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• Breakdown of business and management hierarchy into strategic, operational, and tactical levels |
• Relationship between OODA loop components and different levels of business decision-making |
• Explanation of how OODA loops operate at various levels within an organization |
• Discussion of importance of taking action in the OODA loop process |
• Analysis of why it's beneficial to "start with the action" rather than observation |
• The OODA loop requires interaction with the environment through action to initiate cognition |
• John Boyd's original diagram of the OODA loop was limited by its static nature and medium at the time |
• Modern tools allow for more nuanced and dynamic visualizations of the OODA loop |
• Event-driven architectures and data visualization can enable a real-time, 3D picture of an organization's internal workings |
• The OODA loop is an abstraction that combines observations, orientation, decision-making, and action |
• Pipelines, event sourcing, and functional programming concepts can be used to visualize and understand the relationships between different parts of an organization's processes. |
• The importance of considering the organization's impact on the environment as a cohesive system |
• The OODA loop (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act) concept and its application to understanding an organization's interactions with its environment |
• The need for developers to think beyond shipping code and consider the broader implications of their work |
• The value of experimentation and exploring different perspectives in understanding complex systems |
• The limitations of book learning compared to real-world conversations and experiences |
• Recommendations for books, such as "Team of Teams" by Gen. Stanley McChrystal and "Extreme Ownership" by Jocko Willink, that can help deepen one's understanding of OODA Loop concepts |
• Ben Ford's proposed book on the subject, "The OODA Loop according to Ben Ford" |
• The creation of a YouTube playlist featuring conversations about OODA Loop concepts with various experts and perspectives |
• The importance of hands-on experience and building mental models to understand complex systems. |
• Starting the implementation process with becoming aware of principles and trying them out through iteration and refinement. |
• The need for contextual expertise that adapts to changing environments, rather than blindly applying established methods. |
• The OODA loop (Observe-Orient-Decide-Act) as a constant cycle of optimization in complex systems. |
• The limitations of transplanting ideas or teams from one context to another, and the importance of building internal fluency through continuous learning. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I think I'll start with a story. The story that I wanna start with, it's the complexity that is starting to creep in not just in the development world, but also the operations world. Everything is moving at a break-neck pace. We have Kubernetes, and that's just the tip of the iceberg, which in itself ... |
So one thing that I try to do is focus on the important stuff, and ignore the rest. But what is the important stuff? How do you know? Not to mention that you can't always just pay attention to what is happening; you still need to get on with your job, you still have requirements... We know that some of them are silly a... |
So in my search for certain models or approaches that would help deal with the complexity and the ever-increasing speed was Agile. This was maybe ten years ago... And that worked well for a while. But how do you apply Agile to the world of ops and the world of Kubernetes, when everything is changing almost every day? N... |
\[04:14\] So in that search, I came across Ben Ford and commando development. He had this really interesting concept of OODA loop. Observe, Orient, Decide and Act. I had a very simplistic view of the OODA loop, and Ben opened my eyes. I was like, "Whoa, there's so much to it... And are you telling me that I got it wron... |
So I have Ben joining me today to talk a little bit about that. That was my story, Ben. What about yours? How is your story with the complexity, and development, and practices...? Tell us a little bit about that. |
**Ben Ford:** Yes, it's great to be here. I love talking about this stuff, so I'll happily dig in. I had a bit of a non-traditional route into technology. I learned to code aboard an amphibious assault ship when I was serving in the Royal Marines way back in 2003. I was on the way to Iraq, I was bored on the ship, and ... |
Fast-forward 5-6 years and I was working as a software developer, back in the day when you used to order a real server from people and have it installed into a data center... And the pace of getting a company up and running then was six months, probably a couple hundred grand in upfront cost... Markedly different from ... |
I was pretty happy being a developer. I thought my time in the Marines was a fun diversion that I had that maybe makes my CV stand out a little bit, but not very relevant for my day-to-day life. And then that continued for a while, and then I started to run into this complexity as well. So I had to go from being a happ... |
And then that sort of also starts to come a little bit unstuck, because then you've got decision-making and strategy, and all of these things that you can have a really good CI/CD pipeline and a really fast feedback loop on the technical front, but if the business doesn't have a way of holding the complexity within whi... |
So I guess at that point, maybe five years ago, I started to come across some authors who were applying concepts from the military to business. And that opened my eyes. I'd already started to see some links with rudimentary -- I started to pick out some rudimentary links between Agile and the way we used to do things i... |
The OODA Loop is the concept that holds all of this together. It's the concept that explains pretty much everything else, when you dive into it deep enough and you get beyond the superficial explanation. Even Agile has its roots in the OODA loop. Steve Blank, who wrote about lean startups, all of that stuff, 15 years a... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** \[08:10\] I've found that fascinating from the perspective of your course, the Algorithms for Leadership, which - I didn't know at the time that I will have you on the show; I wasn't even sure about when the show will start, or what it will be about... And as I start discovering more about that course... |
People, when they think of OODA, they imagine those four words arranged in a circle, and there's like an arrow that goes from left to right. And most people, that's where they stop. That's it. I'd like us to dig a bit more into that. But before that, I'm wondering if someone is listening to this and they're wondering "... |
I think it's interesting to get that high-fidelity that tends to be lost over time, and I think you're doing a very good job of capturing it, not only in spoken form and written form, but also in a presentational form. That's what really attracted me. You present these concepts really well. They're incredibly compresse... |
**Ben Ford:** That's a great question. So my journey in technology took me into functional programming. So I went pretty deep down the rabbit hole of pure functional programming, and I became a Haskell programmer, and built systems with Haskell... Which requires a mindset shift. You choose a different set of very funda... |
And the way I think about handling complexity, at both a strategic and a tactical, immediate feedback loop levels - I now have the same mental models to think about both of those, and to teach... So it's one mental model that you can apply to multiple things, and that's why it's so compressed. It's so compressed becaus... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I think that's super-powerful. If you think about Linux and UNIX, and how it stood the test of time, those really simple tools that compose in infinite ways... And I think most people think they're just one OODA, but what blows their minds is there's OODA loops inside OODA loops; turtles all the way d... |
\[11:57\] And you go a little bit into that, because there's so much - like, team of teams... I think that was like a super-powerful concept. Red team thinking, and a couple of others... But I think I'm already jumping a bit ahead of myself... Because the one word that kind of unifies them all from my perspective is th... |
**Ben Ford:** I would call it operational excellent. In fact, I was toying with that very phrase for quite some time to explain what all this stuff is. The OODA loop is observation and orientation, which is information coming in, and then it's decision and action, which is the kind of execution side of things... And th... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I really like that. I really like that because it's a simple concept that composes in specific ways, and the excellency is in how you compose that. And by the way, there's not consultant that can tell you how to do that. It's a discovery process. It always depends, it always changes; guess what - what... |
**Ben Ford:** Yeah. And that's where so many businesses come unstuck. I don't know where I heard this phrase - I will always say that it's not mine, but I do really like it, so I say it a lot... A digital transformation is what you need when you're falling asleep at the wheel of evolution. You've forgotten how to build... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** When I joined your course, typically they happened in the evening for me, being based in the U.K. So I think 7 o'clock plus, after 7 o'clock; 7 to 8, 8:30... And after a long day, you can imagine that maybe sometimes I'm not paying as much attention as I would want to. That's why recordings - they're ... |
So I took a note, and I thought "When my mind will be rested, I will unpack this." I'm still to go back to that. I think there's so much there. |
**Ben Ford:** Yeah. So just to dig into that a bit more... The other problem that digital transformation has is that it's implemented top-down. So the leaders wake up one day and they go "Oh no, we've lost the ability to keep up with the tech upstarts." Banks are a classic example. "Oh no, Monzo is a thing, and Starlin... |
\[16:07\] So the problem with bigger organizations isn't really the digital transformation at all, it's the fact that there is no link between top-down and bottom-up. They're two different worlds, they can't talk to each other, and no amount of millions of pounds spent on consultants is gonna be able to fix that. And t... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Okay. So let's imagine that a big company approached you, saying "Hey Ben, we are in the pickle. We need your help. You really know your stuff... Help us." What would you do? |
**Ben Ford:** That's a great question. That's a really, really good question. And there's several problems with that. One is that somebody who comes to an organization assuming that they know the context of the organization is gonna be bitterly disappointed. So the first thing is that I would have to tell them "Look, I... |
So I think that's what I would say... I would hopefully make them understand that their mental models about what is possible in the world of technology are perhaps a little bit out of date, and you need to give your organization some space... Because there'll be people in every organization - every big organization tha... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** So the way I hear it is you're almost saying that you would be focusing on the operational excellence, which is the combination, first of all - you need to know the principles, and then how do you combine them and how do you make them relevant to your org... And I can't really tell you how to do that,... |
\[19:58\] I think that's a really powerful thing, in that you're focusing on the interactions, principles, of course, and the interactions between those principles, and the applicability, I guess, to the specific context which needs to be discovered. And by the way, that changes all the time. |
**Ben Ford:** Yeah. An analogy I use all the time is martial arts. I a bit lapsed at the moment, because of injuries and the pandemic and stuff, but I used to train in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, and there was no way that somebody could just give me a book on Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and say "Alright, go sit in your garage for six... |
**Break:** \[21:10\] |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Now, there's two things which I'd like us to get to. The first thing is the real OODA loop diagram, the one that you haven't seen, and then Ben's OODA loop diagram, which I think is the best one you'll ever see and you have definitely not seen. So even if you've seen John Boyd's original, this is bett... |
And the second thing - I would like us to walk a bit down the stack. So we go from business, we go strategy, operations, tactics. I would like us to spend a bit more time on the tactical area, which is where you have a lot of experience, right? The real combat experience - I'd like us to spend a bit more time there. |
We'll be taking a closer look at the OODA loop now, the components. How does it apply to the high-level, to the business, and how do we traverse the stack all the way from strategic (Is this strategic?), operational and tactical. |
**Ben Ford:** That's right, yeah. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Okay. So I'm thinking about the business, maybe the management, products... What is in the middle? |
**Ben Ford:** I have the middle layers as kind of like the organizational level. So the strategic -- and you can look at these as timeframes as well. So the strategic timeframe is whatever the business-level decision-making cycle is. The operational level is how yo decide to integrate what the business wants with what ... |
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