Advantage goes to whoever cycles through observe, orient, decide, and act faster than the opponent can reorient.
Boyd developed it from air combat, and orientation is the step that carries the weight: it is where prior experience and framing enter, and where an opponent can be induced to misread the situation.
In practice
- An incident team that reframes the problem faster than the outage evolves regains control; one still working from the first hypothesis does not.
- A competitor who reads a market shift and repositions before you have finished the analysis has beaten you with the same information.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Decision-making & Reasoning
- Essay
- Why reasoning works the way it does