How to win a war
Historically there have been two ways to win a battle:
- Recruit a bigger army
- Build more powerful weapons
They were the only variables that mattered. Size and Power. The number of soldiers you had and the calibre of their guns pretty much determined if you would win. Conflicts were wars of attrition. Military might was everything. If you have ever seen the trenches of the Western Front that run through Northern France and Belgium you will understand exactly what I mean.
The military strategist, John Boyd, was a fighter pilot in the Korean war. He realised that there was a missing factor, speed. If numbers were equal, it wasn’t the biggest most powerful fighters that won dogfights, it was the smaller more agile ones.
The OODA loop
Boyd went on to develop the OODA loop to help train fighter pilots. The loop works something like this:
Observe, gather data, see what your opponent is doing
Orientate: process that data to get meaning from it
Decide: work out what the best course of action is
Act: play out your decision
In a dog fight the ability to run through the cycle quickly and repeatedly determines success. If you can act faster than your opponent or “get inside his loop” then he will always be on the back foot. He will be reacting to what you have done, or better still, reacting to a situation that no longer exists.
The rate at which you can make decisions and act on them is a critical factor in military supremacy.
He who can handle the quickest rate of change survives ~ Colonel John Boyd
An intellectual hop
You don’t have to be a genius to see how the OODA loop applies to other competitive activities. In sport, litigation, politics or business, if you can respond faster than your opponents you will leave them reeling.
A cultural leap
Our organisations are rarely that agile. How often have you sat in a meeting which has completely failed to make a decision? Do you ever have to throw an issue “upstairs” so somebody on a higher pay grade can decide for you?
If you want to churn through the OODA loop faster than your competition (and why wouldn’t you) then endless committees won’t help. You have to force decisions down the organisation so more people can make them.
That has a lot to do with a clear purpose, cooperative working environment, flat structures, aligned objectives and trust. It has very little to do with risk and control frameworks, quorate committees, personal agendas or authority matrices.
Command and control won’t cut it
It is far better to make the wrong decision than not make a decision at all. After all if you get it wrong, you can always decide to back it out…
What would Maverick say?
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