When life throws things at you, do you respond, or simply react? Observe, Orient, Decide Act.
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
from “Man’s Search for Meaning” by Viktor Frankl, my favourite book, as I wrote about here, with a story about round the world cycling too
When life throws things at you, do you respond, or simply react? Are you “response-able”?
This past weekend I was out of my bike on lanes and hills that were new to me, often with pretty rough surfaces. In only around two hours of riding, there were many opportunities to respond, yet if I had reacted (to bumps, potholes, ridges, debris on the road etc), many of these could have resulted in a crash.
So, a simple tip from fighter pilots on how to respond, and, fast, is in what the call the “OODA Loop”. Ooda stands for:
- Observe – what is happening here. Gather all the information you can using all your senses
- Orient – see reality, objectively, for what it truly is in the moment, free of your biases.
- Decide
- Act
O,O,D,A then repeat (loop) as needed.
Now, if one reason you visit my blogs is for some depth in observation, awareness, self-knowledge, then I recommend searching the 1250+ posts for terms such as “heuristics”, “bias”, “awareness”, “presence” and you will see many writings around the topic. I recommend starting with: “You cannot eliminate your biases“.
As to the OODA loop, the core to this for me is not only the anchor of a four-step process we can remember and anchor to when things happen really fast, but also the distinction between Observe and Orient. The ability to Orient after Observing is absolutely not intuitive, so a skill and asset to be invested in.
For more on this, I highly recommend Shane Parrish’s longer recent piece on the OODA loop on his Farnam Street blog, called “The OODA Loop: How Fighter Pilots Make Fast and Accurate Decisions”, and do follow through at least a few of his links for even more depth.