OODA Loops and Building Mental Snowmobiles

The talk introduces the OODA loop, a decision model developed by Air Force pilot John Boyd, and places it within decision science. The speaker covers Boyd's background and his influence on the F-15 design after a direct meeting pushed leadership to cancel the F-111 variant project. He also reviews ideas behind his thinking, including Hicks' law on how more options slow decisions, and a range of cognitive biases that distort judgment.

The middle section focuses on practical tools. Decisions are sorted by reversibility and repetition, so routine, reversible choices move down to junior staff while high-stakes, one-shot choices stay with leaders. Two planning methods are presented: MESCA, for scoring courses of action against must-haves and won't-accepts, and PACE, for layering primary, alternate, contingency and emergency plans. Backward planning from a desired future is also covered. Examples include survivorship bias in WWII bomber armor, the railroad-gauge origin of rocket booster width, and the response to the September 11 attacks, used to show how people freeze under stress and why they need to keep moving.

The closing portion applies the loop to cyber work, including automating business rules, running tabletop exercises where outcomes are decided by dice rolls, and tracing anomaly detection from global and contextual methods toward collective analysis. The takeaways are to keep the loop moving, limit the options given to decision makers, build the next generation of leaders, and ask for help when needed.