Tighten your OODA loop

Death to the Waterfall Method!

Reading The Agile Manifesto, I am struck by the similarity to Spiral Development principles that were espoused while I was working at the Electronic Systems Center. One of the biggest problems AFMC was facing was that the requirements for more and more complicated systems were being contracted out, with increasingly long schedules (thus increasingly large cost), and when the thing was dropped on the doorstep... it wasn't quite right.

Spiral development is an attempt to avoid the program management difficulties of the Waterfall Method of system delivery. Since most programs are an improvement on an older system, the first deliverable is usually one that is only slightly better than the old system, but it is specifically design to be modified towards an vastly improved end result. The next cycle of the development is to take the current state of the system, decide what enhancements can fit into the next spiral, taking time and cost into account, and them field the improved version in about a year, or an upgrade kit.

This is a program management technique, but it has a lot in common with the OODA loop. Everyone engages in OODA loop behavior. You can make a strong case that simple things like balance are highly optimized and subconscious OODA loops. In business and system development, it is a scheme for making decisions and implementing actions at a faster pace that a competitor can. Flexibility and agility are words that can be used to describe it.

Ultimately, if you can make good decisions and implement effective actions faster than an opponent (even if that opponent is your own status quo), you can "out-maneuver" him and establish a dominant position.

Remember that you must be able to take action as fast as your decision process. If the kinds of actions you can take don't produce results for 6 months, then 6 months is as soon as you can make the next effective decision. It does no good to change your mind at three months for such long-lead-time actions, because all you do is confound your accumulated results and restart the 6-month clock again.