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by jph·1y ago·view on hn ↗
"When John Boyd, the brilliant / irascible military strategist, developed the OODA loop, he worked within the limits of jet fighter dogfights."

Boyd is a superb recommendation for startup programmers to read. Boyd and the OODA loop can completely transform teams who aim to build software quickly.

My OODA loop notes for tech teams are here: https://github.com/joelparkerhenderson/ooda-loop

2 comments
Maybe you're the right person to clear this up. Ages ago I read in a HN comment that the OODA loop is often misunderstood to be a sequence of steps, rather than something more continuous? And that people's explanations of it are very different from what Boyd had in mind. People treat it more as a Shewhart PDSA cycle rather than the integrated, concurrent dynamic process Boyd described it as.

Since then I've avoided reading others' re-explanations of it, and instead tried to find any original writing from Boyd on it, to shape my own understanding of it before corrupting it with others' misunderstandings.

The problem is I have been unable to find any original Boyd writing on it. Could you guide me in the right direction?

Not OP. Have you perused these references from the Wikipedia page for OODA loop? The reference to a “supposed slide set” sounds interesting; perhaps that is what you’re alluding to regarding source material being hard to find?

Boyd, John R. (3 September 1976). Destruction and Creation (PDF). U.S. Army Command and General Staff College.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a6/Destruct...

Boyd, John, R. (28 June 1995). "The Essence of Winning and Losing". danford.net. A supposed five-slide set by Boyd.

https://danford.net/boyd/essence.htm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop

An interesting video from another time this came up on HN:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdK4y6O-llE

> OODA Loop & Evolutionary Epistemology of John Boyd by Chuck Spinney

From this comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26466750

They also mention a video by Chet Richards and how it relates OODA to business context.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hDhznBtN24

The Q&A with both Chet Richards and Chuck Spinney is also worth a look:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWfbPoDuEwg

Chet Richards' Boyd material here including all his presentations. https://slightlyeastofnew.com/439-2/

Patterns of conflict presentation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phm0Y5mFz1g&pp=ygUjSm9obiBCb...

Even the agile goals make sense, but when people read the description they turn it into a meaningless ritual.

Same for your OODA loop and anything supposed to improve your efficiency.

The OODA loop is great, but Boyd has so much more brilliant stuff for people willing to put in the effort. OODA loop gets you the heart of his thought, but if you really want to understand him read a transcript of "Patterns of Conflict." Osinga's "Science, Strategy, and War" is also a superb summary of Boyd's thought, although I'm partial to "Patterns."