Understanding The OODA Loop and How Startup Founders Can Use It.

The moment you plan or launch your startup, it’s in a dogfight. And your job as the founder is to outmaneuver, to respond rapidly to uncertain conditions and eventually outlast (and defeat) your competition. It’s just the way it is. (cue the Top Gun theme)

As a startup founder and marketer, why should you bother with OODA loop?

What is the OODA Loop?

The OODA loop (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act) is a model that was created by USAF Col. John Boyd. It was originally designed for Korean era fighter pilots as a way to understand conflict and provide military leaders with a model or method for making decisions and assessing their impact.

The execution of the decision-making process may be viewed as involving the cycling through four distinctive but interdependent stages:

1) OBSERVATION, or absorbing information from the environment by all means;

2) ORIENTATION, or placing this information into a matrix of human understanding and experience;

3) DECISION, or selecting a subsequent course of action based upon the likelihood of either offensive achievement or defensive nullification; and

4) ACTION, or attempting to operationalize or carry out the previously conceived decision.

Collectively, these stages are known as an OODA loop.

The OODA loop applies to startup marketing because we are constantly doing experiments to get quick, accurate results using current analytics tools at our disposal.

Here’s a simple walk-through of how one can create and implement the OODA loop into your startup marketing efforts.