POINT OF DEPARTURE: THE OODA LOOP

Since the OODA loop plays such a prominent role in these articles I’ll use a primary source introduce it, the U.S. Marine Corps.

“The OODA loop applies to any two-sided conflict, whether the antagonists are individuals in hand-to-hand combat or large military formations. OODA is an acronym for observation-orientation-decision-action… When engaged in conflict, we first observe the situation—that is, we take in information about our own status, our surroundings, and our enemy… Having observed the situation, we next orient to it—we make certain estimates, assumptions, analyses, and judgments about the situation in order to create a cohesive mental image. In other words, we try to figure out what the situation means to us. Based on our orientation, we decide what to do… Then we put the decision into action… Having acted, we have changed the situation, and so the cycle begins again.” MCDP 6.

This brief explanation paints a picture that looks like this;

On the surface this looks fine but on closer inspection it fails as a learning model. (I’ll call this the bumper-sticker model. It gets the point across for mass consumption. Boyd’s last model is richer and succeeds as a learning model. We’ll get to it later, for now this works.) This model represents an allopoietic system. These systems comprise “the process whereby an organization produces something other than the organization itself. An assembly line is an example of an allopoietic system.” Think of Henry Ford’s mass production methods or the people who are a part of the fast food process. Rigid allopoietic systems simply pass something through, from point-to-point, without any concern for what comes after. The parts can’t change what they do; they merely follow orders, policies and procedures. This can work for well-defined actions but fall short in dealing with novel situations.

In contrast to allopoietic systems are autopoietic systems. The difference is that the former exists to create ‘something else’ while the later exists to ‘recreate itself.’ Biological cells are an example of autopoietic systems. The knock on autopoietic systems is that, in the extreme, they become isolated as the degree of self-referentiality increases to self-absorbtion. In these cases they are a positive feedback loop like cancer or big business. They survive at others expense and in the end will kill the host body.

These two systems set up the tension I wrote about earlier. In soccer a pure assembly line system produces robots while a self-centered system produces prima donnas. It takes a blend of “soldiers and artists” within the system to maintain the proper balance between bottom-up emergent behavior and top-down intent. This is part of the individual player development vs. team focus debate. Players are not developed in a vacuum and teams cannot improve except through individual growth. Getting the right balance is hard.

So what is ‘flowing’ through the OODA loop, allopoietic and autopoietic systems? At its most basic level it’s energy/information. It’s what keeps things going, the raw material for creation. Stop the flow of E/I and they cease to function as a system or as a process. They become an entity and that's a different type of model.

An energy/information flow implies that someone communicated with someone else through a medium and that the meaning was understood. In a personal sense, you made an observation, it altered your orientation in some way, you had to decide what to make of it and took some action. In short your point of departure was an OODA loop.