Agile Business Intelligence – Ideas from a Jet Fighter Pilot

Business intelligence systems deliver so much data; they overwhelm us with information. Yet traditional decision-making models come from a slower time when data was harder to come by and they encourage us to analyze everything before we do anything. We wind up getting lost in the data while the world passes us by (that state known as “analysis paralysis”). Question: Are there other decision-making models better suited to guide us through these unpredictable times?

Just collecting and analyzing data isn’t enough. We need to use the data we collect to create a picture of our world that gives us a meaningful context for evaluating the data and making timely decisions. We have to act and act quickly as the world unfolds if we want to succeed in our real-time economy. Analyzing data can be part of the problem if it goes on too long.

[ I do lively presentations on this and related topics – mhugos@yahoo.com ]

Observe – Orient – Decide – Act

John Boyd was a fighter pilot who defined a process for decision making in fast-paced environments. He was an expert dogfighter and an instructor at the US Air Force Fighter Weapons School where he taught other fighter pilots to do what he did so well. He saw there was a repeatable pattern to the way a good fighter pilot collects information and acts on that information. Over the years he articulated what he learned and formed it into a repeatable process that shows people and whole organizations how to compete and win in any high-change environment. He named this process “Observe – Orient – Decide – Act” (OODA) – now known as the OODA Loop or Boyd Cycle.

There are four steps in the OODA Loop; the first step is observe. This step involves collecting and communicating information about your environment. For a fighter pilot this means information such as location and status of other fighters, both friend and foe, and information about the status of your own fighter. For a company this includes information such as presence and status of competitors and performance data about your own company – stuff like operations data, financial information and sales statistics. It also includes overall information about the markets you serve and the trends in those markets.

The second step is orient. This is the most important step because this is where information is turned into understanding. And this understanding is used to form an appreciation of different situations as they evolve and their inherent possibilities – their threats and opportunities. The next two steps in the OODA Loop depend on this understanding; Boyd called it “situational awareness”.

Boyd said situational awareness for the fighter pilot means forming a real-time 3D picture in your mind showing where the good guys are and where the bad buys are, and what they are doing now and what they are poised to do next. For companies it means plotting relevant performance indicators for competitors over time and identifying important trends and what they could lead to. This means seeing evolving market positions and possible next moves for your company, your competitors and your customers. Situational awareness provides the context to analyze situations as they unfold.

In the third step, decide, you investigate different responses to the threats and opportunities you see and evaluate possible responses. That means forming plans and budgets for possible actions and forecasting what might happen. This work is done at a level and in a time

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