OODA Doodling

Recap

Readers who have been following my OODA posts will already be familiar with my Revised OODA diagram:






You can follow the link further above to find my reasoning behind the revision, although I think now that the original post was a bit convoluted and overlong.  In a nutshell:  I was not happy with the Boydian fuzziness of the original OODA —





— since no demarcation between the concrete world and the abstract (mentally constructed) ‘world’ is made clear in that diagram.  For instance, Boyd’s Orient phase is assumed to include preexisting mental constructs, genetic information, etc., mixing these things within the Orient phase, and does not allow use of the OODA concept for explaining how these constructs form or evolve:




These things are assumed to already exist, altering the OODA response of the individual in reaction to an observable environment:  He ‘orients’ with the existing environment on the basis of these preexisting conditions.  (One assumes that the mystical pentagram may be showing the act of orientation, as ‘new information’ is compared in the matrix which includes the other things listed in that pentagram.)

For any consideration of OODA processes on a broader scale beyond a single individual’s responses to a present environment — say, how that individual develops cultural mental constructs in the first place, among other things — the simple Boydian diagram is nearly worthless.  What if we want to shape an individual’s cognitive development, over a lifetime or merely over an extended war campaign, or alter the deeply held mental constructs, and may only do so by altering the World?  How do concrete alterations affect the abstract constructs?

Plus, I did not like the fuzzy processes Boyd merely calls Implicit Guidance & Control and Feedback and Unfolding Interaction with the Environment.  (In fact, the last process is drawn identically with one type of Feedback!)  Significantly ‘interaction with the environment’ does not make clear the fact that physical acts alter the environment, or shape the World.  Given my more recent considerations of static, or of many individuals simultaneously changing that World and confluential processes which cannot easily be tracked back to a definite set of individuals, a consideration of how abstract processes within diverse individuals may alter concrete realities seems important.

So in the Revised OODA, I separated the concrete from the abstract although I show an OODA process for both: a Concrete OODA and an Abstract OODA.  The Abstract OODA is actually the Concrete Orient phase in the Concrete OODA.  I haven’t so much rejected Boyd’s conceptualization as apply it differently and expand it in order to use it for understanding broader scale social and psychological phenomena.  I’ve used more detail to explain my various choices during the revision process, in the original post.

Revised OODA Simplified

Many times since that original post, I’ve wanted to revise the diagram for the Revised OODA.  While showing a very clear separation between the two OODA processes virtually required the larger diagram, with the Abstract OODA blown up to better include guideposts for understanding each of the phases and remain legible, I’ve thought that some other things were obscured or left out.

For instance, every time I’ve referred to the diagram, I’ve had to mention that an arrow ought to be assumed to exist leading from the Concrete Act back to the World.  That was something I left out of the original diagram; yet, it’s vitally important for understanding the larger psycho-social dynamics.

Drawing the two OODA processes separately, with the separate names given to them,  occasionally led to misunderstandings.  For instance, Dan of tdaxp once remarked that he has always been suspicious of the concept of ‘abstract processes’ — Isn’t thinking a concrete process?   I tried to explain my concept of abstract processes and mental constructs:  You may actually see a bunny rabbit, but no bunny rabbit is hopping about inside your head while you are thinking about what you have seen!  So thoughts and thinking are physical, concrete processes, but those concrete realities within your head are not identical to the concrete realities exterior to your brain, although the two ‘worlds’ may align or be quite related.  (In the case of another person’s thinking, that concrete reality outside your head, but in his, might even be quite like the concrete reality occurring within your head! Or not.)   I’ve just used the terms ‘concrete’ and ‘abstract’ to signify the different domains.

So I’ve always wanted a better way to show this relationship between the Concrete OODA and the Abstract OODA, and haven’t liked having to separate them so starkly.  Another recent doodling, which I’ll include a bit later, inspired me to simplify the Revised OODA for easier use in later posts:




A simple color-coding helps, I think: black for the concrete, white for the abstract.  Unfortunately, to be able to combine these two OODA processes so closely, I’ve had to leave off many of the descriptive labels as well as simplifying the OODA labels in the Abstract OODA — to get the thing to fit within the margins of a blog post.  But for anyone familiar with my concept of the Revised OODA, this simplified diagram should serve as a good guide for later discussions.

Into the Fifth Generation…

This is where the heavy brainstorming comes.  Recently, D5GW contributor Arherring has been exploring different organizational structures as well as operational models for 5GW organizations, including, so far, the Waterfall Model and the Iterative Model.  I was a little confused about the iterative model; having read an interesting comment at the Small Wars Council, I wondered if I had found an example of an iterative process:

This reminds me of something that Galula mentioned his his Counterinsurgency Warfare. Paraphrasing pages 104-106 of his most recent book, he says the Chinese government would enact programs by first sectoring off areas and implimenting different variations of the program, and then experimentally evaluating the results. Later, the more successful variations would be implimented on a wider and larger scale.

[“Smitten Eagle”]

The comment was made in reference to John Robb’s post on Stochastic tinkerers and warfare.  Arherring suggested a parallel development model to describe the Chinese process, as had John Robb to describe stochastic tinkering networks.  Broadly speaking, the idea of a parallel development process, as used in both cases, is suggestive of evolutionary processes — if those evolutionary processes had some ulterior purpose and were informed by some guiding, ‘divine’ hand!  Although random or selected diversity may lead to separate developments, these separate developments are brought into friction which winnows out the ‘bad’ while leaving the ‘best’ outcomes of each locus of development.  So the Chinese government would preselect variations with an eye on finding one or a handful that are the best; and stochastic tinkering networks may ultimately arrive at surprise but useful innovations (the ‘best’) while throwing out failed routines (the ‘bad’), although individuals within those networks or individual networks appear to be working ‘randomly’ or on seemingly separate problems. (Presumably, individuals across these networks would be able to observe the various outcomes of the actions of other networks, in the open-source environment, and would be able to share in the innovation as well as in the process of winnowing out the bad routines.)

So we might say that these two examples of parallel development actually presuppose the preexistence of some standard of measurement by which various future results will be judged — if, of course, any sort of  ‘better’ or ‘best’ outcome is desired — and that, indeed, some ultimate goal exists already in the mind (if broad.)

These considerations of the parallel development model remind me of earlier considerations of Social OODA processes:






1.  Here are five individuals with particular observational niches within the World, in which each works on his own particular problems.  However, their niches may overlap or may have overlapped, and they may have very similar mental constructs (even if they also have many dissimilar mental constructs.)





2.  To the degree that they have something in common, they may view the world in common ways and act upon the world in common ways, changing it from multiple directions but perhaps directing it toward a common although broad goal.  However, other groups and individuals will be doing the same thing, and the resulting changed World may result in similar observations from previously diverse, quite-different groups: innovation, perhaps.

That is a bit like parallel development, I think.

While trying to grasp the concept of an iterative development process, I ran into this difficulty:  in a parallel development process like those already mentioned, each distinct group of actors, however diverse, may be working toward shared or very similar goals — may recognize useful innovations made by others, as well as the failures of others — and so, in an open-source environment, each group’s operation appears to be one iteration of an iterative process spanning that environment, viewed from afar.  In an open-source environment, the distinction between a parallel development process and an iterative development process may blur or fade altogether.

When I mentioned before that the parallel development process in each of the given examples seemed evolutionary but also guided by a ‘divine’ hand, I also had this in mind:  That each diverse group in an open-source environment increasingly has the same World in view.  That World is the guiding hand, when considered through the lens of the Revised OODA and the social OODA process.  The World may be constantly altering, true; but over a lifetime of observations, and given an increasingly open open-source environment — and the explosion of media sources — greatly individualized and limited observational niches — particularized views — may be weakening for many individuals with access to media and the open-source environment, as increasingly shared narratives grow in strength. 

But I wanted a better understanding of the iterative development process; so I looked it up on Wikipedia and found this diagram:





This diagram instantly reminded me of the Abstract OODA of the Revised OODA; so I thought I’d combine them:






This formulation seems to work rather well for broadly showing how a 5GW organization might operate.  As with an individual’s process, two ‘worlds’ exist:  The concrete and the abstract.  Here, the two domains are, (1) the 5GW organization (white/’abstract’ OODA)  and (2) everyone/everything else (black/’concrete’ OODA.) (1) the internal operation of the 5GW organization and (2) the concrete implementation and observation of effects.*  The interior process includes a vision of the ultimate goal or system — included in Mental Constructs — and a testing of concrete observations of the world, analysis based on requirements, new design work; ultimately, the 5GW organization Acts concretely to implement tweaks to the World, and re-observes what happens after implementation, again weighing those observations against the same vision.


Such a process is, of course, not entirely different from what others working to alter the world may do.  However, to the degree that the actual World begins to resemble the vision held by the 5GW organization, so many other individuals operating in the world will begin acting reactively but cooperatively:  their own mental constructs will begin to form in accordance with that changed world, and their own actions will work to perpetuate it.  This is quite different from pre-5GW approaches, which do not depend so much on a theory of cooptation but on subordination and overwhelming force to produce compliance or resigned acquiescence. (Even if, in the natural course of things, general standards will tend to form without direction, anyway, via the Social OODA process.)

If we go back and consider the general thrust of the Revised OODA concept, we might consider how the Concrete World influences the shape of the Abstract Mental Constructs and how those Mental Constructs in turn manifest as actions which alter the Concrete World.  Because so many individuals exist, with their own individualized Mental Constructs and OODA processes, their activities across the world produce a lot of static:  so many dreams at war, largely unaligned and often at cross-purposes in the way they manifest.  (Indeed, a single individual’s dreams may manifest at cross-purposes, themselves!)  In a way, the hypothetical iterative 5GW process would work to manifest dreams (in others) that lead to beneficial confluential processes stemming from diverse acts, which will shape a resilient self-perpetuating system. So the ‘5GW Iterative OODA process’ diagrammed above would be like the inverse of the general Social OODA process as it typically occurs:  The vision predominates and the world must be brought into alignment with it, rather than the visions altering according to the changing world.  A 5GW organization must be proactive rather than reactive, even though it observes the existing world before altering it.


*Update/Correction:  I see my brain slipped. In general, I view the Revised OODA as a process of moving from the concrete to the abstract and back into the concrete; so for the operation of the 5GW organization, I view it similarly in this diagram, with movement from the World exterior to the 5GW organization, to the internal operation of the 5GW organization, and back outward to the world at large.