Teaching Leaders & Teams To Harness VUCA with John Boyd’s OODA Loop to Sharpen Their Competitive Edge | CLO @ AGLX | Leadership Advisory | Keynote Speaker | U.S. Marine | Co-Host of "No Way Out" Podcast | 🇺🇸🇵🇷
WARNING: Skip this post if you do not want your assumptions challenged! It’s a big, complex topic. It will have to be discussed in multiple posts. Let’s begin! Here is my entire thesis in three words: “Orientation is everything!” When I talk about OODA, I always begin with defining Orientation. I’ve learned that if I can help individuals and teams understand Orientation effectively, the follow-on discussions of OODA tend to make more sense. In the paper that I wrote with Hunter Hastings we say: “Orientation is the internal operating system of an individual which enables them to sense external events through observations, process them in order to assign them meaning and intent, formulate hypotheses in the form of decisions, test those decisions via actions, and learn via feedback loops, continuously as time advances. “In other words, Orientation is where and how humans filter data and information in order to transform it into knowledge and understanding that can be decided and acted upon within their respective environments. “Orientation continues to operate as time moves forward, continuously making new observations, new decisions, and new actions, all based on new observations via feedback loops.” Our point is very similar to what we read in “MCDP 1-4: Competing.” In Chapter 4 we read: “Orientation influences all other elements of the OODA loop, because it controls how people make sense of what they observe and because it shapes their decisions and actions. “Orientation consists of all the things that affect how a person understands the world, such as language, culture, genetics, education, previous experience, etc.” The bottom line is that whether in business, the military, law, sports, #marketing, advertising, #investing, #trading, art, etc: Orientation is everything! Orientation is the differentiator in competing (more on that in a later post). Orientation directly impacts everything we do as individuals and as teams. “MCDP 1-4” goes on to say: “It is essential for Marines to understand the role a person’s orientation plays in the choices they make and how this relates to the actions they take in the world. “This also applies to groups of people, where a kind of collective orientation can work in a similar way. “We must consciously study the components of a rival’s orientation if our understanding of their approach to competition is to be useful crafting our own campaign.” Read it again and replace “Marine” with something pertinent to your profession. It holds. All of the quotes from “MCDP 1-4: Competing” are in Chapter 4: “How Rivals Approach Competition.” I think that it is the most important chapter. There is also a let less “replace ‘Marine’ with ‘X’” in that chapter, which helps convey the principles more simply. In the next post we will explore and expand on differentiated Orientations within competitive environments. Stay tuned and thanks for reading!
So..... This is a good scene setter/chum in the water, but I suppose your next posts will be about just what that means. So What? What are the implications? What are the parts of Orientation (Digging into the five aspects denoted on the chart)? How do we improve those parts? Besides the feedback, iterative process of the Loop, is there a way to ensure we are Orienting well, or is it only the process that tells us that? Inquiring minds 🤔 want to know.....
Mark J. McGrath looking forward to the next post! Will there be a guide or tool one can use to assess one's own orientation?
Observation and orientation … pay attention and figure things out. Good stuff!
Great post.
And the key to effective orientation is humility!
“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.” -Sun Tzu, The Art of War Recent breakthroughs in generalist AI allow us to build very accurate machine learning models that predict how an individual will orient given a certain set of inputs. In MCWP 5-10 Marine Corps Planning Process, the course of action war game is prescribed as a way to validate a course of action by testing it against an adversary, with an independent will, under realistic conditions. Using generalist machine learning models that are trained to mimic the orientation of adversaries, with independent will, we can test a course of action, in a realistic simulation, quickly and effectively. We can apply this technique to our own orientation, as well, so that we can know the enemy and ourselves.
Co-creator of The Flow System™ | No Way Out Podcast Co-Host | AGLX NA MD
1yTrauma changes our orientation. Trauma is not what happens to us, it’s how we respond to what happens to us. It’s all about orientation. Trauma colors how we sense, decide, and act. Trauma can arise from the interplay of culture, genetics, previous experiences and interaction with the outside world (environment). Sound familiar? We reconstruct memories. Our orientation changes as we mis-remember or block out the past. We also construct reality… Our default mode network (ego) locks in our orientation. We must find ways to suppress our DMN (IG&C)—some destruction and creation anyone? This is what flow does; psychedelic assisted therapy, meditation, group flow, etc.