Your posting has been included in the most recent “Smarter than I” carnival.

Thank you for elaborating on Col. Boyd’s ideas in this particular forum. My own graduate work has been in some small way aimed at applying the OODA model in Communications and Management and I had long wished that someone might introduce the concept here. Despite a background in the Social Sciences, my grasp of the study of Economics has largely been obtained here and at other, similar, sites so I didn’t feel sufficiently qualified to be the one to raise the topic.

One particularly fruitful avenue of investigation arising from the application of Boyd’s thinking in the economic realm, at least as I understand it, would be in the area of ‘operational tempo’. Having obtained (and while maintaining) superior speed in one’s OODA loop (i.e. ‘getting inside’ the competition’s loops) one may begin to influence the actions of the competition and anticipate their (rational) responses.

That said, however, Boyd’s model was formulated in and applied to an environment in which the actors are particularly motivated to respond in rational and somewhat predictable ways. (Fighter pilots are usually assumed to be chiefly motivated by survival and constrained by similar objectives and common physics. These, in turn, lead to a relatively limited scope of rational action.) As the stakes are lowered and the objectives diversify the number of possible Actions increases and the predictability required for Orientation tends to break down.

Also, Boyd’s model does not (in its simple formulation, at least) address communication as a source of information (both useful and otherwise) and so tends to oversimplify all but the most simply adversarial human interactions.