OODA Loop

Four steps that repeat. The second one decides whether the other three help.

Origin & context

The best-documented statement of the loop is Boyd's own lecture, "Discourse on Winning and Losing," given on 25 April, 2 May and 3 May 1989 at the US Marine Corps Command and Staff College in Quantico, Virginia, and preserved in a transcript. Boyd taught it to officers as a way to think about conflict: each side observes, orients, decides and acts, and the side that gets inside the other's loop holds the initiative.

Builds on: John R. Boyd (1989), Discourse on Winning and Losing, lecture at the USMC Command and Staff College, Marine Corps University, Quantico (25 April, 2 May and 3 May 1989).
What we changed: Nothing in the loop. The page puts the weight where Boyd's own lecture does, on orientation, rather than on the popular reading of the loop as a race.

Boyd's own example

The commander whose picture came from the rear

In his 1989 lecture, Boyd answered a comment from the class about one commander's conduct. The popular reading of the loop would look for a slow decision.

Boyd's answer pointed somewhere else. "It’s a false orientation," he said. The commander "had an orientation, but his orientation was the orientation you get at a rear headquarters, period. That’s a rear headquarters orientation. Unfortunately, it doesn’t map to what was going on up there."

The lesson is the one the slogan loses. Every step after orientation inherits its errors. A commander who decided twice as fast from the same rear-headquarters picture would only have been wrong twice as often.

Boyd used the case to locate failure in the picture, not the pace: a false orientation, however quickly acted on, does not match what is happening at the front.

Norsk Hydro

Three decisions in one meeting, and a picture redrawn for months

In March 2019, ransomware hit Norsk Hydro, the Norwegian manufacturer. At the emergency meeting, as Microsoft later told the story, "Norsk Hydro executives made three swift decisions": they would pay no ransom, they would summon Microsoft's cybersecurity team to help restore operations, and they would be open about what had happened. Executives then held daily press conferences at their Oslo headquarters.

The speed rested on a picture the company already held. At a press conference the day after the attack, finance chief Eivind Kallevik called it "quite severe" but said the company had no plans to pay, and pointed to its good backup systems as the route to recovery. The decide-and-act step was fast because the orientation was settled: the way back ran through the backups, not the attackers.

Then the loop kept turning. Hydro's estimate of the cost was redrawn as the facts came in: $41 million at first, $52 million in April, $69 million in early June. The case does not show Hydro using Boyd's loop, and its adversary was an attacker, not a rival. It shows the loop's question answered well: what do we believe is happening, and what follows from it?

In July 2019, Hydro put the total financial impact of the attack for the first half of the year at up to $75 million (NOK 650 million), up from the initial estimate of $41 million. It never paid the ransom.

Read the full story: Norsk Hydro's ransomware refusal →

Questions to ask

• ?What do we believe is happening, in three sentences?
• ?What fact would prove that picture wrong, and who would see it first?
• ?Does our picture match what the people at the front line are seeing?
• ?What result do we expect from this decision if our picture is right?
• ?When did we last change our picture, and what changed it?

Before you start

• →A situation that is changing while you act on it
• →Someone responsible for the team's running picture of what is happening
• →A way to get fresh observations quickly, including from people at the front line

Primary benefit

It makes a team say what it believes is happening, and change that belief as the facts change, before it races to act.

Typical outcomes