The OODA Loop and Decision Making
Prepare for the unknown by studying how others in the past have coped with the unforeseeable and the unpredictable.
George S. Patton
Decisions act as our steering wheel that guides us through the pathways of life. This is true whether a decision is simple, like deciding whether to have a cup of coffee, or complex, such as choosing the best architectural design for a new critical service. Decisions are also how we guide our own actions when delivering IT services, whether it is in how we approach coding a new feature or troubleshooting a production problem.
However, being effective at decision making isn’t an innate skill. In fact, it is one that is surprisingly difficult to learn. For starters, effectiveness is more than how fast you decide or how adeptly you execute that decision. It must also achieve its objective while accounting for any conditions that might change the dynamics and thereby the outcome trajectory of your actions in the executing ecosystem.
In this chapter, we take a deeper look at the decision-making process itself. We will also explore the ingredients necessary for effective decision making, how they impact the decision process, and how they can become impaired.
Examining the Decision-Making Process
Decision making is the process of pulling together any information and context about our situation and evaluating it against the capabilities available to progress toward the desired outcome. This is an iterative, rapid process. To work well we have to determine with each cycle whether the decision progressed us toward the outcome. If so, how effective was it, and if not, why not? We also have to look to see if anything unexpected occurred that can tell us more about the situation and the efficacy of our current capabilities that we can use to adjust and adapt.
Figure 2.1 Figuring out the right mix of context and capabilities for decision making can be challenging.
Even though we make decisions all the time, the process for making them can be surprisingly complex and fraught with mistakes. Consider the example of taking a friend to a coffee shop. While the task is inherently simple, there are all sorts of elements involved that, without the right level of scrutiny, can cause problems. You may find that you have the wrong address (wrong or incomplete information), that you took a wrong turn because you thought you were on a different street (flawed situational context), or that your car is having engine trouble and the coffee shop is too far to walk to (mismatched capabilities). It is also possible that your capabilities, context, and information to get to the coffee shop are all fine, but your friend is angry because the shop has no Internet service and she only agreed to go there with you because she assumed she would be able to get online (misunderstood target outcome).
Spotting and rectifying mistakes under such simple conditions is easy. However, as the setting becomes far more complex, particularly as decisions take the form of large chains like those needed in IT service delivery, mistakes can far more easily hide under several layers of interactions, where they can remain undiscovered all while causing seemingly intractable problems. As these mistakes mount, they steadily degrade our understanding of our delivery ecosystem in ways that, unless found, undermine the overall effectiveness of future decisions.
The military strategist John Boyd became captivated by the importance of decision making while trying to understand what factors determined the likelihood of success in combat. He studied how simple mistakes could cascade and destroy any advantage a unit might have, and sought ways to improve decision-making processes in order to create a strategic advantage over the enemy. His work soon came to revolutionize how elite units, and many Western militaries, began to approach warfare.