I am going to continue with the trend from my last post and talk again about developing a defense oriented mindset. In the last post I talked about developing and maintaining situation awareness, using Jeff Cooper's color codes. As I touched on briefly, the human mind and body is tuned for defense, and has little built in tools that help us survive. Often these tools aren't even used consciously, but instead are embedded in our genetics and instincts that we are born with. Which makes sense really, because without the tools, survival would be a lot harder.
One of these tools is the body's response system and cycle to a stressor, which is referred to as the OODA loop. Although people had almost certainly noticed the loop before, the person who is credited with really looking at it in depth and developing a theory as to how and why it works was Colonel John Boyd, USAF. Col. Boyd was one of the best military thinkers and strategists in the second half of the 20th century, and his theories have far reaching effects that go beyond just influencing the battlefield. He was also a fighter pilot and responsible for helping to develop several of the fighter aircraft of the time, as well as doctrine for them.
The OODA loop is a theory he developed about the human response to an event or stressor. It stands for:
Observe
Orient
Decide
Act
These are all the steps your body goes through when something unexpected happens. You use your senses to observe the event, and gain as much information as possible about it in a short amount of time. You orient the data and information in relation to your perspective. You then decide what action you are going to take in order to react to the event. And finally you act based on the results of that decision. And then the process repeats itself.
While the process may all happen extremely fast, in a quickly evolving and fluid situation, things can change in the middle of your cycle, and then you have to start over again. I am sure that the application of this theory as it pertains to a fighter pilot is very easy to visualize. Being in a plane, dog-fighting with an enemy, where the only limit on space is the ground and the flight ceiling of the aircraft, would require a pilot to be able to process the OODA loop very quickly. If your enemy keeps making decisions that render your decided actions useless, you can never catch up, and never get ahead to gain the advantage.
To use a simple example to illustrate the point of how the OODA loop works. If someone throws a ball at you, and you try to catch it, you are using the OODA loop. You observe the ball in flight, orient the data in your mind to calculate what your positioning needs to be to catch it, decide how you are going to catch the ball, and act by catching the ball. If your OODA loop doesn't process fast enough, the ball hits your or flies past you while you are still trying to figure out how to catch it.
Another simple example of the OODA loop shows how the cycles process, and why it is good to be able to process them faster. Say you are walking down a sidewalk, and the only other person walking on it is coming straight towards you. Normal western custom is for both people to veer to their respective right side, so that people don't run into each other. So, in your first cycle, you observe the individual walking towards you, orient yourself to the data, how far away they are, how long it will take to close the distance between the two of you ect..., decide to veer to the right as is normal custom, and then take a step to the right, to avoid running into the other person.
So, what happens if as you step to the right, the other person steps in the same direction, into your new path? You now need to run through the loop again, in order to once again avoid a collision. If they keep running the loop faster than you and stepping in your way, they can block your path. Now, I am not going to recommend doing this to random individuals on the street, as people usually don't take very kindly to having their path blocked, but this is an experiment that you could do with friends or family.
By now I hope the defensive applications for this theory are becoming apparent. If you are in a self defense situation, three of the keys to survival are speed, surprise, and violence of action. I will have a blog post later that covers those keys in more depth later, but the surprise part is where the OODA loop really comes into play. In the vast majority of self defense scenarios, the victim is already behind the eight-ball when it comes to surprise. Unless you manage to pick up on visual cues from your attacker through situational awareness, you have no idea someone is going to pose a lethal threat to you. So after that threat, you need to quickly process all the information while you observe the situation, orient the data to your perspective, decide what action to take (fight or flight), and act. If you do nothing, you are an easy target. If you do what the attacker expects, you are an easy target. If you do something unexpected to defend yourself, you processed your loop faster than the attackers, and re-gained the element of surprise for yourself. And then as long as you keep processing it faster now that you have the momentum, you can survive, because the attacker can never complete his loop, because you are acting while he is still deciding what to do. Inaction in the face of force is one of the biggest mistakes a person can make. And inaction is caused by indecision, which comes from not being able to decide, because you never reach the decision/action steps due to the fluid nature of an event. So, being able to process the cycle faster is what can give you the upper hand in defending yourself.
Once you understand the OODA loop, it really becomes applicable in much more than just a military or defensive role. It is used in sports, in verbal debates, in politics, and in business. And the more you understand it, and the more you use it, the better you become at it. The better you become at it, the faster you process through the loop while making the right decision. So, the OODA loop is probably worth a bit more thought and mental development on your part. Its something you never think about until you learn the theory, but once you learn the theory and understand the OODA loop, it is an invaluable mental tool. Start with smaller examples, and then you can see how the more complex ones develop, but really, the complex examples get simpler, because you just go through them one loop at a time.
No comments:
Post a Comment