Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. This is the OODA loop, first recognized in fighter pilots and then in the Toyota Production System. It represents every choice of action in humans and higher level systems: take in sensory data, form a model of the world, choose the next action, make a change in the world.
At least in fighter pilots, and in all our daily life, most of this is automatic. We can’t help observing while we are awake. We constantly decide and act, it is part of being alive. The leverage point here is Orient.
The model we form of the world guides our decisions, both conscious and unconscious. Once the pilot has a geometric plane of battle in mind, the decisions are obvious. Once you see the bottleneck in production, you can’t look away from it. When I have an idea what’s going on in my daughter’s mind, I can talk to her.
Our power to change our actions, our habits, and our impact on the world lies in Orient. When we direct our attention to finding new models of the world, whole new possibilities of action open to us.
Fighter pilots can see what is possible when they picture the battle in the best geometric plane. Production managers needs to look at the flow of work. In software, I look at the flow of data through services and functions — different from when I used to see in objects or think about spots in memory.
The power of breaking work into smaller chunks is the chance to re-Orient in between them. TDD gives us lots of little stable points to stop and think. Pairing lets one person think about where we are in the problem space while the other is busy acting. Mob programming gives us the chance to negotiate an orientation among the whole group.
That co-orientation is crucial to collaboration. With that, we can predict each other’s decisions and understand each other’s actions. If we have a shared model of the world and when we are going, plus trust in the competence of our team in their respective specialties, that’s when we can really fly.
(This post is based on a conversation with Zack Kanter.)