330: The OODA Loop—How to Stay Ahead of Danger

0:00Hey, everyone, I'm Brian Duff and welcome to another episode of the mind for survival. I want you to flash back in this episode to start this off to June 5th of 2014. You might be saying, Hey, Brian, what happened on June 5th of 2014? Well, at Seattle Pacific University, a 22 year old named John Mies, he's there working the security desk in a campus building. When a man walks in with a shotgun and starts shooting, one student dies, two more are hit, and Mies, the 22 year old John Mies working at the security desk, he hears it, he sees it, and he watches the shooters stop to reload and uses that as his opening. He steps out, hits the man in the face with prepperspray, tackles him, takes the shotgun away, and it's over before police arrive. Now, I imagine Mies didn't have a plan that day that says,

1:03Hey, there's going to be a guy that comes in with a shotgun and I'm going to do X, Y, and Z. What he had though was a working thought process and he moved through that thought process, that problem solving process, faster than the man with the gun. And that process has a name. It's called the Udalupe Observe Orient Decide Act. And an Air Force fighter pilot named John Boyd, built it to explain why pilots in worse airplanes kept winning fights over Korea, and since then, since he came up with that, it's been the backbone of how the military law enforcement and pretty much every serious student of self-defense thinks about decisions ever since. Now, yesterday, we covered Cooper's colors, the levels of awareness you moved through all day up and down through your levels of awareness. Today, we're covering the

2:09next thing down the road on that and we're going to discuss what you do with that awareness, because noticing something is only half of situational awareness. It's the observed half. There's the Orient side of situational awareness. And then there's the rest of the Udalupe process of the decision making process decide and act. So in this episode, we're going to cover what the loop is, where Boyd got it, what each of the four steps look like on a normal day, and we're going to explain why situational awareness is the front half of the loop and not the entire thing as some people think. And then finally, we're going to talk about how to train it in small reps. So it's there when you need it. It's the same Udalupe, whether you're in a cockpit, a parking lot, or your own kitchen at 2 in the morning. So let's go ahead and get into it.

3:11Really quick, before we do, while I have the rest of September already slotted for what episodes we're doing because I'm doing the 30 days of national preparedness month, I am always looking for fun, perplexing, new, interesting, put whatever adjective you want on it. Type of questions about preparedness to discuss on the show. So if there's something you would like me to discuss, something that I haven't touched on or something you want updated, please shoot an email to Brian that's Brian with an i at mind. M-I-N-D, the number four survival dot com that's Brian at mind four survival dot com. And that was the number four in mind for survival. Send me an email, let me know what your question is, and I will do my best to get it on the show. I love when the listeners, when you all send me questions, because it's like, hey, we're all working together to make this happen. So with that, let's go ahead and get into this episode, episode 330 talking

4:12about the Udalupe. Okay, and the best place to start is, let's start with what is the Udalupe, okay, and the Udalupe, in case you're new to this, is a four step decision making cycle, which stands for observe, orient, decide, and act. It is the brainchild of Colonel John Boyd, who was a U.S. Air Force fighter pilot, and he was a really good U.S. Air Force fighter pilot, so good that he taught at their fighter weapon school, which was the Air Forces or is the Air Forces version of top gun. He was also a military strategist who, again, he developed a Udalupe, and when he developed it, the idea behind it was simple. His premise was, whoever moves through a cycle, a thought process cycle, a mental cycle, faster, and more accurately than the opponent, or in the case of natural events, the circumstances, that person that moves faster, more accurately, through all that decision-making process and everything, holds the advantage. So how does that work? Well, you observe what is

5:14happening. You orient to that information, you figure that information out, you get an understanding of that information out, and what it means. You then take that information and you decide what to do. You make a decision, and finally, with the decision made, you act on it, and actions change the situation, which puts you back at the observer phase. This is why it is a loop and not a checklist. Each pass through the loop gives you a better picture than the last. It gives you an updated picture of what's happening, and as long as you keep moving through the loop, you'll keep getting that updated information, those updated decisions. Boy, built the Udalupe for air combat, and it applies anywhere where there's a changing situation, and you have to respond to that changing situation. Right? You have water in the basement. That wasn't there yesterday. A crowd at the ball

6:15game that turns rowdy. A phone call from someone claiming to be your bank, but it doesn't make sense to you. This cycle is what good situational awareness is made of, and it works the same for you, here. Doing what you're doing. Listen to this right now. On the ground, as it does for a pilot in the cockpit. Now, where did the Udalupe come from? We know it came from Colonel John Boyd, and John Boyd was born in Erie, Pennsylvania back in 1927. In 1953, he wanted to be a pilot. In 1953, he flew an F-86 saber over Korea, where the Air Force at the time credited its pilots with a 10-to-1 record against the Soviet built, MIG-15. The deal was, though, on paper, the MIG was a better airplane. It climbed faster. It turned tighter, and it flew higher. So Boyd was looking at

7:17this. He goes, this doesn't make any sense, and he wanted to know why the pilots in the slower jet kept winning. His answer was that the fight was decided by how fast a pilot could take in what was happening, make sense of it, and act on it, not by the airplane's top speed. Sure, speed and maneuverability had a lot to do with it, and ultimately, it came down to the better pilot. Now, something that's interesting with John Boyd is that Boyd never wrote a book. He never took his ideas and put them in a book. He worked his ideas through briefings that he created. Some of them hours long that he delivered to officers and Pentagon staff. Plus one short 1976 essay that I talk about in my book, he wrote an essay called Destruction in Creation. Now Boyd retired as a colonel in 1975 and then spent like, I don't know, next 20 years or so as a Pentagon consultant. Now his work on energy maneuverability theory, like how fighters move and

8:24all that, that shaped and was the backbone of the F-15 and F-16. Now the only diagram of the Udu loop he ever drew appeared in a June 28, 1995 briefing titled The Essence of Winning and Losing. It's a really good briefing. You go find it online. Now he died in 1997 as buried Arlington National Cemetery. Boyd, I love talking about him because he is such an important person when it comes to yes, the military in a lot of ways, but to the mindset of situational awareness to Udu and all that. Now the loop, his Udu loop, spread from fighter tactics to military strategy and general military strategy and what got into law enforcement, business, cyber security and gone beyond. It's spread because it describes how the thought process happens and ultimately how we make decisions, which is super important right when you're trying to prep when you're prepping

9:26for disasters, when you're prepping for hard times, you're prepping for whatever's coming down the pike at us. It's all about how can I make more effective decisions that lead to more effective actions. As I like to say, it's never the action you take. It's always the decision you make. Now let's talk about the four steps observed, Orient, Decide and Act real quick. First, there's observe. Observe means taking in what is actually happening around you, not what you assume is happening. During the observed phase, you are collecting raw information, what you see here, smell and feel, plus what your gut is flagging or your gut's letting you know, hey, that strange feeling your gut, the hairs on the back of your neck start standing up. Right. Your gut is letting you know that before your conscious mind catches up, it's detecting something. It's saying, hey, pay attention to this. The key of this is noticing what is different from your baseline, the baseline

10:31that you already know, the baseline that we've discussed already recently. A driver, for example, weaving between lanes and closing on your bumper stands out because you know most drivers don't weave between lanes that come flying up on your bumper. That's not normal. That's not within the baseline. You know that at home, a thump in the house somewhere at 2 a.m. registers with you because you know the sounds your house makes when nothing is wrong and it doesn't make a thumping sound when nothing's going on. Right. If you're on your phone or lost and thought somewhere, that step, the whole hey, something's happening, the noticing the baseline shift, that may not happen. And if it doesn't happen, nothing happens afterwards because you don't know that this thing just happened. Next is Orient. Orient is the step void considered the heart of the Udu-du-lube. Here is where you filter what you observe through your experience, your training, your culture and the situation you are in.

11:35And you come out of that with an interpretation, a perspective, an understanding about that information, the relationship, do it in the past, current and in the future. Right. Micah ends least definition of situational awareness. In Boyd's words, without our genetic heritage, cultural traditions and previous experiences, we do not possess the repertoire, the range of skills that lets us make sense of what we observe. If we don't have all the life experience there, what are you? Something with no life experience? That's a baby. Right. A baby doesn't really know what the heck it's observing. The same with anybody who doesn't have life experience. The weaving driver behind you, that's coming up on your bumper. Well, because of your life experience, you're going to look up and you're going to make a decision. Maybe he's drunk. Maybe he's just distracted. Maybe he's angry at you specifically. That thump that you hear in the middle of the night, your experience with the

12:40world is going to tell you is that the dog, the ice maker, or someone's in the house, maybe. Orient is also where things can go wrong with our thought processes, biases, fears, old assumptions. Right. They all can come in and distort the picture, distort our perspective. As easily as good experience sharpens it, they can dull it. So get this step wrong, get the orient step wrong. And every step after it is built on the bad read you get in the orient because you're getting that interpretation. And if it's a bad interpretation, the next phase is going to be impacted by it. The next phase is decide because once you form that perspective in the orientation phase, it's time to decide based on your beliefs and understanding. That's ideal when decisions are based on high quality, bias free information about topics you understand deeply. When you

13:44have really good information and it's bias free and it's about topics you understand, you're able to really get some good information going. Right. However, the more reality separates from the ideal decision making situation, the more likely we are to make and hold onto bad decisions. This is also where our decision making process can be hijacked by your sympathetic fight fighter freeze response in whole or in part. As I frequently discuss, when that happens, right, when our fight fighter freeze response pops in, what is going on? Our imagila, our instinctual brain can overpower and hijack our rational mind. Have you ever had something happen that you reacted to? Poorly you reacted to and less than an ideal manner or afterward you're like, man, I didn't handle that one so well. That's what I'm talking about here. What happened?

14:45The fight fighter freeze response got going. It's powerful and it takes us in hijacks our brain. Again, it can hijack us and make us completely go kuku for koko puffs or it can just kind of influence our decision making. Right. The thing about that powerful response is that it is an instinctual defense mechanism that can be tough to push back against. It's a survival mechanism. It doesn't allow for a whole lot of push back sometimes. The fact is it's up to each of us to confirm the information we feed into our thought process while also checking that we are in the best mindset possible. In other words, hey, we need to put good information into this. But we also need to make sure that we are in the best mindset possible to deal with that information. Doing that will lead to more accurate, intentional and effective decision making. Not doing it leads to less effective

15:52decisions which ultimately fuel less effective actions. Less than effective decision equals less than effective actions. Since you're the one taking the actions usually, right. It's kind of like we want to make sure we beef those up a little bit. Let's talk about actions now because act is the execution of your decision. It's I made a decision. Now I'm acting upon it. Now once you decide, take the action and take it completely. A half executed action exposes you to the risk of acting without producing the result you just decided on. Now when it comes to actions, there are four kinds of actions that come out of the Udalupe. First is an intentional action. Hey, there's this thing we're going to do X. I'm going to do X. Then there's a decision to gather more information. Hey, I'm not taking this intentional action. I'm not running over here doing this thing. Do my little cheetah flip and getting up and solving, you know, saving the day. Instead, I'm going to my decision

16:55is to sit here and gather more information. There's also a decision to say, Hey, I'm going to sit here. I'm going to review the information. I'm going to review past experiences. I'm going to figure something out here. Those three are all deliberate actions you take based upon your decision. And there's a fourth that I mentioned, which is the unintentional, instinctual fight, flight, or freeze response. That one is what we talked about earlier. That means when the when the fight, flight, or freeze response gets going, it means that your loop has been hijacked by emotion, by stress, by anger, whatever's going on before you got here, before you get to that decision making process before you can take the action, you're in a fight, flight, or freeze, your decision making process has been hijacked somewhere along the way. Right? Every action that you take, whenever you take an action or somebody else takes an action, that changes the situation you're in.

17:55The same holds true when it's nature, every advance in the hurricane, the winds blowing this way, it's doing that. The rain's coming here. Right? Everything that changes is a change in your situation. Once an action happens, the result is observed. You make a decision about that information, how it correlates. You come up with a perspective on it, and that sets you up to make a decision, and then an action, but that does not, the Udalupe does not stop with action. That's why it's called a loop. It hits act, and it's back up to the top. It's also good to keep in mind that a lot of times when you look at the Udalupe, when it's represented graphically, it looks like four distinct things. It's a loop going in a circle, and when you're in one spot of the loop, I'm an orient, I don't need to go all the way through this loop if I'm thinking about to go back up to the top. Our minds move to where it needs to be at times within that loop. Now, let's talk about how the Udalupe and situational

18:58awareness connect, because people use situational awareness and Udalupe as if they mean the same thing. They do not situational awareness is the observed and orient half of the Udalupe. Detecting a change in your baseline and understanding what that change means, that's observed and orient, that situational awareness. You're understanding what the elements are in a current volume of time and space according to Micah Endsley. You understand the relationship between those elements in the present, and then you use that to project what those elements are going to do, how they're going to interact, what that means for the future. How are things going to move around in the future? Decide and act are what you do about what you get in the observed and orient phase, making a decision, and then here's the action I'm taking. That split matters in practice, because you can have solid situational awareness and still fail because you noticed the problem

20:00understood it and failed to decide or take an action. You can also decide and act quickly on bad news, right? Like a bad read of the information, you're getting bad information, you're interpreting it poorly, because the observed and orient half was weak, you're skipped. Now the loop works when both halves do. That's when it really gets humming. Situational awareness gets you an accurate picture of what's happening. Then the back half of the loop decide and act, that gets you the results you're looking for. Speaking of getting the results you're looking for, let's talk about how to train your Udalupe. Now you train your Udalupe the same way you train anything else. Repeated, regular, repetitions before the day comes that you need it. One you can do is you can scan against a baseline. When you walk into any new space, we talked about this in the baseline article a couple of days ago, a store, a parking lot, a restaurant, some event,

21:00take a few seconds to look at and feel, observe, stop, smell, look, listen, write all the sill stuff that the military talks about and determine what is normal for there. Get yourself a baseline. Even if it's a brand new baseline, that when you walk into it, if anything shifts on that, you'll know which way it's going. You'll have an idea of what's happening. And maybe as time goes by, that situational baseline that you have will develop even more and you'll get more of a feel for it. Then as you go along, look for what doesn't fit and that's what's off the baseline, that's what deserves attention. You can also train it by checking in with your gut if something feels off. And you can't say why treat that though as an observation. Hey, there's something wrong here. I'm observing this because you're getting this sensation. I need to figure this out because your subconscious picks up on changes oftentimes before your conscious mind can figure them out or they can name or you even realize that they're there. Next, another thing you can do is make small

22:05decisions on purpose. When you sit in a crowded space, which route you drive, whether you say something or let it go when someone irritates you, decide and pay attention to the result. Right? Decisiveness under pressure is built on decisions made without pressure. And finally, follow through. Once you decide, act based on that decision. Then as you go through it, start again by looking for changes in the baseline. Sometimes we struggle with making decisions. Sometimes we struggle with having confidence in the decisions we make. When you have follow through over time, it may not always work out. They may not be the most effective decision. Therefore, you may not take the most effective action. But over time, you'll start learning, hey, which decisions you're becoming good at, which decisions you need to work on and you'll get better at this. It'll happen and it will happen without you having to think about it, right? Unconscious competence. Now, the bottom

23:09line on all of this is that the utlup is a thought process. It's a thought process cycle that you go through that we all go through all day every day. And because most people don't practice it, they go through it slowly, clunkily, I don't know if clunkily is really a word, but you get it, right? They go through and they rely on bad information that they don't understand how they should go back and vet to help refine their, their, what their perspective they come out of the orient phase, right? And that leads to that bias perspective. They don't ever check that. Because you are practicing it because you're into situational awareness, you're into preparedness, you're into the utlup, you can refine that so you can get better at your decisions. The goal of the utlup and preparedness-minded people in general is to be able to make decisions that are fast, accurate, and effective. And for us preparedness-minded people, for us preppers and who are in all this prepping and survival stuff, that's a really good thing.

24:13So with that, everybody, hey, if you enjoy this episode, if you like what's going on with the Mind for Survival podcast, please help spread the word by sharing this podcast with your friends, with your family, with people who could benefit from it and help the show to grow. Man, I am so stoked when you do that. I am so, I am so appreciative of everything that you do to help out with the show. It always makes my day. So with that, everybody, as always, stay safe, secure, and prepared, and never forget my friends. You are just one prep away from being the better prepared. Bye for now.

25:48I said 220's on the bar. He didn't count him, didn't grant. Just nodded at the board and said, go put your name back in. I said, what I do wrong. He said nothing. You can see that he finished up his coffee and he let that sit with me. Crew chief on the flight line said, kid, don't act surprised. It ain't the hundred ain't his hands. It's what's behind his eyes. Boy, it's from your next three moves before you phone your one time you pick a turn son is it's already done. For the second's $40 shake on it and go break as hard as you can boy and give it all you know. I pulled high roll low. I was climbing for the sun and the radio said guns guns guns at 31. I'm out my 40 bucks told the boys out on the flight line. They just left and wished me luck. Ain't nobody made it

26:53for me and I don't believe they will but I got the 34 last week and I'm signing up still. $40 seconds $40 shake on it and go break as hard as you can boy and give it all you know. I pulled high roll low. I was climbing for the sun and the radio said guns guns guns at 31. $40 second boy guns guns guns. $31