The OODA Loop Isn’t About Speed. It’s About How You See.

Most people get Boyd’s framework completely wrong. The real advantage isn’t deciding faster — it’s destroying what you think you know.

In 1961, a brash Air Force officer at Nellis Air Force Base had a standing bet. He’d start any simulated dogfight from a position of disadvantage — the other pilot on his tail — and win within 40 seconds. Every time.

His name was John Boyd. Pilots called him “40-Second Boyd.”

He never lost.

The interesting thing is that Boyd wasn’t the fastest pilot. He wasn’t the most technically gifted. He won because he processed reality differently than everyone around him. While other pilots reacted to what they saw, Boyd was already three moves ahead — not because he thought faster, but because he saw what they couldn’t.

Boyd spent the rest of his career trying to explain why. The result was the OODA Loop — Observe, Orient, Decide, Act — a framework that’s been adopted by the military, Silicon Valley, and every business strategist with a whiteboard.

The idea is pretty straightforward. You observe what’s happening around you — data, signals, changes in your environment. You orient yourself — filtering those observations through your experience, beliefs, and mental models to make sense of what you’re seeing. You decide on a course of action. And then you act.

Then you loop back. What happened? What changed? Observe again. Reorient. Decide. Act. Over and over.

In competitive environments — combat, business, sports — the person who runs this loop effectively tends to win. Not because they’re smarter. Because they’re continuously updating their understanding of reality while everyone else is still operating on yesterday’s assumptions.

Since it’s Super Bowl weekend, and my Patriots are back in the big game (it’s been a while), here’s a great example. Before the hard run the past six years or so, Bill Belichick built a dynasty on Boyd’s thinking. He didn’t win six Super Bowls because the Patriots were more talented. He won because he studied the NFL rule book so deeply that he found edges no other coach knew existed. In the 2014 playoffs against the Ravens, he ran formations using obscure eligible receiver rules that caused total confusion — the Ravens literally didn’t know what was legal. The NFL changed the rules after that game. Belichick wasn’t faster. He was operating from a completely different map of the game.

You see, most folks get the OODA loop, but they get the emphasis wrong.

They reduce OODA to “decide faster.” Move quicker. Iterate more. Ship and learn. Speed, speed, speed. And to some extent it is. But Boyd would have hated that.

Because the most important part of his framework has nothing to do with speed. It’s the part most people skip over entirely.

Orientation.

How you see the world determines everything you do in it. It’s the red pill moment from The Matrix — you don’t see reality differently because you move faster. You move differently because you finally see what’s actually there.

And right now, the way you see yours might be falling apart.

Your Map Is Rotting

Boyd wrote a dense, philosophical essay in 1976 called “Destruction and Creation.” It’s only a few pages long. Most people have probably never read it. But it’s the intellectual backbone of everything the OODA Loop stands on.

His argument starts with three ideas borrowed from science and mathematics:

Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem tells us that any system of logic has truths it cannot prove from within itself. Translation: no matter how good your mental model is, there are things it can’t explain.

Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle says that the more precisely you measure one aspect of reality, the less precisely you can know others. Translation: focus on one thing, and you’re blind to something else.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics says systems tend toward disorder over time. Translation: your understanding of the world doesn’t stay accurate. It decays.

Boyd’s point wasn’t academic. It was very practical. If you think about it, it’s all a bit uncomfortable.

Your mental models are always incomplete. And they’re always getting worse.

That career map you built five years ago? It doesn’t match the territory anymore. The leadership playbook that got you promoted? It’s based on a version of your industry that no longer exists. The assumptions you hold about what makes you valuable, about what good work looks like, about how careers progress — those are degrading right now, whether you notice or not.

This is what Boyd called the fundamental problem of orientation. And it applies to every professional who’s ever felt stuck despite doing everything “right.”

When most people feel disoriented — when the map stops matching the territory — their instinct is to add more.

More courses. More certifications. More frameworks. More information.

They pile new layers onto an old foundation. They optimize what they already know. They try to read faster, learn more, absorb everything.

Boyd would say that’s exactly backwards.

You don’t need more. You need to break apart what you already have.

The Snowmobile: Why Reinvention Starts With Destruction

Boyd used to teach this concept with a thought experiment.

Take four things: a set of skis, a bicycle, an outboard motor, and a pair of tank treads.

Now, strip each one from its original context. Forget what they were designed for. Break them down into components — raw materials with no category attached.

Then recombine them.

What do you get? A snowmobile.

Nobody arrives at a snowmobile by optimizing skis. You don’t get there by making a better bicycle. The breakthrough comes from destroying the original categories — pulling the pieces apart — and synthesizing something new.

Boyd called this process “destructive deduction” and “creative induction.” Fancy terms for a simple idea: you have to take your existing thinking apart before you can build something better.

This is the core of his “Destruction and Creation” essay. And it maps directly to how the strongest career pivots actually work.

Think about anyone you know who made a successful, dramatic career shift. They didn’t just add a new skill on top of their old identity. They broke apart what they knew — separated the transferable principles from the outdated context — and reassembled those pieces into something that fit a different world.

Sales skills + storytelling instinct + digital fluency don’t make “a better salesperson.” It becomes a content strategist. Or a founder. Or a leadership coach.

The destruction comes first. The creation follows.

The same applies to building a personal brand — which, at its core, is just an exercise in orientation. You can’t figure out what you stand for by adding more to the pile. You have to tear apart who you are first. Your experiences, your skills, your obsessions, the things you care about when nobody’s watching. Strip them from the roles and titles they’ve been attached to. Lay them out like Boyd’s skis and treads and motors. Then ask: what can I build from this that nobody else can?

That’s not a rebrand. That’s reinvention. And it starts with destruction.

That’s not a failure of your career plan. That’s how real reinvention works.

Why Orientation Is the Only Skill That Compounds

Boyd argued that the purpose of this destroy-and-create cycle isn’t to find the “right” answer. It’s to increase your capacity for independent action in a changing environment.

Put simply: the better your mental models, the more options you see — and the more confidently you move when everyone else is frozen. Freedom to act when others freeze. Freedom to see options that don’t exist for people still running on old maps.

And this is trainable.

Your orientation — how you process what you observe, what patterns you recognize, what you filter out — isn’t fixed. It’s a living system that you can actively maintain, rebuild, and sharpen.

Boyd saw every decision as a hypothesis, not a commitment. You observe, you orient, you decide, you act — and then you feed the results right back into your next observation. The loop never stops. Decisions that don’t work aren’t failures. They’re data that improves your next cycle.

This is the part most people miss about the OODA Loop. It’s not a sequence you run once. It’s a continuous process of updating how you see the world — and the “Orient” step is where all the real work happens.

That’s where you either stay stuck with an outdated map. Or you break it apart and build a better one.

3 Steps to Rebuild How You See the World (The Personal OODA Loop)

So let’s dive in and see how you can apply Boyd’s destroy-and-create cycle to your own thinking.

1. Audit Your Current Map of the World

Before you can destroy outdated mental models, you need to see them. Most of us operate on assumptions we’ve never examined because they were true once — and we’ve been running on autopilot since.

Write down the five biggest beliefs driving your career and life decisions right now. Things like: “I’m too old to start something new.” Or: “If I work hard enough, the right people will notice.” Or: “I need to have it all figured out before I make a move.”

Now ask yourself: when was the last time I actually tested this? If the answer is “more than two years ago” — that belief is a candidate for destruction.

5 minutes activity: Open a doc. Write: “I can’t __________ because __________.” Fill in five blanks. Be honest. These are the invisible walls shaping every decision you make — and most of them were built by someone else.

2. Destroy Before You Build

This is the hard part — and the part most people skip. Boyd’s insight was that you can’t create new thinking without first shattering the old containers.

Pick one belief from your audit that feels shaky. Now pull it apart. What specific experiences created it? Does the evidence still hold? What’s changed in your industry, your role, or your life since you adopted this belief?

You’re not looking for the “right” answer yet. You’re creating what Boyd called a “sea of anarchy” — raw material, freed from old structures, ready to be recombined.

5 minutes activity: Take one belief and write three reasons it might be wrong. Not is wrong — might be. You’re loosening the grip, not abandoning it.

3. Borrow From Worlds That Aren’t Yours

This is Boyd’s snowmobile moment — and the step that separates people who iterate from people who reinvent.

Once you’ve broken apart old assumptions, stop looking for answers in your own field. The power is in the unexpected collision of ideas — pulling raw material from domains that have nothing to do with your day job and seeing what fits.

Boyd didn’t invent new physics. He borrowed from Gödel, Heisenberg, and thermodynamics — fields that had zero connection to aerial combat — and applied them to military strategy. Belichick didn’t study other football coaches to find his edge. He studied the rule book like a lawyer would.

The same principle works for your career. A marketing leader who borrows sprint retrospectives from software engineering runs a tighter team than one who only reads marketing blogs. A manager who studies improv comedy’s “yes, and” principle builds a better feedback culture than one who takes another management course. A content creator who reads behavioral economics writes more persuasive copy than one who studies other content creators.

Lateral thinking beats deeper expertise in the same lane — almost every time.

5 minutes activity: Pick a field you have zero experience in — architecture, biology, jazz, game design, whatever pulls you. Read one article. Write down one principle from that field and one way it could apply to a challenge you’re facing right now. That’s one new piece for your snowmobile.

The Loop Never Closes

Boyd never climbed the ranks. He retired as a colonel — underpromoted, underfunded, and largely ignored by the institutions he tried to change from within.

But his ideas outlasted every general who outranked him. The OODA Loop is taught at every war college, studied in every business school, and referenced in every serious conversation about strategy and adaptation.

Not because it’s about speed.

Because it’s about seeing — and having the discipline to destroy your own certainty so you can build something sharper in its place.

Your career, your life isn’t stuck because you’re moving too slowly. It’s stuck because you’re navigating with an old map.

Break it apart. Rebuild it. Run the loop again.

That’s not a one-time fix. That’s a practice — the kind that compounds over years, the kind that separates leaders from people with leadership titles.

Boyd’s bet still stands: the person who sees clearly will always beat the person who moves fast with a broken compass.

Start with Step 1. Five minutes. One doc. Five beliefs you’ve never questioned. That’s your first loop.

Your move.