How to Keep Your Company Alive – Observe, Orient, Decide and Act
I thought the OODA concept was pretty cool when I first read about it and John Boyd. And it's fun to say. OODA Loop, OODA Loop, OODA Loop. But it has been <i>seriously</i> overused, to the point where nowadays it's just a shibboleth that "thought leaders" use to show their "edginess" or whatever.<p>The problem is that "orient" has no real meaning in most decision-making contexts, and watching people stretch it to fit is almost painful. Sure, if you adopt <i>exactly</i> the right point in the word's semantic field, and carefully distinguish it from its neighbors (Observe and Decide), and squint a bit, it can make sense, but <i>good</i> metaphors or acronyms don't work like that. They don't require a High Priest to provide interpretation. A better metaphor, which I learned in a talk on autonomous computers at a UC Berkeley CS retreat in ~2001, is:<p><pre><code>  * Measure

  * Analyze

  * Plan

  * Execute
</code></pre>
I might not have remembered the terminology exactly, let alone the acronym, but I think it's close. Steps 1/3/4 are roughly equivalent to the same in OODA, but step 2 is <i>quite</i> different. More about accuracy/completeness than about rapidity, though <i>of course</i> both are always important. I suppose one could substitute different words to make a catchier acronym like MAKE or MACE. If increasing dilettante appeal seems important, feel free. For me, the important thing is that we're not all fighter pilots and <i>it's OK</i> to have a qualitatively different decision process. Come up with your own metaphor, your own acronym, that fits <i>your</i> situation intuitively without such arduous adaptation.