Decisions
10 min per cycle

OODA loop

Cycle through observe, orient, decide and act faster than the situation changes, treating orientation as the step that decides the rest.

Time cost
10 min per cycle
Output
A cycle time and an explicitly updated model of the situation.
Steps
5

Use when

  • The situation is moving and a decision made slowly will be answering a state that no longer exists.
  • You are competing with someone who is also adapting.
  • A plan keeps being overtaken by events.

Do not use when

  • The situation is stable. Fast cycling adds churn and no information.
  • The decision is irreversible. Speed is a liability at a one-way door.

Inputs required

  • A live feed of what is actually happening
  • Authority to act without re-approval each cycle

Procedure

  1. 01

    Observe

    Gather what is happening now, not what the plan expected. Separate observation from interpretation — most failures here are interpretation smuggled in as fact.

  2. 02

    Orient

    Update your model of the situation. This is the step that matters and the one usually skipped: prior experience, expectations and analogies all distort it, and a stale orientation makes every subsequent step wrong.

  3. 03

    Decide

    Pick an action given the updated model. Hypothesis, not certainty. The decision is provisional because the next observation will test it.

  4. 04

    Act

    Do it, and do it in a way that generates observation. An action that tells you nothing wastes a cycle.

  5. 05

    Shorten the loop

    The advantage comes from cycling faster than the situation changes, not from any single decision being good. Measure how long a cycle takes and remove what is slowing it.

Characteristic failure mode

Looping without reorienting. Observe and act cycle quickly while the model of the situation stays fixed, so the loop becomes fast repetition of the same mistake.

Worked example

A shop is losing customers and the cause is unknown.

  1. 01Observe: takings by hour, not by week — the weekly figure hid the pattern.
  2. 02Orient: the loss is concentrated in a two-hour window, so the earlier theory about pricing is wrong.
  3. 03Decide and act: change staffing in that window only, and watch the same measure.

Result

Four days per cycle instead of one month. The reorientation — from a pricing problem to a coverage problem — was what the shortened loop bought.

Where to go next