OODA Loop

Overview

The OODA Loop (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act) is a framework for acting in fast-moving, uncertain situations. The core decision rule: don't wait for certainty—act on the best current understanding, then immediately observe the result and loop again. Speed through the loop beats a perfect plan that arrives too late.

Core Principle: Act on ~70% confidence for reversible moves, then re-observe. Cycle faster than the situation changes.

When to Use

• Incident response and outages
• Debugging a moving target (intermittent failure, ongoing degradation)
• Any time-sensitive decision where the situation is still changing

Situation changing rapidly AND need to act before certainty? → yes → APPLY OODA
                                                              → no  → use deliberate analysis / a hypothesis differential