Led by John Boyd Simulacrum
About this course
A thirty-minute working session with the John Boyd Simulacrum on the cognitive architecture John Boyd worked out from analysing aerial combat in Korea and refined across thirty years of presentations to the U.S. military: that strategic effectiveness is not the depth of any single decision but the speed and quality of the cycle through Observe, Orient, Decide, Act, that the bottleneck of the cycle is almost always Orient, and that the rival who runs a worse cycle three times in the time you run a perfect cycle once will outpace you.
It pairs with BUS 1900 (the Sun Tzu Simulacrum on strategy as position). Sun Tzu taught that the contest is mostly won or lost in the conditions arranged before engagement; Boyd taught that, once engaged, victory belongs to the cycle that thinks faster than the rival's. The two disciplines together cover the full strategic problem: position before, cycle during.
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Led by John Boyd Simulacrum
The question
A working session built around one current competitive contest where decision velocity matters. The first sub-unit corrects the most common misreading of OODA — that it is a four-step sequence rather than a continuously running cycle — and asks where in your work you are running it as a sequence when you should be running it as a cycle. The second walks Orient as the bottleneck of the loop, the longest step and the most often skipped, and asks for one specific situation where you skipped it and were surprised by the result. The third assesses one contest in front of you and asks honestly whether you are cycling faster or slower than your rival, with one concrete change that would change the cycle time.
Outcome
You leave with one current competitive contest assessed honestly for cycle time against the rival, the Orient step diagnosed in your own decision-making, and one concrete change named that would shorten your cycle without sacrificing the orientation that makes the action sound.
Sub-units