Comment by bkohlmann | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bkohlmann | Hacker News Reader

I first heard of Boyd my senior year of college. We got a new NROTC commanding officer who was one of Boyd's acolytes in the 1980s. It changed my life.

I discovered that being a good military officer wasnt about following orders. It was about doing what was best for your country. Sometimes the two coincided. Sometimes they didnt.

While the OODA loop is usually applied to outpacing an adversary, I applied it in a macro sense to my entire career.

I spend the first 8 years of my fighter pilot experience "observing and orienting" myself to the culture I found myself in. I saw good and bad leadership, useful and wasteful strategies.

Then, in year 9, I "decided and acted." Within two years, I had built three organizations that infused DoD with a mindset of innovation.

Then I left the military and started over. I went to graduate school and now find myself in consulting. In many ways, I'm Observing and re-orienting myself. I'm waiting for the right moment to "decide and act."

I find this mindset infuses nearly every problem I attempt to tackle. And as my pattern recognition increases from frequent observations and orientations, I can decide and act effectively ever more quickly.

This is the first time I read a macro application of the OODA loop, I somehow only saw it on the micro level. How do you observe and orient on a macro level with respect to culture? Or to be precise, how would you observe and orient in a new country that you moved into on a cultural level? Also, what other ideas from Boyd did you find useful in your everyday life?

For me, to Observe, you have to be willing to be a blank slate. You have to suspend all "knowledge" and absorb as much as you can. You need to reserve passing judgment.

When you have an inkling of understanding, you begin probing to validate your understanding. This is the start of the Orient phase. You may be wrong or right in your assessments - but you iterate from the small experiments. You hone in on what is actually true, which takes some iteration.

As for other Boydian ideas...here are a few:

Broadly applied synthesis: What made Boyd powerful was his deep intellectual curiosity. His broad understanding of history and thermodynamics made for a unique and insightful combination. He frequently quoted and made use of Heisenberg, Godel and other philosophers in his engineering work.

E-M diagrams: As a fighter pilot, I used his "Energy-Maneuverability" diagram literally every day. It's the foundation of all dogfighting across the world. And it was created from the computer time he stole from Wright Patterson AFB...and was then courtmarshaled because of it. E-M is closely tied to the OODA Loop, although the latter is far more broadly applicable.

Dont Forget Your Family: This was "anti-lesson" from Boyd. He immersed himself in his work. But it absolutely destroyed his family. He left them penniless because he refused to take any meaningful money from the government as a contractor in his post-military career. He was a Lion - but all men have their flaws.

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