From OODA to ODDA
The Operators Loop for Scaling
The OODA LOOP - Observe, Orient, Decide, Act
The OODA Loop - Observe, Orient, Decide, Act - is not just a theoretical framework; it is a matter of life and death in wartime. Never heard of it? I’ll give a brief overview below.
You have heard of it? Great. That’s why I’m transforming it and creating my own acronym… the ODDA Loop. For those of you saying, “Cook, you are ODDA!”… all I can say is thank you! You know me well!
The OODA Loop was developed by U.S. Air Force Colonel, John Boyd. He named his acronym to help him never forget why some fighter pilots consistently outmaneuvered their opponents, even when flying inferior aircraft.
His key insight? Victory doesn’t always go to the strongest or most heavily armed, but to the fastest and most adaptive thinker.
In high-stakes dogfights, the pilot who could rapidly observe the environment, orient to shifting threats, decide on the best move, and act faster than his enemy would gain the upper hand. OODA - Observe, Orient, Decide, Act.
Col. Boyd’s OODA loop gave pilots a mental model to continuously process chaos, anticipate their opponent’s moves, and stay grounded and calm at 10,000 feet. When repeated quickly and accurately, OODA created confusion and hesitation in the opponents, breaking their rhythm and ultimately allowing them to win the dogfight.
Business is often described as “wartime”. OODA’s faster decision loops serve businesses as well as war. Like war, OODA can be the difference between success vs. failure… survival vs. death.
CEOs, COOs and CFOs are in the best positions to apply the same OODA principles from their unique vantage and data points. Leaders who can make high quality and high velocity decisions under extreme pressure are what separate the best from the rest.
I personally like OODA based on it’s structured, operational, decision making framework offering an alternative to merely relying on gut/instinct. I started Cook’s PlayBooks to share just such frameworks with the goals of increasing leadership confidence, execution, and to help focus and filter out distractions.
OODA is a great framework for mapping the current situational analysis to your “next action”. OODA reduces the feeling of being unclear, overwhelmed, and uncertain and helps leaders make decisions under fire.
Observing, Orienting, Deciding, Acting: Use it when you are in your own dogfight whether that’s the pressure of your next boardroom crisis, your next product or AWS operational failure, or the next overall SVB-like or investor market crisis.
The last time I started thinking about OODA - I realized I had been writing about a similar decision making framework. So I’m now offering an adapted version that may fit even better in the startup scaling world. With this post, I’m publishing for the first time what I’m calling the ODDA Loop.
Observe → Define → Design → Align = ODDA
Observation is critical in any situation. You can’t change anything you can’t see clearly. Situational awareness is critical. Whether it’s OODA or ODDA - it all starts with “seeing clearly” the situation around you with deep breaths and without the blinders of emotion that limit visibility.
Now DEFINE the real root problems. And by define, I mean literally WRITE IT DOWN. I’m a huge fan of literally writing things down. It’s a neuroscience brain thing that enables stronger memories of the “thing” you are defining.
Now DESIGN the right solutions. It doesn’t need to be perfect. In fact a version 1.0 design is required. Don’t try to design version 3.0 out the gate. Version 3.0 will get better nearly by learning from the minimum viable versions 1.0 and 2.0. But waiting to launch V3.0 in search of perfection is the prison of precision. Good enough is better than perfect in the dogfight as hesitation often kills.
Finally ALIGN the leadership team around the Definition and the Design. Communicating the Why, What, and How.
Alignment is not a memo, slack, or email. It’s not a 1-off all hands meeting speech. Those “write it down”…”say it” things are needed but that’s not true alignment. Alignment is the operating, repetitive discipline of syncing priorities, milestones, and ownership across functions.
Without alignment, even a beautifully designed system will fail because the rest of the org typically defaults to playing by the old rules and old systems.
When Aligning, Make Sure…
The leadership team repeats and communicates to their teams the same problem and the same solutions you’ve defined.
Everyone understands and can story-tell the rationale (the “Why”) behind the new design.
Hold Leaders and their Teams accountable to the new behaviors, metrics, and priorities required to reinforce the new ODDA system.
Most startups skip the first three ODD steps of scaling:
Post product-market fit is when it’s time to scale. It’s at this exact stage many startups fall back on what got them there and keep just “doing the thing”, skipping the continuous situational observations required for the new world PMF world.
How do customers like what’s we’ve built? What did they think of our last release?
What should we prioritize next?
What do we need to design for the next release? Why?
The “A” is essential when scaling. Alignment. A!!! Keeping everyone on the same page and rowing in the same direction. It ensures that the ODD thing you designed, your company’s “operating system”, is not just theoretically sound, but culturally lived inside of all employees operational behaviors.
Alignment is the only way to unlock speed, trust, and compounding focus. If the OODA loop gave pilots an edge in battle, the ODDA loop will apply that same competitive advantage to leadership.
IMPORTANT: Most leaders treat alignment as a simple communication step: announce the new plan, roll out a slide deck, get nods around the table, send an email. Real operational alignment needs to go much deeper than that.
Alignment is about getting everyone to see the same Why and assigning the right Who and When.
Without shared understanding of why the system is changing, people will revert to old guard habits. They’ll quietly (or loudly) second guess the decisions. They’ll hedge their bets. Over time, pockets of misalignment will appear creating executional drag, duplicated efforts, cross-functional tension, missed goals, and eroding trust in company leadership.
Alignment is the bridge between great design and great execution or the anchor of a great ODDA culture.
Alignment is when you translate a smartly defined and designed operational system into shared conviction and execution across the team.
When teams align on the why, who, and when, they operate as one unit of mission, motion, and ownership.
Skip the “A”?
When you skip the critical alignment anchoring of the system, even the best designed plans will fail.
People will “telephone tag” the priorities and be confused by the the org structure. Culture will begin to crack and fragment around silos of FUD - fear, uncertainty, doubt.
That’s why in my ODDA Loop, Alignment isn’t the soft stuff, it’s the Anchor - the keystone that holds the system together.
Thank you Ai for this image assist!
Alignment as the Keystone: Holding the Whole System Together
In ancient Roman architecture, the keystone was the central wedge-shaped stone at the apex of an arch. It was the last piece placed during construction, but once set, it locked all the other stones into position. Without it, the arch would collapse under its own weight. With it, the structure became one of the strongest and most enduring forms of design in history and able to bear immense loads and last for centuries.
Just like the Roman keystone didn’t carry the weight alone, alignment doesn’t do the work of execution by itself. But it ensures that the forces within your organization, the people, priorities, systems, and culture are all rowing in the same direction an in sync with each other.
Alignment is pure structural engineering which transforms smart design into long lasting operating architecture.
At every new stage of scale, you’ll need to revisit ODDA.
When you are going from Seed → Series A or $50M → $200M ARR, don’t forget ODDA:
Observe and Orient the new system.
Define the new problems.
Design the next version of the machine.
Align the Why, Who, When.
This is the real operating system of the CFO, COO, and strategy-minded CEO.
Don’t be siren song’d and skip straight to doing and hiring before orienting to the current situation and defining what you really want.
Did you clearly define the problem?
Did you align the solution?
It’s a deceptively simple loop. But in my experience, it separates the amateur operator from the architect-level leader.
1. OBSERVE: Watch the Work Happen
Before you touch anything, look with fresh eyes.
You are not fixing. You are not judging. You are observing like a field researcher:
What’s actually happening inside this company?
Where does the work really happen?
Who actually makes the decisions?
Where are the blockers in execution, prioritization, communication?
At Netflix, I designed the “Follow the Envelope”. This meant tracing every touchpoint the DVD (physical disc) took from picking, packing, shipping, through the USPS Postal System, to the customer, and back home to our warehouse.
At Mozilla, my team and I built nearly every internal operational system from finance to facilities to travel to all hands meetings to HR. We continually observed, defined the current situation, designed and re-designed the next versions and then aligned the org to the new systems.
You don’t need to be a functional expert in every domain. But you do need to be a great student, learn the language of systems and required scale, and be the chief translation officer to the organization.
DEFINE
That’s why my playbooks include things like:
The T-Chart Framework clearly defining success vs failure.
This ODDA loop.
And even my Communications and Crisis Frameworks for ensuring leadership, quality, velocity, and trust.
3. DESIGN: Architecting the Operating Model
Design is the laying the foundations of the systems, structures, and behaviors to fit the problems you’ve now observed and defined.
This is where the real fun begins. You get to work on:
Role clarity and decision ownership.
Forecasting systems that match decision cadence.
Culture operating systems that reinforce values through rituals.
GTM motion redesigns that match stage, not legacy.
Design isn’t a PowerPoint deck. It’s not a reorg in a memo. It’s the hands on work of wiring and re-wiring the business so that strategy, structure, and execution all click into place.
Put This PlayBook Into Action: This Week
Pick one area of your business that feels messy right now. Let me guess? Is it the GTM handoffs, your product roadmap prioritization, or your weekly exec meeting? “Wait, Jim, how did you know?”
Now spend a few hours “shadowing”. Only observing behind the scenes. You aren’t allowed to say anything or fix anything while observing. Note: this new behavior will be hard since you have biases on how to quickly fix it… or you think you do… but many times these biases and quick fixes get in the way of the real solutions only gleaned through deep, objective, non-biased observations.
Now write 1-2 sentences or 3-5 bullets that define the real root issue you’ve just observed.
If you do that, the design will practically write itself.
Oh yeah… and don’t forget Alignment!
That’s it for how OODA inspired my new ODDA.
