Category: Strategy

What’s the F in the OODA Loop?

Posted by Ahsan – March 27, 2010

OODA stands for Observe, Orient, Decide, Act.

There’s an F in the OODA Loop – its best kept secret. Perhaps John Boyd omitted it out of fear of being mistaken for a culinary maestro (FOODA, anybody?). Well, to be serious, it is present in the official diagram.

OODA -> F -> OODA

The F is present when an  OODA Loop ends and another begins: Feedback.

So what is Feedback and why is it so important to the OODA Loop? The OODA Loop is an empirical construct. A user cycles through the loop, ending with Action, but they must begin the next loop by Observing the result of their Action in the Environment.

The Importance of Being Fed Back

Imagine a business providing a service for its customers, but ignoring their feedback. How can they satisfy their customers without listening to them?

I used to be averse to self-styled self-help gurus spouting cheesy advice, until I stumbled across Jamil Qureshi, a sports psychologist cum author, at the 2009 Emirates Airline Festival of Literature. His book, The Mind Coach, contains an epic passage that I have whole-heartedly embraced:

Turn Failure into Feedback

We tend to perceive our actions as either failures or successes. This is one reason why you may not see life as the learning opportunity it is. As soon as we see things as a failure, we take things personally. The learning opportunity gets lost in a fog of self-doubt and bad feeling. However, being turned down, rejected or refused doesn’t mean you’re inept, incapable or bad. It simply gives you feedback about how to do it better next time.

In fact, there is no such thing as failure, only feedback.

There Will Be Friction

In the absence of proper feedback, the second OODA loop will be operating on inaccurate Observation and its Action will therefore be out of tune with what was actually required by the environment. There will be Friction: a mismatch between the environment and the user’s mental conception of that environment.

It boils down to these points:

  1. You must observe accurately.
  2. You must be willing to accept the input you get. There’s no such thing as bad feedback or good feedback. Feedback is Feedback.
  3. You must Observe again to see if your Actions effected any change in the Feedback you get in the next OODA Loop.

Feedback will be your mantra. Feedback, Feedback, Feedback!

A Symphony of Solutions

Posted by Ahsan – March 17, 2010

Problems are easier to solve in controlled environments, and often there is a single solution to a problem. But what do you do when you do not control the environment, and the effect of a solution is not measurable?

Deep within Charlie Wilson’s War, the search for a “silver bullet”, a single weapon that will decisively turn the Afghan war against the Soviets, is not going well. They have looked at various weapons such as the Swiss Oerlikon, the British Blowpipe, and have the Israelis working on the “Charlie Horse”, but various obstacles remain. The protagonists are: Gust Avrakotos (CIA man), Mike Vickers (Weapons expert), and US Congressman Charlie Wilson:

“As with everything else, Vickers did not miss a beat when Avrakotos asked him what they should do. He said that Wilson was thinking about the solution to the problem the wrong way. Rarely, in war, is the battle won by a single weapon. It wasn’t necessary to find the perfect weapon. Once again, the answer lay in the broad concept of the weapons mix.

[...]

Vickers explained that it was not necessary to look for a single new weapon to serve as a “silver bullet”. The way to defeat Soviet air power was by introducing a symphony of different weapons that, when put together, would change the balance in favor of the mujahideen. He then painted a verbal portrait of the melange of weapons he was urging Gust to deploy to bring down the Hind.

[...]

It was like having his own intellectual hit-man, and Gust could feel Charlie’s excitement, as Vickers concluded by conceding that none of these weapons individually would be that effective, but the whole whole would be greater than the sum of its parts. It was their collective impact that must be considered, because all they needed to do was to convince the Soviet pilots that this mix of diverse anti-aircraft weaponry existed and was in the hands of the guerillas. Every Soviet pilot would then know there was no one diversionary tactic they could rely on. [...] once the weapons mix was in place, they simply wouldn’t know what the mujahideen might have coming up at them.”

This is an example of a symphony of solutions (here weapons) that chip away at a complex problem (combating Soviet air power), loosely orchestrated by a strategist. The solutions in this case are resources decentralized in the hands of “clients” (Afghans). The grand strategy is to win the war; the immediate objective is to deter Soviet Air pilots from their aggressive tactics.

Apple, Amazon and the iPad

Posted by Ahsan – January 29, 2010

Apple is not a bookseller; Amazon is.

With the iBookstore, the iPad may attract people to reading, but it will not pull readers away from the comfort of an e-paper based reader. Serious readers who want to read more than blogs will be attracted to the eye-friendly, battery-efficient approach of the Kindle, the Sony Reader, and similar e-ink devices.

Where Apple scores marks is giving Publishers the freedom to price their ebooks; compare this to Amazon’s bare-knuckle approach of setting a maximum price of $9.99. But Apple is not a bookseller, yet.

How will Amazon respond to the iPad?

One possible strategy they may pursue is to release a Kindle application for the iPad that allows users to purchase books from Amazon – whether Apple will approve such an application is another guess (refer to the Apple-Google wrangle over a Google Voice app for the iPhone). A Kindle application is already available on the iPhone.

What is Apple? They sell computer devices – indeed, they are marshaling the transition from computer devices to consumer devices. But Apple is not a bookseller; Amazon is.

What is Amazon? They sell/distribute books, they publish books for sell-published authors, and they sell an ebook reader. They’re a combined bookseller, publisher, and distributor. Their focus is on digital content. What they’re really doing, long-term, is competing with the publishing industry as a whole (which explains their relative disdain for the ISBN), but they’ve pre-empted the war with a battle over price, and this is where Apple and other companies with large consumer bases see an opening. By allowing Publishers to set their own prices, they have offered a way out for a bewildered industry.

What Amazon needs to do is calibrate their present grand strategy of introducing an alternative publishing eco-system to current circumstances. How they can do this without making publishers redundant, I’m not sure. Perhaps publishers will become mere filter houses for quality content – an interesting question for another post.

Where does Google fit in?

Google Editions, a web-based bookstore, is around the corner – reportedly, in the 1st half of 2010. This fits in nicely with the iPad. Google goes toe-to-toe with Amazon as a competing book publisher, bookseller and distributor (indeed, the 3 terms will become indistinguishable in the future). Will they invest in an Android-based tablet? Or will they wait for the Google Settlement to pass?

Given the rapid rate of change, it’s impossible to say what exactly will happen, or even if the ideal equilibrium will be achieved. As a wise man said, we shall see.

The author, an avid reader, is a “technologist” working for a chain of bookstores in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

Strategy I – The Way

Posted by Ahsan – July 6, 2009

Musashi Miyamoto with two Bokken (wooden Stick...
Image via Wikipedia

The definition of strategy remains elusive due to the diverse contexts in which we use the word, each of which is a topic in its own right:

  • Political strategy
  • Environmental strategy
  • Military strategy
  • Business strategy

But let’s attempt some general definitions:

1. Strategy is the Way.

In The Book of Five Rings, Miyamoto Musashi refers to “the Way of Strategy”, which we can interpret as study of the Way itself. The Way is not a formula or a tactic; tactics are tools of the Way. But what is the Way ?

2. The Way is how we respond to anything and everything.

The keyword here is ‘respond‘ as opposed to ‘react‘. We Observe, Orient, Decide and Act – a single OODA Loop. The goal is to cycle through an OODA loop faster than the opponent. Indeed, in certain contexts (e.g sword-fighting) the Way can be practiced to such perfection that a response becomes a reaction – a fast OODA Loop programmed into muscle memory by sheer practice.

3. The Way has a direction.

A good strategy has an objective, which may change depending on the situation, but all loops and their variations must directed towards the success of that objective.

4. The Way is dynamic.

Not all our strategies turn out as planned, yet we deal with the changes; coping with changes itself requires a strategy. The nature and art of Strategy itself changes over time as we learn more about ourselves and the world we live in. Thus, we are eternal students of the Way.