's thinking is very misunderstood -- and Boyd is mostly to 
blame," says Chet Richards, a Boyd aficionado and strategy consultant. The 
loop doesn't require individuals or organizations to observe, orient, decide, 
and act, in that order, all the time. "Going through the cycle every time 
takes too long," Richards warns. Think instead of the loop as an interactive 
web with orientation at the core. Orientation -- how you interpret a 
situation, based on your experience, culture, and heritage -- directly guides 
decisions, but it also shapes observation and action. At the same time, 
orientation is shaped by new feedback. An effective combatant, Boyd reasoned, 
looks constantly for mismatches between his original understanding and a 
changed reality. In those mismatches lie opportunities to seize advantage. 
And reality, Boyd understood, changes ceaselessly, unfolding "in an 
irregular, disorderly, unpredictable manner," despite our vain attempts to 
ensure the contrary. "There is no way out," Boyd wrote. "We must continue the 
whirl of reorientation, mismatches, analyses/synthesis over and over again ad 
infinitum." The OODA loop persists endlessly. 
The Future of the OODA Loop
John R. Boyd died, says Robert Coram, "believing that people considered him a 
kook, a man who never made general and whose ideas never gained popular 
acceptance." His ideas weren't easy to grasp, and most military leaders were 
loathe to listen to such a source of disruption -- an iconoclast who 
threatened their comfortable order. Although the OODA loop and other Boyd 
concepts are written into Air Force doctrine, Boyd's name is relatively 
unknown in his own service. Some believe that his influence is waning in the 
Marine Corps, the branch that once embraced his thinking the most 
enthusiastically. Among Boyd's old friends and admirers, many of whom gather 
every Wednesday night at the Fort Myer Officers' Club outside of Washington, 
DC, some wonder if they are fighting a losing battle. "The group is fading," 
says Tom Christie, one of Boyd's closest collaborators and now director of 
operational test and evaluation at the Pentagon. "We're all getting older, 
and we didn't inculcate John's ideas into younger people coming up." Yet 
Boyd's ideas themselves are growing more relevant -- in military operations 
and in business competition. In the wake of the Gulf War, Pentagon officials 
credited Boyd's thinking on maneuverability for the rapid attacks that 
crippled Iraqi forces. Today, many military strategists believe that the way 
to counter terrorists is to think as they do -- to employ speed, ambiguity, 
and deception. One way to look at the tragedy of September 11 is that, for a 
moment, the terrorists got inside our OODA loop. The phenomenon is magnified 
by the rapidly declining half-life of any good idea through ever-faster pace 
and ever-more-demanding dimensions of the competitive arena. The dogfight, it 
seems, is just getting hairier. So what happens to the OODA loop, some 
wonder, as technology increasingly compresses the flow of information, 
driving decision making ever faster? On one hand, observes retired Colonel 
Ted Hailes, a professor at the Air War College, "in the drive to make OODA 
loops smaller and faster, man's role in the loop is being reduced or 
preformulated." Think of program trading on Wall Street, for example. Grant 
Hammond theorizes about evolution toward an "OODA point." On the other hand, 
it may be that technology compresses just one part of the loop, that the 
wide, instantaneous availability of data creates an environment of complete 
transparency. In such a world, it would be impossible to gain advantage from 
observation, since all competitors would see the same thing. Orientation, 
then, would grow even more important: The data is worthless, after all, 
without our interpretation. And that means Boyd was more right than even he 
could have imagined: The future of business will belong to those innovators 
who can build snowmobiles. Keith H. Hammonds ( <a href="mailto:khammonds@fastcompany.com?Subject=Re:%20(ai)%20Check%20out%20The%20Strategy%20of%20the%20Fighter%20Pilot:%20Boyd%20&amp;%20OODA%20Loop%2526In-Reply-To=%2526lt;13d.e6ec895.2a149a8f@aol.com">kha
mmonds@fastcompany.com</a> 
) is 
a Fast Company senior editor. Read John R. Boyd's "A Discourse on Winning and 
Losing" and related works on the Web ( 
www.d-n-i.net/second_level/boyd_military.htm ). 
Sidebar: How to Isolate Your Enemy
Colonel John R. Boyd saw isolation as a critical strategic device -- in 
effect, the opposite of the information-rich environment that pilots ( or 
companies ) need in order to operate effectively. In isolation, he argued, a 
competitor had no hope of observing and adapting to a changing environment. 
Isolating your enemy, Boyd saw, could become a powerful tool to make his OODA 
loop inoperable, cutting off the flow of information both in and out of the 
organization. In his 14-hour briefing, "A Discourse on Winning and Losing," 
Boyd described three strategies for isolation. "Physically we can isolate our 
adversaries by severing their communications with [the] outside world as well 
as by severing their internal communications to one another. We can 
accomplish [the former] ... via diplomatic, psychological, and other efforts. 
To cut them off from one another, we should penetrate their system by being 
unpredictable. "Mentally we can isolate our adversaries by presenting them 
with ambiguous, deceptive, or novel situations, as well as by operating at a 
tempo or rhythm they can neither make out nor keep up with. Operating inside 
their OODA loops will accomplish just this by disorienting or twisting their 
mental images so that they can neither appreciate nor cope with what's really 
going on. "Morally our adversaries isolate themselves when they visibly 
improve their well-being to the detriment of others ... by violating codes of 
conduct or behavior patterns that they profess to uphold or others expect 
them to uphold." 

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