By most professional accounts, Colonel John Boyd was a cantankerous, belligerent bully when it came to the battlefield of ideas.  He was known for shouting down generals as a civilian working in the Pentagon, and for his well-founded arrogance as a young pilot/officer.  But his supreme confidence was not without merit.  He was a genius who understood the art and importance of decision-making in warfare and in life.

Boyd’s decision-making model, the OODA loop, has revolutionized many board room decision-making exercises, and is embraced by many military leaders.  The steps—Observe, Orient, Decide and Act—each deserve a dissertation alone, but the key to the success of the OODA Loop is an organization or individual’s ability to review a situation, shift focus accordingly, pick a course of action, then move out.  By using observations, experience and analysis to then pick a course of action and act as quickly as possible, a person or team has the ability to gain advantage over whatever faces them—an air-to-air combat opponent, a market and its competitors, or even life itself.  In air-to-air combat, we called this ‘getting inside the adversary’s loop’.

As a fighter pilot, I learned after many reps, many mistakes, and lots of sweat, to hold my own and even thrive in visual aerial combat.  The repetition of practice allowed me to predict what my adversary would often do and orient myself to their pending action.  I reached a point where, when fighting anyone from a novice to a well-trained pilot, I knew what their options were and expected what they would do next.  Even when fighting a thinking, highly-skilled opponent, I could often hold my own because of my willingness to decide and act first.  By doing so, I often put my opponent in a reactive mode where I was perpetually 2 seconds ahead of them.  That 2-second decision lead, repeated over the length of a fight, helped me to win many an engagement despite lesser physical flight skills.

In the A-10, a good rule of thumb for turn rate was about 10-12 degrees per second.  That meant that for every second you applied g-forces (pulled on the stick/controls) to get the aircraft to turn, the nose of the aircraft would turn at about 10-12 degrees per second.  To make a 180-degree turn, for example, it took about 15-18 seconds.

Every time I decided then acted ahead of my opponent, their 1-3 second reaction time put them 10-30 degrees behind me.  Within 1-2 full circles of a fight, that advantage helped me go from a defender to the attacker, or from an attacker pressuring the defender to a kill shot call after raking my nose across his aircraft.

The times where the rapid, unpredictable decision-making did not result in a victory was when I fought against an opponent whose ability to use the OODA loop quickly and effectively was better than mine.  I hate to admit it, but there may have been a few pilots capable of that.  Maybe.

This exercise in self-preservation while flying a plane helped me to realize that every decision is not going to be the right one.  Every action will not be executed to perfection.  But more often than not, my ability to decide and act with full commitment while observing my environment and the results of my actions helps me to make any reasonable decision the ‘right one’ and be successful in any endeavor.

To me, the physical skills of flying an aircraft are second to none when compared to the fulfillment of just about any other job.  But the thrill and confidence that comes with learning how to make effective decisions—in any endeavor—is bar none the greatest professional thrill I’ve ever experienced.  Learning how to soak in your environment, point in the right direction, then act on a decision with commitment is what winning looks like.