R/T 010 - How to use strategy to succeed, even if you think it has nothing to do with your job.
This week's radical thing is: Part 1.5 on the OODA loop - call it an interl-OODA!
Welcome to issue 10 of Radical Things.
This feels like a milestone, so I will celebrate it with you! 🥳
When I started writing this Substack, I didn't really know what I was doing. My approach goes against all the online advice about writing a newsletter.
2.5 months and 10 issues in, and I'm aiming for a happy medium between writing something I enjoy and something worthwhile to read while not taking ridiculous amounts of time doing it.
I'm also figuring out how to write my way - an ongoing process!
So, I'm going to be experimenting a little in upcoming issues. I hope you continue to read and stay on the journey with me.
I always appreciate any feedback. It sounds trite, but if you want to drop a like or a comment, it really does help grease the wheels of motivation.
The same goes if you think a friend would like to read it.
Have you been snowmobiling this week?
Why not?
I said last week you should always be doing it! 😄
If you're a designer or researcher, the idea of analysis and synthesis is nothing new. Yet, they are critical in dealing with emergent change inside the OODA loop. It's part of general existence. It's not something you compartmentalise in a process within a project.
Through the OODA loop, Boyd teaches us to continually challenge our mental models to make sense of the world. This week, I had the opportunity to put this lesson into action.
Let me tell you about it.
I was doom scrolling through LinkedIn and came across an excellent article on the OODA loop. The author, John Schmitt, compares Gary Klein’s Recognition Primed Decision (RPD) model to the OODA loop. In his comparison, he claims Boyd's model is not a "cognitive model of decision-making".
Aye? 🤯
If you read last week’s issue, that's precisely what I told you it was. But now I realise my own mental model needed to be more accurate.
Schmitt continues:
"A spinning OODA loop is a generalized (sic) model of adaptation to (usually hostile) surroundings."
Sometimes a shift in perspective enables other ideas to slide into place like Tetris blocks. I mentally kicked myself for not piecing this together before.
This statement immediately challenged my mental model, which I adjusted accordingly.
I did this quickly because this new information clarified why the OODA loop applies beyond military theory.
Here's Boyd on the purpose of strategy.
"To improve our ability to shape and adapt to unfolding circumstances, so that we (as individuals or as groups or as a culture or as a nation-state) can survive on our own terms."
Most popular writing tells you strategy is about winning. For many organisations and people, this is rarely true. Especially if they're not driven by "customers" or crushing competition, i.e. the social sector.
Strategy is so much more than writing a plan as a box-ticking exercise or to appease your boss. When you reframe strategy as the ability to adapt to emergent change, it becomes a more potent force.
As Boyd puts it, strategy is...
“A mental tapestry of changing intentions for harmonizing and focusing our efforts as a basis for realizing some aim or purpose in an unfolding and often unforeseen world of many bewildering events and many contending interests.”
Yet, to be successful you need to be curious about the world, drawing on a broad range of influences and knowledge. In this approach you create space to challenge your thinking, to adapt and create snowmobiles.
The same approach Boyd took in creating the OODA loop.
“We can’t just look at our own personal experiences or use the same mental recipes over and over again; we’ve got to look at other disciplines and activities and relate or connect them to what we know from our experiences and the strategic world we live in.”
The next time you come across something that challenges your perspective or mental model, don’t dismiss it. Instead ask yourself: Do I need to better understand this, or do I need to change my mental model to meet this new perspective or reality?
With this simple question, you’re standing on the shoulders of giants and taking your first steps to use strategy to succeed on your own terms.