Mastering the OODA Loop - A Navy SEAL's Guide to Decision-Making

Welcome back to the Navy SEAL Mindset podcast! In this episode, I dive into the third Navy SEAL secret of leadership - the OODA Loop. We'll explore how this decision-making process can be applied not just on the battlefield but also in everyday life and business scenarios.

• Origins of the OODA Loop: Colonel John Boyd, an Air Force fighter pilot during the Korean War, developed the OODA Loop as a critical decision-making tool. It allowed the U.S. to outperform the Russians in dogfights, even with inferior equipment.
• Understanding the OODA Loop:
  • Observe: Start by observing the situation, your team, the enemy, or the context. Gather as much information as possible.
  • Orient: Orient yourself to the gathered information. Analyze and understand the current state of affairs.
  • Decide: Make a decision based on your observations and orientation. This step requires thoughtful consideration.
  • Act: Execute your decision promptly. Take the necessary action to move forward.
• Applying the OODA Loop:
  • On the Battlefield: Navy SEALs employ the OODA Loop in high-stress situations, adapting their strategies based on changing circumstances.
  • In Business: Salespeople, leaders, and entrepreneurs can use the OODA Loop to gather information, adapt to client needs, and make effective decisions.
  • In Relationships: The OODA Loop helps navigate complex interactions, allowing you to observe, adapt, decide, and act to achieve positive outcomes.
• Unraveling Weaknesses: The OODA Loop exposes the weaknesses of your opponents by observing their actions, orienting yourself to their strategies, deciding on countermeasures, and taking effective actions.
• Making It Their Idea: In leadership and persuasion, making others believe that the decision is their idea can be more effective than imposing your will. This often leads to desired outcomes.
• Recap of the Navy SEAL Secrets of Leadership:
  • Secret 1: Multitask like a Navy SEAL - Focus on the essentials: shoot, move, communicate.
  • Secret 2: Leaders get no bullets - Train and empower your team to lead effectively.
  • Secret 3: Master the OODA Loop - Enhance decision-making in all aspects of life.

Stay tuned for more valuable insights on thinking like a Navy SEAL, and as always, stay awesome! 🔥

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Transcript

William Branum: 0:00

Welcome to the Navy SEAL Mindset. I am your host, William Branham. And this is episode 012. 012. In this episode, I want to talk about the third Navy SEAL secret of leadership. And that is... OODA loop, OODA loop, O O D A, and it is a loop. I gave this presentation a couple years ago, and it, again, it was Five Sealed Secrets of Leadership, and someone came in and they looked at my presentation and they were like, where's the loop? And it was a circle that I had drawn, and it was an O and an O and a D and an A. O O D A, and there was an arrow going from each letter to the next, and they're like, where's the loop? Oh, it took them a minute to figure it out, but they soon figured out that it's just this loop that never ends. Observe, orient, decide, and act. And unfortunately, I can't take credit for this, not unfortunate really, there's nothing really original that we do in the SEAL teams. The best things, the best tactics, the best techniques, the best procedures that are out there in the world that work. We take the things that work, and we incorporate them into the things that we do, and we do them better, oftentimes, than the people who actually came up with them. So that's one of the things that makes us the best in the world, that gives us that Navy SEAL mindset, that gives you that Navy SEAL mindset. Where did this whole thing come from, this Oodaloop? This is actually something I used to hate. I hated the word Oodaloop. I had a leader, and I think I've probably talked about him before, that that I'm super grateful for. He was one of the worst leaders that I've ever had, but I'm super grateful for him, because, His poor leadership forced me to step up and take different action that I probably would not have taken otherwise and and come up with these ideas these five seal secrets of leadership, like Had this other leader been a better leader? And like I said, in the past, and I don't remember if I've told this story before, we were doing these contact drills where we're teaching young leaders how to lead on the battlefield in a gunfight. And he would run up behind these young officers and say, ADA loop, ADA loop, OODA loop. And I'm like, I fucking hate that word, OODA loop. I'll never use it. And I should never say never.'cause usually when I say I will never do something, I usually end up doing it, and doing it better than I ever thought that I could. OODA Loop. Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act. Why is this relevant to you? Why is this relevant to business? Why is this relevant to life? Why is this relevant to thinking like a Navy SEAL? Let's go back to where it came from. If you go back to the Korean War a man, gentleman by the name of Colonel John Boyd was a, an Air Force fighter pilot. And in the Korean War we fought the Russians, sort of a proxy war in Korea, and so we, they had, the Americans, the U. S. had less capable aircraft than the Russians did. And, Mr. Boyd knew this, so he figured out that we need to find a different way to fight. We need to find a better way to beat the enemy, since they have better equipment. Maybe they have better training, we don't know. But we're gonna fight them in the air, in, dogfight style, kind of like, the old movies of Top Gun, or the Red Baron back in World War II, or whatever. And so they would get in these dogfights, and what Colonel Boyd eventually figured out is he figured out this way of this sort of decision making process, or formalized this decision making process, so that they could beat the enemy faster than the enemy could beat them, even though the Russians that we were fighting against had better equipment. Once he figured out this OODA loop technique, he started teaching it to other pilots and other other pilots and other people that were fighting the Russians, in the Air Force. He later became an instructor. And it was such an effective tool on the battlefield. That the U. S. was beating the Russians in dogfights 10 to 1. We would knock down 10 of their aircraft to them knocking down one of our aircraft. That's how effective this OODA loop process was. And then, after the Korean War Mr. Boyd went and he became an instructor, a flight instructor, and he was beating his students within 40 seconds of actually engaging them. And then he taught the, the tactics, the techniques, the OODA loop process and how it was relevant and how the future pilots could use that in a dogfight. And so that got passed down to the Army the Marine Corps, eventually the SEAL teams, because again, we are, we're a pretty junior force as far as being around since the beginning of time. We've only been around, truly, the SEAL teams weren't even around in the Korean War. We didn't become commissioned until 1962 while we were in Vietnam. So we got passed down this idea of OODA loop and on the battlefield, on the business field, on every field and everything that you do in life, whether it's, you're having a relationship with someone you're having a conversation, you're having a business. Agreement or disagreement, you're doing business with people, you're a salesperson, you're a student in school, it doesn't matter what you're doing. Maybe you're just driving to the grocery store. You're managing kids. Everything you do is an OODA loop. And I'll start with on the battlefield and then we'll talk about how you can apply that to the rest of your life. So on the battlefield. We're in a gunfight. I positioned myself next to that young officer, and he's engaging the target, or actually, I've taken his bullets away, and he's learned to not shoot bullets when we're in a gunfight, he's starting to observe the battlefield, and then he orients himself if we do this, he's thinking, like, if we move to the left, what will happen, if we move to the right, what will happen and he's He's orient himself, orienting himself and the team to the threat. Then he makes the call. He decides what the call is gonna be, and then he makes the call, and we move. So he observed the battlefield, he observed the team, he observed the enemy. He oriented... His decision making process off of what was going on on the battlefield. And sometimes you have to let the battlefield mature. You have to let the gunfight kind of mature. See where everyone is. See what the actual enemy situation is. Let's say you're on a sales call. I used to say that I would never be in sales. And I really like getting on the phone and selling really expensive things to people if they need it. And sometimes they know they need it, but they just need a little push. And a lot of times, it's just really... If I just go in there and I say, Hey, you need to buy this. This is for you. You got to do it. Why don't you just go ahead and give me your credit card? They're never going to give me their credit card. Why would they? I wouldn't do that. So what I do is I just start asking questions and I observe what their answer is and then I orient myself to what their answer is and then I ask another question and then another question and as I'm Observing, I'm orienting, like, how I'm going to make the close. I'm orienting how I'm going to actually ask them to give me their credit card information, or whether I'm going to pass them a link to, to buy something. I'm deciding what I'm going to do based on what their actions are, based on what they're telling me. Or when I'm coaching a client, it's exactly the same thing. I'm asking them... Questions. I'm letting the battlefield mature. Like I may know the answer, I may think I know the answer, but I don't have all the information. And so I continue to ask questions. I continue to orient, I continue to maneuver before I take actual action. I'm still maneuvering I'm getting a different perspective of the battlefield. I'm orienting, I'm orienting, I'm orienting, and then I decide what I'm gonna say. And then I take the, and I then I take that action. I give whatever advice that the client needs at the time as appropriate. So it doesn't matter what you're doing. If you're in a relationship, you're always observing, that, that other person, you're observing their actions, what they're saying. And a lot of times in male female relationships, it's not really what they're saying, it's what they're doing. And I can only say this from a male perspective of a relationship. I can tell you without a doubt that the female perspective, they may say something, but that's not really what they mean. So you have to have, number one, you have to have some experience in dealing with women who may say one thing but really mean another. For example, Hey honey, where where do you want to go out to dinner? Oh, I don't care. Okay let's go to the steakhouse. Yeah, I don't really want steak. I think I want a salad. Okay. Or maybe I was thinking more about sushi. So in that exchange, Hey, what do you want for dinner? Oh, I don't care. So you, you, or you observed, you oriented, you made a decision. I want steak. Let's go to dinner. And you acted, you said, Hey, let's go have a steak dinner. No, I don't actually want steak. I want sushi. So now you just, you took action on the battlefield of this relationship. You maneuvered and you got a different perspective. You threw something out there in the world to your... To your team, and they responded in a different way, so you just have to adjust. You observe, oh, maybe we're gonna go have sushi. Maybe she wants to have sushi. So, you say, okay, awesome, let's go have sushi. So you observed, you oriented yourself to the situation. You made a decision, you could make the decision to go to a steakhouse, probably not gonna work out that well for you. Or you made the decision to go have sushi, and then you acted on it. So that's, OODA Loop works in every situation. And, one of the great things about the OODA Loop is it's, what it's, what it really does the real magic of the OODA Loop, is it's unraveling the weaknesses of your opponent. So really, you may not care where you go out to dinner. Or really, you may not care if you make the sale or not. Or really, you may not care if your kid does its homework, or her homework. You actually should care about that. But you may not really care the direction that you want to go. If you have a business, if you're leading people, you should care what the outcome is. You may not care how they get there, you just, but you care about the outcome. So you want to observe what they're doing and you want to influence their actions to meet the outcome, the desired outcome. So if I'm, I'm training that new leader, and I want them to observe the battlefield, I took their bullets away. So now they have to observe the battlefield and maybe they're not like observing the whole battlefield. They're not getting the whole thing. Then I'll I'll give them sort of a preparatory command, or I'll give them an idea of a direction that maybe they could go. So that they can observe differently. If you're, if you're a senior leader in an organization and you're trying to train a replacement, someone to come up and take your position so you can move up and out, or whatever to take a bunch of stuff off of your plate, then you put them in those sort of stressful situations and observe how they're going to act. Observe, Orient yourself to their reaction, then you take action, and then you you decide what to do, and then you take action. And you teach them to do exactly the same thing. Going back to I don't know, sales. I'm gonna ask you a bunch of questions. I'm gonna observe, and I'm gonna orient myself based on your... Answers. And then I'll maybe throw something else at you and see how you react to that. And then I'm just going to continue to, to OODA loop until I make the sale. Or until I get, if I'm leading a group of people, until I get them to give me the outcome that I'm looking for. This is super important in leadership. I spoke at an event last week and one of the people in the crowd, they asked me about, there are times... When their clients and she was I think works with people with MS They're just not doing the work and she just wants she just gets so mad and she's like I she just want to like shake Them and tell them just you need to do this so that you can get better And so I said that yes, I totally understand where You're orienting yourself to their actions. Then you have to decide whether you want to be a hard ass, or if you want to be a big softy, and then flip the script on them. And then make whatever that thing is their idea. When you can make it their idea, and they tell you what they want to do, that's exactly the thing that you wanted them to do, you win. So you observed the situation, you oriented yourself, even though you didn't want to, you oriented yourself to be a big softy. You decided to be the big softy, but you decided the direction you wanted to try and push them or get them to go. And then you took action. And then they're doing something that you want them to do, but they think it's their idea. And so that's how you OODA loop in business, how you OODA loop in life. So again, the first secret is Multitask like a Navy SEAL. Shoot, move, and communicate. Secret number two, leaders get no bullets. Secret number three is OODA loop. You guys stay awesome. Don't forget to get naked and I'll talk to you soon. Hey, this is William Branum. I'm retired Navy Seal, 26 years of service, and I have a free gift for you. Go to five seal secrets.com, the number five seal as in Navy seal five seal secrets.com. Go download your free copy of these five Seal Secrets and I'll give you a, a secret. The secret is Naked. Naked is an acronym. Uh, go over there and find out what it is, five seals secrets.com. Totally free. All you gotta do is gimme your name and email so I can send that to you and uh, it's all yours. Then you can start learning how to think like a Navy SEAL. Talk to you guys soon.