By Benjamin Chen
OODA is a decision making tool that was invented by Colonel John Boyd during World War II. It was created to help military jet fighter pilots to act and decide faster than the potential opponent. It was found to have decisive use.
OODA is an acronym which stands for Observe, Orient, Decide and action.
The first step in to Observe, in other words, describe the situation. In this step you will need to use all your senses in order to gather as much information and data as you can. You imagine yourself and the situation in third person, not in your own view. This allows you to see the scenario as efficiently as possible.
The second O is Orient. In this step you analyze the already existing data and group the causes and facts together. You organize the information to create possible and relatively effective plans of action. You see consequences on each plan of action and ultimately chose you 3 best ones.
Now you decide on which course of action you shall execute. You look at all the oriented choices and pick the most efficient plan to execute and do. Your selected choice needs to have the fundamental consequences as long as extra boosts and advantages later. You chose this choice in your own perspective and values but you still have to chose the plan which maximizes the benefits in the shortest time.
Now that you’ve chosen a plan and course of action you can execute it in the fastest, most effective way. Making sure you do it is the key thing! You try your best to follow your elected plan of action and hopefully get the expected outcome. After this you immediately link back to the first step and you do it all again.
In real life, you can see this happening all the time. Many jet pilots are repeating this loop over and over again in wars and desperate times. Tests with limited time must be oriented and answered in the swiftest manner achievable. Many people have used this strategy to gain incredible and unbelievable benefits in business and economics, along with science etc..Maybe you are using it too, but you just don’t know it.
This is the basic introduction and procedure to complete OODA decision making. To find out more search up ‘OODA loop’ in Google, Bing, Yahoo, or any other web browser.
