The hallmark quality of Boyd’s innovation was this: he’d realized that if one could operate /…

The hallmark quality of Boyd’s innovation was this: he’d realized that if one could operate / execute within the opponent’s decision cycle, the opponent would not be able to discern the delta between subjective order and orderly chaos, and would eventually be driven into madness.

It’s important to note that “operating within the opponent’s decision cycle” does not translate to speed.

Sometimes it’s possible to outmaneuver one’s opponents by actually moving slower, for example if you’re calibrated to a larger op, in orchestrated collaboration with other contributors with the assumption that the opponents can be expected to act with bombast, impetuousness, and informed by ego.

The visual metaphor I frequently use is simple, but many people understand it: the gears on a bicycle.

One gear may make it easy to pedal up an incline. The pedals are moving quickly, but the bike itself is moving slowly uphill.

But imagine what happens when you switch to another gear; now the pedals may be moving slowly, but the bike itself is traveling quite fast.

OODA is a useful tool for describing the “wheels within wheels” metaphor that’s often associated with systems theory, and as a delightful twist: the OODA framework itself actually calibrates quite nicely to cognitive behavioral theory (CBT), particularly if one streamlines the first two cycles (observe and orient) through a sustained autotelic (or psychological “flow”) state; a concept popularized through the work of Csíkszentmihályi.

Originally conceived within the context of aerial combat, OODA ended up being used to frame various scenarios in other contexts, for example: the first Gulf War, and is considered by some to be the most important contribution to military strategy since the work of Sun Tsu.