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 seriously overused, to the point where nowadays it's just a shibboleth that "thought leaders" use to show their "edginess" or whatever.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 exactly 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 good 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:  * Measure

  * Analyze

  * Plan

  * Execute

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 quite different. More about accuracy/completeness than about rapidity, though of course 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 it's OK to have a qualitatively different decision process. Come up with your own metaphor, your own acronym, that fits your situation intuitively without such arduous adaptation.