I was talking to our State Prescribed Fire Coordinating Biologist Wes Buchheit the other day, and wanted to quote one of my faves, Colonel “Ghengis John” Boyd:
You gotta challenge all assumptions. If you don’t, what is doctrine on day one becomes dogma forever after.
It was a mini-rant about bureaucracy and particularly how it applies to wildland and prescribed fire (looking at you NWCG!) and yes, how for one intergovernmental agency, doctrine absolutely did become dogma.
When I talk about Ghengis John, though, I always try to slip in his OODA Loop. I asked Wes if he’d heard of that - he had not, so I gave him a quick primer.
Now, it’s your turn for that primer!
If you’ve been in the wildland fire service - or adjacent to it - for a while, you’ve probably attended or at least seen some of the videos from the NWCG course L-180 Human Factors on the Fireline. In that course, the OODA (Observe-Orient-Decide-Act) Loop is introduced. Cue aaahhhs of 18-22 year old fresh faces of rookie seasonal wildland firefighters looking at this simple circle like it’s the Circle of Life. Hakuna Matata and all that.
Here, take a gander for yourself:
OOOOHHH! So… first we Observe what’s going on, Orient to our situation and options, Decide what to do, then Act!
Well, yeah. Everybody does, every day. You’re just not consciously aware of the process. The problem here is that this dumbed-down OODA Loop is useless, and worse - misses the point. The basic assumption I’ve heard numerous times is “if you ‘spin your loop faster’ to iterate through the process, YOU WIN! Simple as!”
Except not, for reasons a couple:
Just iterating through the process faster doesn’t guarantee a good result! If your Observations are wrong or critically incomplete, and/or your Orientation isn’t well-calibrated, you will likely make bad Decisions, and your resulting Actions will be ineffective or worse. Try driving faster on a flat tire, same basic idea.
The “good stuff” is completely absent from this zoomed-out macro-scale “Wheel of Decision” - it’s the little things, like lug nuts, that help hold the wheel on the car, and this version not only has a flat tire but no lug nuts.
So what are those little things?
Ghengis John was a thorough dude - if you ever read about his life (recommended: Robert Coram’s Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War), he had multiple degrees, specialized in mechanical engineering and physics, and later in his career and life was a key player in the designs for the F-15 Eagle, F-16 Fighting Falcon, and F/A-18 Hornet aircraft, all still in active service across the globe.
With that impressive background, it makes sense that his Diagram of Decision Processes looks more like an engineering schematic or blueprint than anything else. The problem is that he was trying to reach an audience of folks who weren’t and aren’t engineers - most people will give that “blueprint” one glance and cue up the Keanu in The Matrix reaction: “WHOA.”
”Welp that looks complicated. Never mind!”
My guesstimate is the intimidating inaccessibility of Boyd’s Decisional Blueprint led folks to take the “key bullet points”, “Ok so we Observe….then we Orient…then Decide…then Act! GENIUS!” and make the wheel, sans lugnuts.
There has to be a happy medium, right?
As usual, Mark and Grounded Truths are here to help.
tl;dr: yes, there’s a happy medium, and here it is. Revisit the top version, glance at Boyd’s original, then take a look at this:
Not only is it prettier (thanks Canva!), but infinitely more useful. Now, here’s the thing, and this is where the real magic is:
It’s not just recognizing THAT “culture” or “bias” or “past experience” might be affecting our Orientation, or that Explicit (written, a la laws or policies) and/or Implicit (unwritten but broadly-understood norms) Guidance may narrow down our Decision options. The magic is in understanding what those factors are, specifically, influencing us and our Orientations and Decisions - AND what those factors are for OTHERS and how they influence THEIR Orientations and Decisions.
Simple But Practical Example Time!
Luke comes from a fairly strict military household - he respects rules, laws, and authority, does the “right thing” generally, and tries to live in the DIRT.
Let’s say his company culture is “get it done no matter what”, yes even if that means cutting corners, yes even “deeply” cutting those corners at times.
Someone like Luke, if the word comes from on high for him to do something perhaps not exactly ethical or legal, is going to be tangled up in an OODA Web that looks more like Boyd’s original MC Escher-esque loops within loops within loops - Loopception!
Luke’s personal Culture, Biases, and Past Experiences are at odds with his company’s Culture and Biases, and now he’s being given Explicit (a directive from his manager) and Implicit (“get er done no matter what” corporate Culture) Guidance that conflicts with his own Implicit Guidance (his moral compass and personal ethics).
Now Luke has a hard choice to make - for simplicity sake let’s say it comes down to two options:
Do as he’s told, suffering consequences to his personal ethics and values, biases (note: that’s not ALWAYS a bad word), and feelings of dishonoring his past experiences...and hopefully not criminal consequences!
Refuse, and suffer the professional consequences, but keep his personal ethics and values intact and possibly dodge implication in shady dealings.
What if Luke really needs the job? What if there’s a wife and kids at home, and he’s living paycheck to paycheck?
All of those things feed in to the decision process, and all of them can be categorized and catalogued according to Ghengis John’s OODA Loop, or Mark Howell’s “Simplified, But Not Simple!” version.
What Ghengis John is saying is: the more you understand those factors and inputs, the specifics that are going into someone’s Observation, Orientation, and Decision-making, the better you’re able to predict their thought process AND their Actions. THAT is the REAL Sun-Tzu/Jedi stuff!
Bonus Section: The Wildland Fire Application
In the L-series of courses, the OODA Loop is taught as this “Jedi Mind Trick” of decision-making when it comes to operational strategic and tactical thinking, when really it’s useless against a wildland fire in that sense.
You’ll hear me say this numerous times:
A wildland fire is a phenomenon of physics and chemistry; it obeys those laws and acts based upon them. It does not think, or feel, or care about anyone or anything. It doesn’t matter whether lightning starts it, an arsonist starts it, or someone doing a prescribed burn starts it. It will burn according to the chemical and physical properties of the Fuels, influenced heavily by the physical properties of Weather and Topography.
For those not in the know, fire is actually a chemical process. As such, fire doesn’t have an OODA Loop - it has an OA one.
Orient - Act. That’s it. Orient to the current layout of the Fuels-Weather-Topography triangle and burn accordingly. Especially within the context of the Stupidly-Simple OODA, the “just spin it faster”/”race to the end” mode of thought, you’re going to lose every time as you have two extra steps to go through, if you follow it “as written”. Thankfully, while the fire’s OA loop has a number of inputs on the Orient side, those inputs can also mostly be observed and taken into account by experienced firefighters to make semi-accurate SWAGs about potential fire behavior.
So where does it have value?
Two places:
Understanding of your own decision-making. “Know Thyself”, right? When you have a clearer picture of what you know and don’t know - that is, the Observation piece; how your own biases, past experience, and culture might be influencing your Orientation to the issue; and what Guidance, Implicit or Explicit, is narrowing down your Decision-space… you can at least make more-informed decisions if not markedly better ones.
Interpersonal dynamics! I’m not proposing everybody go all crazy mix of Sun-Tzu, Machiavelli, and Boyd on the rest of the crew, not at all! But the proper, actual OODA Loop is invaluable as a framework for gaining an understanding and clearer picture of how others in your crew operate, how other nearby crews may be operating, even how Management operates and makes those high-level decisions.
Armed with this info, you can “see things coming” and avoid or react appropriately.