What's an OODA loop and why does it matter? Coaches and players seek sustainable competitive advantage. Aerial combat informs high-stakes competition where small edges mean life or death with often unseen opponents.
Colonel John Boyd spent his life refining OODA loops, decision-making sequences that work in combat, business, sports, and elsewhere. They apply at the macro (organizational) and micro (individual) levels. They embody the 'do more of what works and less of what doesn't' principle.
Consider the Heimlich Maneuver. You see a struggling victim in a restaurant. "Can you talk?" No. You OBSERVE an emergency and ORIENT to upper airway obstruction. You DECIDE and ACT simultaneously applying force to increase airway pressure and dislodge the piece of meat blocking breathing. That's an OODA loop.
Coaches face OODA loops deciding timeouts, substitutions, or tempo and tactical changes. Players make instantaneous adjustments each possession. OODA loops are everywhere.
You OBSERVE a 2-on-1 fast break and the dribbler ORIENTS while dribbling with the inside hand, advancing while the defender reacts. The defender cheats toward the ballhandler who DECIDES and ACTS with a one-handed bounce pass for a layup. There's a process underpinning the sequence. Chris Oliver discusses it as basketball decision training.
Basketball IQ implements what I call VDE - vision, decision, and execution. But it repacks OODA loops.
Here are highlights from the summary of Boyd's process.
In 1961, at age 33, he wrote “Aerial Attack Study,” which codified the best dogfighting tactics for the first time, became the “bible of air combat,”
Nation-states around the world and even terrorist organizations use the OODA Loop as part of their military strategy.
It is a learning system, a method for dealing with uncertainty, and a strategy for winning head-to-head contests and competitions.
When our circumstances change, we often fail to shift our perspective and instead continue to try to see the world as we feel it should be. (Overcome ambiguity.)
Those three principles are Gödel’s Proof, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, and the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics (don't get hung up on terminology...we have partial information, constant change, tendency toward chaos)
These folks never stop to ask, “Maybe I need a different tool?” (We need openness.)
(Solutions may require us breaking free of conventional, cultural, experiential, and tribal thinking. Years ago a relative was not recovering after major surgery because of anorexia, weakness, and fatigue. I suggested to the family a time-limited trial of anabolic steroids (legal but unconventional). Within days the patient improved her appetite and strength, ultimately recovering and returning home.
You need to always be in Condition Yellow. Condition Yellow is best described as relaxed alert. (If we close ourselves to new information, we will make poorer decisions.)
It is not necessarily the one with more information who will come out victorious, it is the one with better judgment, the one who is better at discerning patterns.” (This is the crux of Pete Newell's mandate of teaching players to "see the game.")
Orienting is critical. Boyd calls this process “destructive deduction.” When we do this, we analyze and pull apart our mental concepts into discrete parts. (This expands on 'chunking' the process used to act on pattern recognition, like Chess grandmasters.)
Build a robust toolbox of mental models.
You see “man with a hammer syndrome” in businesses that stick to a tried and tested business model even though the market is moving in another direction. Kodak, as mentioned above, is a perfect example of this. So too is Blockbuster. They continued making hard-copy movie rental a primary part of their business even though more and more consumers were streaming movies via the internet.
I encourage interested readers to study the article because of its universality and depth.
Lagniappe: it's easy to underestimate the genius of great players. Watch the video and think about OODA and changing circumstances during "orientation."
Lagniappe 2: Difference makers...on the ball defense...great video.
1. Proximity (on the catch, with the ball)
2. Stance "low man wins"
3. Discipline
4. Ball-u-basket (containment)
5. Communication
Lagniappe 3: The Phil Jackson Bulls-eye test.
Lagniappe 4: Do you have the Lion Mind or the Dog Mind?