What is Workplace Violence and How to Deal with it
Workplace violence is easily the most misunderstood concept in the contemporary organizational context. This is because the term is misleading and whenever one mentions workplace violence, we conjure images of rioting and destruction as happened recently in the Maruti plant in Manesar, India or the Foxconn facilities in China. However, without discounting these incidents as […]
Public Policy Approach to Public Administration
We remember reading about the Wilsonian philosophy of public administration and the famous dichotomy of politics and administration. After Wilson, there were many authors like Frank J Goodnow, L D White and F. W. Willoughby who elaborated on the topic and reaffirmed the need to separate the political functions and administrative functions of the government. […]
Role of Employees in Avoiding Politics
Employees indulge in politics to save their job and gain attention without working hard at the workplace. Individuals strive hard to win appreciation of the superiors by tarnishing the image of their fellow workers. It is the organization which suffers; if the employees are engaged in politics. Politics never benefits anyone in the long run, […]
Foundation Pillars of Successful Leaders
Successful leaders must have certain exceptional traits which serve as the pillars of the foundation of successful leadership. Effective leaders should have enabling capabilities, must be able to share the common vision, are supposed to be deft in challenging the existing system/processes, should have encouraging qualities and be able to model behaviour. Inspirational Leaders as […]
How the Workplace of Tomorrow Would Look Like
Some Recent Trends Based on News Lately, the news emanating from the United States and India as well as from China is about how President Trump is raising the banner of protectionism and the slogan of America First and Make America Great Again is leading to lesser reliance on outsourcing and instead, focusing on the […]
We had discussed how the OODA Loop or the Observe, Orient, Decision, Action loop works in helping to make better decisions. The first and the important thing to remember about the OODA loop is that it is mainly concerned about situations that involve split second decision making.
Considering the fact that it was developed by an Air Force pilot, it is natural that the OODA loop describes decision making in situations that are combat oriented in nature. However, this does not preclude its use in corporate decision making as there are many situations in which the decision makers have to take split second decisions with little or skewed information.
For instance, during board meetings and meetings of shareholders, important decisions and announcements have to be made depending on the exigencies of the situation.
To take an example, during hostile board meetings or meetings of senior management where the decision makers have to confront other managers with competing agendas, they have to react quickly and agilely to ensure that the decision that they take is in the best interests of the organization and its shareholders.
So, the point that needs to be noted is that decision makers in these situations have to assess the opponent’s strategies and strengths and weaknesses and react in a timely and quick manner.
The time between receiving the information and taking a decision is often in the seconds and minutes and hence decision makers have to react quickly to the demands of the situation. Often, this means that decisions have to be made by getting inside the minds of the opponents.
For instance, getting to know what the opponents’ strategies are and their intentions by assessing their body language and their words would be invaluable to the decision makers.
Further, the noteworthy aspect is that the decision makers have to rely on gut feelings and emotional intelligence to arrive at the decision. This means that the decision makers have to trust themselves and their judgment to take the decision that would be in the interests of the organization and its shareholders. This often involves acting with imprecise or skewed information. The reason for this is that the opponents’ themselves would be actualizing their OODA Loops and hence it becomes a combat situation where the one with the better decision making abilities wins. This is the reason for the popularity of the OODA loop in contemporary organizations where training and mentoring often involves familiarizing with the OODA loop.
Finally, it is not always the case that decisions taken by the decision makers are perfect and free from errors. Hence, there has to be a mechanism where feedback loops have to be activated which ensures that decisions are vetted and evaluated for the impact that they have on the organization.
So, to sum up the benefits of the OODA loop, it is indeed the case that this method developed by John Boyd is extremely useful for decision making in any setting where the reaction times are less and where the fitness and the agility of the decision maker plays a crucial part in making the decision.
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