tjboudreaux/cc-thinking-skills/thinking-ooda

OODA Loop

Core rule: For reversible moves under time pressure, act on ~70% confidence, then immediately re-observe. Cycle faster than the situation compounds; a late perfect plan loses to a fast loop.

When to Use

• Incident response, outage, or ongoing degradation where state is still moving.
• Debugging a moving target (intermittent failure, live traffic shift).
• Any time-bounded decision where waiting for full certainty costs more than a reversible action.

When NOT to Use

• The situation is static and you have time — deliberate analysis or a hypothesis differential wins.
• The next action is irreversible or high blast-radius — raise the evidence bar; 70% is not enough.
• You can cheaply localize the cause (read the failing diff, log, or metric) — test that hypothesis directly instead of looping in the dark.
• There is no time pressure and no changing environment — OODA adds churn without value.

Procedure

1. Observe (time-boxed): gather the cheapest high-signal state now — metrics, logs, alerts, recent deploys/config, and feedback from the last action. Cap the window; do not collect forever.
2. Orient: match observations to a pattern and form ≥2 candidate explanations. Update or discard the mental model when data contradicts it; refuse single-hypothesis lock.
3. Decide: pick one reversible action that tests the leading hypothesis. State confidence (~70% threshold for reversible moves), the predicted effect, the observation you will check next, and a time box for that check.
4. Act: execute once, decisively, with a known rollback or degrade path.
5. Re-observe immediately: compare outcome to prediction within the time box; feed the result into the next Observe. Loop until stable or until the next move is no longer reversible enough for this skill.
6. Stop condition: exit the loop when the system is stable, the remaining work is static analysis, or the next step requires irreversible commitment — then switch method.

Output

A cycle record (repeat per loop):

1. Observed — current signals and what changed since last cycle.
2. Orientation — ≥2 hypotheses; which one leads and why.
3. Decision — action, confidence, predicted effect, next observation, time box.
4. Act + result — what ran and what the immediate re-observe showed.
5. Loop status — continue / stable / escalate out of OODA.

Verification

• Falsify/stop: if you cannot name a reversible next action and a near-term observation that would refute it, stop looping and gather more evidence or escalate. If re-observe never happens after act, the loop is broken — fix that before another action.
• Over-application guard: do not OODA static design work, irreversible launches, or cases where a single cheap localization check ends the uncertainty. Do not wait for 100% confidence on reversible mitigations under active incident pressure.