Responding to change - Applying OODA to tech strategy
To flourish and grow in a many-sided, uncertain and ever-changing world that surrounds us, suggests that we have to make intuitive within ourselves those many practices we need to meet the exigencies (urgent need or demand) of that world.
John Boyd
At the beginning of his seminal presentation, “Discourse on winning and losing”, John Boyd starts with the above words to describe his motivations on his approach to military strategy. I came across this when trying to understand the thinking behind his Decision Cycle (or OODA loop) concept. While Boyd was thinking of military strategy with the above paragraph, its applicability to technology strategy struck me (after looking up the definition of exigencies).
John Boyd was a fighter pilot of some repute but more prominently an intellectual who developed multiple military and warfare ideas. His thoughts on strategy transcended the military sphere into business, litigation, and law enforcement. The OODA loop is an oft-referenced method in strategy circles. Devised by Boyd, it’s applicability is confirmed in business and military strategy. Its elegance strikes me as particularly useful for producing a technology strategy that needs to flex to the highly complex and fast-moving modern world of software development. Working in Agile should already prepare us to at least have some empathy with the concept. The Agile manifesto principles sit nicely with Boyd’s description of a “many-sided, uncertain and ever-changing world”. Agile is arguably often represented as a way of delivering software faster. But I would argue Agile’s primary focus and principal motivation is to deal with an unpredictable future and fluid context. Technology strategy should be no different, and I see many lessons from Boyd from which we can learn. This post will try to set out those ideas and how they fit in developing a suitable technology strategy
What is the OODA loop?
OODA stands for Observe-Orient-Decide-Act. Going into the details of OODA and Boyd’s motivations are beyond the scope of this blog post. I do advise people to read more into it because it is a fascinating insight into strategic thinking.
In particular, I suggest:
Responding to change
Boyd, in essence, recognised that chaos and change are inevitabilities. He drew upon three scientific and philosophical principles to come to this conclusion.
Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems. In a nutshell, this is the idea that our understanding of our environment is always incomplete and imperfect and needs constant refinement through observation.
Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. A scientific principle about the imprecision of measuring velocity and position of atoms and particles. In his application of this to the world around us, Boyd suggests that the more we observe and understand a domain, the more uncertainty we have of another. Because of this, our understanding of reality is necessarily imprecise.
2nd Law of Thermodynamics. This law introduces us to the idea that a closed system tends towards increased entropy (disorder). In the same way, “The more we rely on outdated mental models even while the world around us is changing, the more our mental “entropy” goes up.”
The OODA loop’s key is not in any attempt to control the chaos and the changing context surrounding us but to embrace their inevitability and create a model that increases our situational awareness and thrives in the chaos. The loop ensures a constant/regular reevaluation of our environment, building a better mental model with each cycle.
In Boyd’s words
Idea of fast transients suggests that, in order to win, we should operate at a faster tempo or rhythm than our adversaries.
It’s worth noting that strategy is often seen in the light of opponents and traditionally viewed as something amounting to a zero-sum game - we win, they lose. Business strategy can often work along the same lines, though the idea that it is zero-sum doesn’t sit well with me. Either way, business is competition and technology strategy in the 2020s is part of the business. We need to do technology better than our competitors.
Now we arrive at the main problem with our industry’s approach to technology strategy. The way organisations do technology strategy often follows a path of attempting to control the chaos and create predictability in a world where none exists. It is not a problem that the strategy was wrong. That is a certainty. It is that there is no recognition of its fallibility until it has already failed.
Technology strategy in organisations is rarely a strategy in the truest sense but dogma—a set of immovable edicts created not to handle change but to dictate actions. To veer from that “strategy” is to be “tactical”, not a word in our industry with positive connotations. In the military world, where this language came from, there is a blurring between tactics and strategy, to the extent that the two words are often interchangeable. Being tactical within a strategic framework is not only acceptable but a desirable outcome. John Boyd himself states in his Discourse:
Give lower-level commanders wide freedom, within an overall mind-time-space scheme, to shape/direct their own activities so that they can exploit faster tempo/rhythm at tactical levels yet be in harmony with the larger pattern/slower rhythm associated with the more general aim and larger effort at the strategic level.
The driving force of OODA and Boyd’s views on strategy stems from an identified need to respond to change. I will go through the four acts and apply it to tech strategy in subsequent posts, but I’ve started with OODA’s superpower - the loop. The cycle of long term planning with rapid responses as we understand and learn more.
Many organisations’ critical mistake isn’t in the production of a long-term strategy. It is that they become anchored to it without reflection breakpoints built into the system. Why? There is nothing upon which to reflect: no new observations, no indicators. The strategy is the objective.
When presenting OODA, Boyd would annotate the “Decide” phase with hypothesis and “Act” with test. By doing so, he was removing any illusion of the finality of these phases. A strategy doesn’t end here. The decision (and the action upon that decision) is the best we can do based on the incomplete context we’ve observed. It’s a hypothesis that needs proving. Like any good scientist, a strategist must include indicators that prove (or more likely, disprove) our theory. We are probably better placed in tech than most industries to do this. Build-in metrics at the beginning and continue assessing them, and build more as we learn more.
Failed 5-year transformation programmes are not an endangered species in tech because of this inability to respond to change. I often hear calls to abandon the concept of transformation programmes. And I wholeheartedly agree. However, until organisations understand that they need to “operate at a faster tempo or rhythm than our adversaries”, the need to go through the 5-year cycles of transformation is unlikely to go away anytime soon. In reality, they are stuck in 5-year cycles of inertia.
