OODA loop
In a situation of direct, bilateral conflict — dogfighting, Chess, test cricket, in/out referendums on membership of the European Union, an OODA loop is a combatant’s decision cycle: “observe, orient, decide, act”: the idea being you need to take in what is happening (observe), synthesise a theory of what the oppo is up to (orient),[1] figure out what to do (decide) and then do it (act) before the other side gets through its own process of doing exactly that, and changes tack, spoiling your clever plan.
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The concept was invented by legendary US Air Force Colonel, John Boyd whose classic dog-fighting manoeuvre was to suddenly fly straight up, stalling his plane, obliging his pursuer to fly straight past him, then dropping down on the attacker and giving him the full nine yards.[2]
The player who can do it faster — thereby rendering the other player’s observation and orientation= obsolete before it can decide and act — is “inside her opponent’s OODA loop” and, as long as she can continuously keep her OODA loop cycling fast enough, will have the opposition constantly reacting to what she is doing, chasing the game, having to change tactics without ever getting onto the front foot.
So, generally, having the ball, rather than chasing around after it.
It shouldn’t really have taken a maverick Top Gun Actor to tell the world that in combat situations — finite games — are usually won by the attacking team, but there you have it.<ref>You can get inside an attacker’s OODA loop by intercepting a pass, I suppose).
Famously, the Brexit side of the Brexit Referendum was marshalled by a chap, Dominic Cummings, who remains a big fan of the OODA loop theory, and used it to great advantage to keep the Remain side permanently destabilised.
Now getting inside your opponent’s punch is all well and good so long as it is your opponent, of course, and Matthew Syed has rightly pointed out<ref>“Looping the Loop”, Sideways, BBC podcast.<ref> that dogfighting as a strategy for peacetime governance didn’t work out so well for Cummings since the idea wasn’t the finite game of defeating utterly an opponent in a binary, winner-take-all showdown, but the infinite game of keeping as many people happy for as long and often as possible.
See also
Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility
References
- ↑ “Orient” doesn’t seem as good a word to me as “synthesise”, especially as that would have made the acronym “OSDA”, which all ninjas will find pleasing.
- ↑ Speaking of dogfighting, the legend that this expression originated from the total length of a Spitfire’s machine gun belt (hence to give it the full nine yards is to shoot everything you have at once), but disappointingly this appears to be an urban myth, at least according to Wikipedia. The phrase dates back to the late 19th century.