The Strategy of the Fighter Pilot

"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.