“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.” — Mike Tyson

Tyson knew a thing or two about fast reactions to external events.

I first learned about the OODA loop from a Marine veteran at Amazon. In management, I’ve rarely met people who know it — and even more rarely people who actually use it. But Amazon borrowed heavily from military strategy and actively hired former military, so it was a normal part of the operating culture there.

What’s the OODA loop?

The concept was described by John R. Boyd in 1987, in his paper “An Organic Design for Command and Control.” Originally developed for fighter pilots, it later spread into general US military doctrine.

OODA stands for:

  • Observe — gather information
  • Orient — interpret what you’re seeing
  • Decide — choose a course of action
  • Act — execute

Its primary use case: complex, volatile situations with high uncertainty. Boxing. A startup in AI. Anywhere you don’t have enough data, things are unclear, and someone is trying to do something that might hit you in the face.

If you’re in a calm, highly regulated environment where competitors never show up and you can move at the speed of a tortoise — skip this post. Although, honestly, I’m not sure many such places are left.

The Orient phase: where most organizations fail

Most articles about OODA focus on speed. “Go through the cycle faster than your opponent.” That’s true — but it’s only one dimension.

The phase that’s misunderstood the most is Orient — interpretation.

“The way to win in a battle according to military science is to know the rhythms of the specific opponents, and use rhythms that your opponents do not expect.” — Miyamoto Musashi

If you look at Boyd’s original diagram, Orient is the most complex phase. It includes your worldview, your knowledge of the current state of the entire system, your previous experience, and cross-cultural context.

Two different companies — or even two teams within the same company — will look at the same data and see different things.

One team might see a signal to try something new. The other might see a threat.

Why interpretation matters more than data

Here’s the simple truth: you never have enough data to make a perfect decision. There’s never enough time to gather everything. And sometimes it’s simply impossible.

So you have to fill in the gaps from previous knowledge and context.

The quality of that gap-filling — that’s what separates a monkey reacting to a stimulus from a pilot who sees the whole battlefield. At Amazon, a similar concept was called “dealing with ambiguity” — a mandatory skill for managers and project leaders.

The four Orient mistakes I see everywhere

1. Stuck on gathering

“We don’t fully understand yet. We need more data.”

This is the most common pathology. The team that spends three months researching instead of running a two-week experiment. Amazon solved this with daily key metric reports delivered to every manager’s inbox, plus a benchmarking team that brought competitive and market data.

2. Ignoring context — or choosing the convenient metric

You know those companies with a dozen dashboards and hundreds of metrics, but nobody knows what to do with them? Decisions are made “data-driven,” but without context or clear interpretation. In practice, someone picks the metric that supports their preferred conclusion.

3. Using outdated mental models

“The company has always done it this way.” Or: “Competitors won’t come up with anything new.”

Kodak was one of the first companies to notice digital cameras. But their position, shaped by decades of film camera success, led them to essentially ignore digital. The cameras weren’t as good as film — but they offered convenience. Kodak ignored that. Now Kodak is a history lesson.

4. Ignoring organizational and cultural context

The classic: launching a product in another country without considering local norms. Or starting an initiative that goes against the founders’ core beliefs. Or doing something that’s unacceptable in your industry right now.

The three everyday OODA pathologies

Beyond Orient, the other phases have their own failure modes:

No observation data — or data arrives too late. You’re making decisions with yesterday’s information about today’s problem. Plus, observations almost never account for the environment. You’re not playing in a vacuum.

Decision paralysis — the inability to commit. The main symptom: scope bloat. A simple question expands into a six-month initiative. The fix is always the same: shrink the decision. Ask: “What’s critical right now?” One small, weighted decision today beats a grand initiative that arrives three months late.

No feedback after action — my personal favorite. You did the thing. You didn’t look at the results critically. Nothing changed. “Good enough.” Note: in Boyd’s original diagram, feedback returns to Observation from every phase — not just after Action.

OODA is a lifestyle, not a framework

The OODA loop is not a tool you implement once and occasionally tune. It’s a set of values and approaches to work that help you make better decisions at high speed under data scarcity.

It’s a style of operating.

And in an era where AI is accelerating the speed of change while increasing the complexity of every system — the ability to orient, not just observe, is what separates leaders from operators.

I learned OODA from military veterans at Amazon. I practice it daily running Finsi. The specific framework doesn’t matter — what matters is building the muscle to interpret signals under pressure and act before the picture is complete.