To emerge victorious a pilot must observe, orient, decide, and act faster, better, and with greater commitment than his or her opponent.

According to Boyd, the secret of moving faster through the cycle than your opponent lies in reducing friction through simple, reliable administrative structures and the use of flexible tools that can be adapted rapidly in response to changing market conditions or competitors’ tactics. These are the basic steps – also known as the OODA Loop: (link)

• Observing – noticing occurrences in the environment, looking for them, and recognizing the “noteworthiness” of some data from the static of many other events that create background noise.

• Orienting – data becomes information when we can place it into a meaningful context. For our purposes that context is your business idea and its embodiment in the marketplace as your brand promise.

• Deciding – requires that information is considered in relation to your goals and objectives, that implications of the information are thoroughly understood and that the ability exists to weigh all of those considerations and come to an actionable conclusion.

• Acting – implies that actions taken are aligned within the company’s strategic intent and that the acting is focused, effective and done well.

Fred Thompson has written about the application of the Boyd Cycle in business.

He wrote, “According to John Boyd, the secret of moving faster than your opponent lies in reducing friction through simple, reliable administrative structures and the use of flexible tools that can be adopted rapidly in response to changing tactics.”

While working thru the cycle effectively and working quickly are among the critical ingredients for success, frame of mind is equally important.

Your frame of mind positions you to win or lose.

Working through the cycle to create a winning outcome is fundamentally different than working to hold your own or to minimize your loses.

There are times when holding your own might be the best that you can do, but that should be a decision you make in a particular situation, not your default posture.

In analyzing winners, both in combat and in business over the years, he found that, “Winners…consistently went through the OODA loop faster than their opponent and thereby gained a tremendous advantage.

By the time their opponent acted, they were doing something different. With each cycle, the slower side’s actions were less apt and it fell farther and farther behind.”

I was consulting with a company who was planning to build the capability to match, within three years, the offerings of their competitor, who was the industry leader.

In this case the competitor had the initiative and my client was reacting to their competitor’s moves. They were playing to catch up, to stay in the game.

They were enthusiastically pursuing this course until someone wondered aloud what new things the competitor would be doing in three years.

It was obvious that the competition wouldn’t be sitting still. My client went back to the drawing board and looked at how they could leapfrog the competition by anticipating the evolution of the market and creating offerings that would cause the competition to react to them.

Their change in mindset held the key to opening the door of competitive advantage.

The premise here is that business and organizations implicitly and explicitly adhere to the framework inherent in the OODA loop.

They must observe what is happening in their environment and anticipate coming events or emerging trends.

They must sift through the "noise" and orient meaningful information as it relates to their strategic intent.

They must cogently consider what they know and make savvy decisions. They must then act skillfully, in a focused and coordinated way, to fulfill their vision while their competitors race to do the same.

Your company already has the potential to think about what it perceives, orient its thinking, communicate its intent internally, and express that will in the environment.

Successful organizations develop a powerful sense of self understanding, the ability to reflect on past experiences, the capacity to apply lessons learned on the path to wisdom, the ability to ponder multiple potential futures, and the determination to choose and enable appropriate courses of action for success.

Again, as Thompson points out, “…The steps of the Boyd cycle – observing, orienting, deciding, acting – are themselves processes. They are amenable to the standard rules of process improvement.”

37. Working The Boyd Cycle:

Tool Preview: Teaches you how to apply the Boyd Cycle in a disciplined, focused way throughout your organization. Gives you the ability to institute its methods as the default thinking strategy for your company, in all of its functions and at every level. [Read Now]

Professionalizing The HR Function:

Many small and/or family owned businesses have a glorified personnel clerk, if they have any personnel function at all.

They see HR as handling the regulatory and legal requirements in today’s business world, but they miss the opportunity to use HR as a center that creates capability for the company.

In the kind of High-Performance organization you’re building, you can’t afford a glorified personnel department.

The days of dumping people, who can’t do anything else, in the personnel department, and having them push paper, are as outmoded as many of the other practices we’ve been talking about.

High-Performing companies understand that if you expect extraordinary performance from your work force you have to supply the support necessary to achieve it.

A strong, professional human resources function that understands your business and how it operates, which partners with you in finding, recruiting, developing and retaining the kind of workforce you need to achieve your business goals, can be critical to your success.

It is not unusual these days to see HR professionals rotated into line functions, so that they can develop first hand knowledge of how the various functions in a company operate.

The care and feeding of your HR people is every bit as important as that of your executive team, or any other of your workers.