
How to Keep Your Company Alive – Observe, Orient, Decide and Act - weinzierl
https://steveblank.com/2020/04/01/the-ceo-playbook-for-keeping-your-company-alive/
======
jph
The title quote "observe, orient, decide, act" is called the OODA loop, and it
turns out the OODA loop is significantly more valuable than the article lets
on.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop)

The OODA loop was developed by military strategist John Boyd, to explain how
to direct one's energies to defeat an adversary and survive. Boyd emphasized
that "the loop" is actually a set of interacting loops that are to be kept in
continuous operation during combat. Boyd also indicated that the phase of the
battle has an important bearing on the ideal allocation of one's energies.
Boyd's views on the OODA loop are much deeper, richer, and more comprehensive
than the common interpretation of the "rapid OODA loop" idea.

~~~
hammock
I highly recommend the biography "Boyd" about this man. I think I got the
initial reco from this site.

~~~
WalterBright
Boyd was an amazing man and his biography is a must read for anyone who wants
to accomplish the impossible in life.

[https://www.amazon.com/Boyd-Fighter-Pilot-Who-
Changed/dp/B01...](https://www.amazon.com/Boyd-Fighter-Pilot-Who-
Changed/dp/B01I5OK43U/)

------
notacoward
I thought the OODA concept was pretty cool when I first read about it and John
Boyd. And it's fun to say. OODA Loop, OODA Loop, OODA Loop. But it has been
_seriously_ overused, to the point where nowadays it's just a shibboleth that
"thought leaders" use to show their "edginess" or whatever.

The problem is that "orient" has no real meaning in most decision-making
contexts, and watching people stretch it to fit is almost painful. Sure, if
you adopt _exactly_ the right point in the word's semantic field, and
carefully distinguish it from its neighbors (Observe and Decide), and squint a
bit, it can make sense, but _good_ metaphors or acronyms don't work like that.
They don't require a High Priest to provide interpretation. A better metaphor,
which I learned in a talk on autonomous computers at a UC Berkeley CS retreat
in ~2001, is:

    
    
      * Measure
    
      * Analyze
    
      * Plan
    
      * Execute
    

I might not have remembered the terminology exactly, let alone the acronym,
but I think it's close. Steps 1/3/4 are roughly equivalent to the same in
OODA, but step 2 is _quite_ different. More about accuracy/completeness than
about rapidity, though _of course_ both are always important. I suppose one
could substitute different words to make a catchier acronym like MAKE or MACE.
If increasing dilettante appeal seems important, feel free. For me, the
important thing is that we're not all fighter pilots and _it 's OK_ to have a
qualitatively different decision process. Come up with your own metaphor, your
own acronym, that fits _your_ situation intuitively without such arduous
adaptation.

~~~
nicwolff
OODA is certainly overused but "Orient" is hardly a mystery or metaphor – Boyd
described it as the continuous re-evaluation of your "Cultural Traditions",
"Genetic Heritage", "Previous Experience", "Analysis/Synthesis", and "New
Information", and explained each of those in detail.

~~~
fenwick67
This hasn't explained what "Orient" means at all, you've just piled new
concepts that need explaining on top of it and said it's a summation of them.

~~~
yaj54
I'm completely new to this acronym but I'm grokking orient as "account for
your bayesian priors."

~~~
zbobet2012
That's about perfect

------
philosophygeek
We've had 10 years of frothiness in venture markets. Many employees under 30
don't even know what a downturn looks like. They're used to high pay, constant
calls from recruiters, and venture capital flowing into their companies. Even
the companies who flop, no big deal, just go down the street to the next
company. I worry that that generation is going to have the most difficulty
with these changes. They'll wonder why things are contracting, why difficult
decisions need to be made, can't we just wait this one out...?

I've never seen anything like COVID-19. I lived through the dot-com bubble,
watching friends who want from an IPO party to crying and packing up their car
back to Iowa within 6-months. Tech contracted and survived. Then there was the
2008 financial crisis. In that case, the damage was spread out beyond tech
centers. Capital markets dried up and life seemed very uncertain for awhile.

With COVID-19, we went from extreme prosperity to an unprecedented shutdown of
_global_ economies with massive uncertainty as to how long this will last.
Every business will be affected, the vast majority of them negatively.

I really wonder whether everyone is prepared for what it means to live in
scarcity instead of abundance.

~~~
Ididntdothis
“We've had 10 years of frothiness in venture markets. Many employees under 30
don't even know what a downturn looks like. They're used to high pay, constant
calls from recruiters, and venture capital flowing into their companies. Even
the companies who flop, no big deal, just go down the street to the next
company. I worry that that generation is going to have the most difficulty
with these changes. They'll wonder why things are contracting, why difficult
decisions need to be made, can't we just wait this one out...?“

I went through this in 2002. It took me a long time to accept that the good
life in the years before wasn’t because I was so smart but because of a
favorable market. It was quite a shock to actually having trouble finding
something new and also to accept that my pay was significantly lower. Somebody
told me at that time “now you see how job search always has been for most of
us”.

~~~
aidos
We've been trying to hire since last year and have really struggled because
rates devs have been looking for on the market are well above what we could
see them returning value-wise for their experience level (that's just the
nature of the market, I get it). When you have people getting £130k for doing
React at a fintech company... well, I just hope people are prepared for the
market changes that are underway.

Honestly, I'd rather this was all over and things went back to normal, but I
do think that there's going to be a fairly hard reset of salaries for people
that previously had a really sweet ride.

~~~
pjc50
> When you have people getting £130k for doing React at a fintech company...

How much is that as a fraction of the value of an average family home in your
location?

If there's a big fall in salaries, there's also going to be a big fall in
property values.

~~~
Ididntdothis
“If there's a big fall in salaries, there's also going to be a big fall in
property values.“

I don’t think so. Rents will go up and housing ownership will be concentrated
even more on wealthy people and big companies.

~~~
pjc50
The destruction of AirBnB may push rents down. Hard to see how rent can go
_up_ beyond what people can actually afford?

~~~
Ididntdothis
Rent, health care, education and housing cost can go up to a level that it
eats up most income for average people. That seems to be the trend.

------
kirse
There's no doubt action (and speed of adaptability) is important, but I'd also
highlight a 2nd virtue - patience.

Action for the sake of action is called panic. People who like to control
things (executives, leaders, me, etc) often feel like they need to be doing
something to have a sense of control in the midst of chaos.

The only thing that needs action right now is triage - cost-cutting. Cash flow
to survive and keep payroll going for the next 12-18 months. Once the safety
net is in place, the mood changes from frantic survival to calm.

At that point, the ratio of thinking:acting time should arguably double.
Recessions take _plenty_ of time to unwind. Take 30 days (not 2) to gather
information from across the org and evaluate trending opportunities. _“Measure
twice, cut once.”_ applies to pivots, too.

Re-developing new models for recognizing opportunities and a new decision
framework for when to act upon those opportunities takes time. The folks who
spend more time thinking about where the puck is going to be vs. reacting to
its every jitter are the ones who will come out ahead.

~~~
takinola
This is such an important point. However, sticking to the "panic only as much
as needed" idea is difficult because, sometimes, incentives are skewed to
reward panic. Think about all the laws that are passed without regard to the
side-effects because "someone ought to do something about this". In peacetime,
prepare for war. Before the crisis hits, you should take the time to think
through how you and the people around you need to behave and what is likely to
trip you up. Don't assume you will do the right thing. Plan to do the right
thing.

~~~
kqr
Or as Deming liked to say, "Don't just do something -- stand there!"

------
eric_b
A similar title for this article could be: "How to bodysurf your way out of a
tsunami"

Good luck, you're screwed.

If you're a cash flow negative startup even slightly tangentially related to
an industry impacted severely by COVID, you're done. This economic shutdown is
end of days for a huge number of small businesses.

The media is hyping shutdown until at least May, but I'm seeing more "June and
on". If that comes to pass, there will be very few small businesses left
standing in the heavily impacted industries. It's going to kill a lot of
otherwise healthy businesses too.

The stimulus is mostly a feel good measure for politicians. How many of you
have gotten your checks? How many have applied for EIDL loans and received
them? How's the PPP going?

Oh I'm sure they'll iron out the kinks, but it'll be too little too late. Hope
ya'll are up to date on your Steinbeck, because that's what's coming.

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danaliv
A similar model taught to pilots is DECIDE:

    
    
      - Detect that change has occurred
      - Estimate the need to counter or react to the change
      - Choose a desirable outcome
      - Identify actions to achieve the outcome
      - Do the necessary action
      - Evaluate the effects of the action
    

It suffers a bit from being a backronym, and I don't know anyone who
explicitly applies it "in real life," but I do emphasize the last item with
students because it's so often overlooked. A lot of people will see a need for
a change, do something to make the change, and then fail to notice that the
desired outcome wasn't achieved.

I see this omission in software systems a lot too, which manifests as a lack
of monitoring, control, verification, and/or alerting. An ETL process that
doesn't verify the correctness of its output, for example.

------
tyingq
I imagine in many cases, what they chose to do in the past matters more than
what they are doing now...in terms of survival.

Cash reserves, assets you can get loans on, percentage of workforce that are
contractors or professional services, flexible contracts, reasonable real
estate costs, for example.

------
sumanthvepa
Some changes in the business environment seem non-intuitive. My cloud
migration consulting work (which I thankfully do remotely) has seen a quick
uptick. A lot of customers want to migrate to cheaper clouds or reduce their
cloud footprint. I was expecting not have much work as many of my startup
clients see revenue pressure. But in the short term a few months the opposite
may happen.

------
mlthoughts2018
> “ Notice that the word speed appears twice. This is not the time for
> committees, study groups or widespread consensus building. Even with
> imperfect information, the future of your company depends on your ability to
> make rapid decisions and start acting.”

Yikes. I guess principled decisions have to go? Executive authority!

It reminds me of the president in The Simpsons Movie... “I was elected to
lead, not to read.”

~~~
kop316
The OODA loop was invented by Col. John Boyd during the Vietnam War and is
being adapted here for the business environment.

The point is for some hard decisions, you will have to act on imperfect or
incomplete information. A good leader will make a decision, because doing
nothing and hoping you get more info will in fact be worse than making the
wrong decision. As you get more information, you can then alter or tailor your
decision. This is especially true in a military environment.

For an example in a popular movie, look at 1st Lieutenant Norman S. Dike Jr.
in Band of Brothers.

~~~
meheleventyone
Isn't the point of getting inside the opponents OODA loop to force them to
make decisions faster than they are able to sensibly and ergo force wrong
decisions. If you get inside your own loop by hurrying your decision making
forcing wrong decisions how is that sensible?

It also seems obviously untrue that acting on a wrong decision is better than
doing nothing. The results of a wrong decision could of course be worse than
the results of not making a decision in haste.

If you're already at the point of being forced to make decisions then you've
already screwed up? You're being reactive.

~~~
kop316
>Isn't the point of getting inside the opponents OODA loop to force them to
make decisions faster than they are able to sensibly and ergo force wrong
decisions. If you get inside your own loop by hurrying your decision making
forcing wrong decisions how is that sensible?

Nope. The point is if I am inside their OODA loop, I can make decisions and
react quicker than the adversary. Now they are reacting to my decisions and I
have the advantage.

> It also seems obviously untrue that acting on a wrong decision is better
> than doing nothing. The results of a wrong decision could of course be worse
> than the results of not making a decision in haste.

The keyword there is "could be". That's what makes leadership hard. You have
to know when is enough information to make a decision, and when you need to
wait. Or if you made the wrong decision, what can you do now?

EDIT: For an example, there's a small brewery down the street that cannot can
all of their beer. Making beer takes 3 weeks at least. So there's predictions
of COVID-19 ending in May to Sept. So what is the right choice? Do I hope that
it ends early and brew beer in a couple of weeks, or do I wait until Sept?
What about all of the perishable supplies I have now?

It does me a lot more harm to wait until the "all clear" and then order
supplies. Why? Everybody else will do the same thing, and now I am out of beer
for three weeks (and longer for other beer). That is a lot of revenue left on
the table lost.

What about making it now? Well if I am too hasty, now I have beer that will
skunk because I cannot sell it fast enough.

So the brewery owner needs to see what info they have now (obverse, orient),
and decide and act. What will cost me more money?

~~~
meheleventyone
> Nope. The point is if I am inside their OODA loop, I can make decisions and
> react quicker than the adversary. Now they are reacting to my decisions and
> I have the advantage.

Yes you'll have the advantage because they'll be making bad decisions as the
situation will have changed by the time they've decided to act on older
information. It's not sufficient to simply act faster you have to be making
good decisions as well.

> The keyword there is "could be". That's what makes leadership hard. You have
> to know when is enough information to make a decision, and when you need to
> wait. Or if you made the wrong decision, what can you do now?

Yes exactly so acting isn't axiomatically the thing to do. Although making a
great folly seems like a great way to get lionized in military history. :D

~~~
kop316
> Yes exactly so acting isn't axiomatically the thing to do. Although making a
> great folly seems like a great way to get lionized in military history. :D

Usually when battles are studied in military history, they try to look at it
based on what the leader knew then versus what we know now. Hindsight is
always 20/20\. There are examples of famous battles where even studied now,
military strategists say that the losing commander did the right thing, based
on the information available.

~~~
meheleventyone
For sure you can make good decisions based on the info available and still
lose. You can also make bad decisions and still win. Sometimes decisions that
seem vital are totally pointless etc. etc. etc.

~~~
kop316
...what?

I think you completely missed the point of th OODA loop.

~~~
meheleventyone
I understand the OODA loop thanks.

I was replying directly to your point that military historians found that some
military commanders were making good decisions based on the info available
even if they caused grand follys. I was pointing out that doesn’t really say
much as most people try to make good decisions but won’t always be able to or
won’t be making decisions that actually matter as external forces overwhelm no
matter what decision is made.

The best laid plans of mice and men often go askew to paraphrase Burns.

------
_curious_
"Your revenue plans are no longer valid."

Probably my favorite line in the script :)

~~~
hef19898
If they were in the first place, that is!

------
arctangent
While OODA is an interesting and increasingly popular concept, it is really
only useful when applied to very short intervals of time. You can and should
expect that an opponent with "a reasonable amount" of time will make the
correct response. In business that timeframe is much longer than the few
minutes or seconds a modern aerial duel might be concluded in.

The general idea of OODA is that if you can "play fast" you can beat someone
who can otherwise "play better". Think about how blitz chess differs from
traditional multi-hour games, even though the rules of play are the same: for
example it is often possible to exert time pressure by playing "confusing
moves". This concept of "fast play" translates into the business timeframe
more as the concept of "agility" (to be contrasted with large-company
"inertia"), whereas businesses only try to confuse one another on television
or by accident :-)

Concepts similar to OODA but more applicable to a business context and
timeframe would include PDCA [1] and DMAIC [2].

PDCA a.k.a. the "Deming cycle" stands for "Plan, Do, Check, Adjust" and is
closely related to the concept of "kaizen" [3] (or "continuous improvement").
PDCA happens in timeframes that can best be described as a "short project" (or
a "kaizen event").

DMAIC ("Define, Measure, Analyse, Improve, Control") on the other hand is a
framework commonly used for larger business interventions where the stakes are
higher, more project members are needed, more structure is required and so on.
It is a key feature of the Six Sigma [4] approach as well as Lean Six Sigma
[5].

Note: I'm sure there are other valid approaches too. I'm just mentioning the
ones I am familiar with in case anyone else is interested in methods to help
businesses improve and respond to change.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDCA](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDCA)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMAIC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMAIC)

[3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaizen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaizen)

[4]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Sigma](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Sigma)

[5]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean_Six_Sigma](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean_Six_Sigma)

------
oneVoiceOnHN
Unemployed Engineer here. I can also sew. Not sure what I should be doing.
Should I make non government certified masks?

~~~
ckdarby
>Not sure what I should be doing.

Set up a schedule to modernize your skills and start applying to remote first
companies.

>Should I make non government certified masks?

Yes, in the unscheduled time.

------
kerng
Not a single reference to the actual creator of this model, John Boyd, a
fighter pilot.

------
jezclaremurugan
In Akamai the mantra is - Stabilize, Adapt, Emerge

------
HugoDaniel
...that and money

