John Boyd Was Not Your Productivity Guru: A Counterpoint to Pop OODA
Watered down doctrine doesn't help you, and in resistance work it might actually get you killed.
There’s an article out today that discusses Boyd’s OODA loop as “The fighter pilot technique for making instant decisions.” The author, who I’m sure means well, commits a classic and dangerous error: trying to retrofit a warfighter's strategic mindset into a consumer decision-making hack.
That move not only dilutes the original intent of the OODA loop but completely misrepresents John Boyd’s operational mindset.
If you're invoking Boyd to improve your travel bookings or launch a newsletter, you're not understanding what he built, why he built it, or the stakes he designed it for. Let's clean this up, bluntly and immediately, because if you’re drawn into this model and try to use it for resistance or activism, you will fail.
1. The OODA Loop Is Not a Linear Flowchart
The original article presents OODA as a tidy 4-step recipe. It's not, and treating it that way misses the entire point. What’s more, it sets you up. In a high-stakes environment, it can lead to fatal error.
Boyd explicitly rejected rigid, sequential thinking. The loop isn’t a cycle. It’s a constantly self-updating, non-linear feedback mechanism built for disorienting environments; it’s designed specifically to create disorientation in an adversary.
Orientation isn’t "step 2" in a neat little process where you go on the merry-go-round and then say, “Oh, we’re here at orientation again.” It’s the central engine that continuously recalibrates the other components. In fact, Boyd revised the loop over time to emphasize this, placing "Orientation" as a recursive function, constantly shaping and being shaped by observation, decisions, and actions.
As
rightly states: “This linear interpretation of John Boyd’s OODA 'loop' sketch is EXACTLY what you want your competitors to believe.”Think about it: if they are moving in a linear manner, you can outmaneuver them every time. You’ll know where they will be in their thinking and their actions because they’re limited to their model. In short, if they’re using the pop-psych version of “Boyd as lifehack,” you can exploit that. If you’re the one using it, well, you’re screwed.
2. OODA Is a Tool of Competitive Leverage, Not Self-Optimization
Boyd didn’t develop OODA so you could stop overthinking pasta or having too many browser tabs open. He designed it to dominate lethal environments.
The loop is built around outpacing and outmaneuvering a thinking adversary. It’s fundamentally about creating confusion, delay, or hesitation in someone else’s loop while accelerating your own. It’s an aggressive, disorienting system meant for asymmetrical advantage.
That means:
It’s adversarial. Not introspective.
It aims to collapse other people’s decision-making, not just streamline yours.
It doesn’t just "adapt." It seeks to create chaos they can’t adapt to.
McGrath calls this misuse "Bad Boyd." And he’s right. Reducing OODA to a lifehack checklist isn’t just erroneous; it’s asinine.
3. The Pop Versions Strip Out the Hardest Part: Orientation
In Boyd's model, Orientation is shaped by:
Cultural traditions
Genetic heritage
Previous experience
New information
Analysis and synthesis
This isn’t just "figure out what matters to you." Reorientation is a brutal, ongoing interrogation of your biases, assumptions, and mental models. It’s about ripping out stale doctrine and inserting agility. It’s cognitive counterintelligence.
4. For the Love of All That’s Holy: Speed is Not the Goal
There’s one more problem in that article. Boyd is not only reduced to a life hack, but it’s portrayed as though speed is the thing you should be working toward. After all, even the title of the article promises “instant decisions.” As I mentioned a few weeks ago:
Tempo is an outcome and reward, not a tactic. Speed emerges from rapid, effective reorientation, not from simply trying to be faster. Mismatch generation (creating and exploiting gaps between your actions and your opponent’s expectations) is the real goal.
What OODA is NOT, is a self-optimizing ‘cycle’ that you just endeavor to do faster and faster until you ‘arrive.’ Not to mention: if speed is the goal, how do you know when you’re fast enough?
Boyd's emphasis on speed wasn’t about personal productivity. It was about collapsing the enemy's ability to comprehend the battlespace.
Every action you take in a real OODA context is about imposing your will on the environment in a way that forces others into reactive positions.
It’s not "test and learn."
It’s "act in a way that erodes their options." You can only do that if you understand the battlespace for what it is, not what you think it is. THAT comes through reorientation: constant, grinding, morphing, growing, pushing.
As McGrath puts it: “Orientation is the core of OODA. It isn’t a step between observation and decision. Through implicit guidance and control, it shapes your sensemaking of the ground you’re standing on. Miss that, and you miss everything.”
If you want to use OODA properly, you need to:
Deconstruct how you process information
Identify what mental maps you're privileging (and why)
Constantly rewire how you interpret stimuli in real time, NOT with the goal of speed, but the goal of generating mismatches between reality and your hallucination of it.
It doesn’t matter if you correctly identify Orientation as the most important part, if you’re still characterizing it incorrectly and applying it like something you found in a Cracker Jack box.
5. You Cannot Extract OODA From Its Warfare DNA
Civilian productivity writers love to yank the OODA Loop out of its martial origins, strip it of orientation's complexity, and treat it like a lifehack for inbox zero. That's not just intellectually lazy. It's operationally misleading.
Boyd's loop was born out of intense study of aerial dogfights, Clausewitzian friction, Sun Tzu's deception doctrine, and systems theory. He layered in thermodynamics, cybernetics, and biological evolution.
It was never meant to help you feel more decisive at the grocery store while trying to decide if you want the cage-free eggs or the free range ones.
As McGrath concludes, the pop-OODA crowd is doing you a favor. Let them treat it like a checklist. Meanwhile, you orient correctly and reshape the terrain they’re blindly standing on.
This is poetry.