The BI Learning Loop

"Developed by strategist and U.S. Air Force Colonel John Boyd, the OODA loop is a practical concept designed to be the foundation of rational thinking in confusing or chaotic situations. OODA stands for Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act.

Boyd developed the strategy for fighter pilots. However, like all good mental models, it can be extended into other fields. We used it at the intelligence agency I used to work at. I know lawyers, police officers, doctors, businesspeople, politicians, athletes, and coaches who use it.

Fighter pilots have to work fast. Taking a second too long to make a decision can cost them their lives. As anyone who has ever watched Top Gun knows, pilots have a lot of decisions and processes to juggle when they’re in dogfights (close-range aerial battles). Pilots move at high speeds and need to avoid enemies while tracking them and keeping a contextual knowledge of objectives, terrains, fuel, and other key variables."

--https://fs.blog/2018/01/john-boyd-ooda-loop

There is another kind of loop that happens in organizations as they struggle with their problems--a learning loop. Unlike the control loop, where the point is to have it be as fast a possible, in the learning loop you get the most benefit when you can slow the loop down.

Daniel Kahneman makes the point in Thinking, Fast and Slow that humans do two kinds of thinking. Type 1 thinking is fast and intuitive, but bad at math, comparisons, and complicated situations. Type 2 thinking can do complex problem solving but is hard, slow, and difficult. He also shows that human beings try to stick to Type 1 thinking as long as possible....often long after they know it is not giving them the correct answers...because Type 2 thinking is hard on the brain.

One thing that helps people support doing more Type 2 thinking is habit and practice. Familiar situations and problems you've encountered many times before are much less demanding for the brain.

Another strategy that help organizations deal with complex situations is to convert the situation into a story. A story gives focus and clarity (at the expense of the messy details) and organizations always have a set of stories about who they are and how they deal with difficult issues.

The problem is, the stories hide as much as they reveal. Kahneman's book is full of all the ways humans are fooled by their mind's built-in cognitive illusions, almost all of which are designed to make it easier to think about difficult situations.

This is where the learning loop comes in. Stories break down, either under the influence of outside problems or because they can no longer handle internal tensions in the group. When they break down the group has to figure out how to rebuild them (hopefully coming up with a story that does a better job).

The loop starts with the old story, the one that is thrown out of wack by change. To get the full benefit of the learning process while you go through the loop it's important to be as conscious a possible about just what the old story is. Many organizations have implicit stories, that everyone uses, but few people can articulate.

The next step is to look at the data. The organization records lots of data. It's old story explains the data and to some degree controls what is recorded, but the data comes before the story and often holds the clue about what is going wrong...and what might be done to fix things or change things.

The trick is to analyze the data in ways that are not constrained by the old story. The data holds the key to getting out of the fix the organization is in, but listening to the voice of the data instead of listening to the old story everyone is used to is very hard....like the voice of the Sirens the old story promises that we all know everything we need to know, nothing to see here. People just need to try harder and we'll be fine.

While you're searching you can learn a lot of things about your organization that are normally hidden by the smooth flow of the old story, including a lot of things that are not directly related to your current crisis. The bright light you have to cast on your data in order to escape your current problem will illuminate many other problems and issues that you have been just getting buy with. These insights are very valuable and you never get them when you are in normal mode. It's only when the old story breaks down that you get the focus and energy to see the complexities of what is going on all around you.

This treasure hunt cannot go on indefinitely. There is a reason that an organization normally works on habits and understands itself through stories....that is the only mode it has the energy and resources to sustain over long periods of time. Hopefully, you will be able to extract insights from your data that let you produce a new version of your old story. You will be able to modify your story, or tell a new story, and tell it to the whole organization in reports and meetings and exercises to change your habitual ways of working.

If your efforts to fix things worked or worked well enough, the organization will gradually adsorb the new understandings and make them part of a new "old" story. The bright light your problems cast on who you are and how you work will fade to a more bearable level of illumination and people will get on with their work.

Until the next time.

The temptation in a control loop is to slow the loop down. It is reported that the French Army came up with a perfect response to the initial German invasion in the second world war....one that would take them only six weeks to implement. Of course, by that time, the country had been conquered.

The temptation in a learning loop is to speed the loop up. It is very stressful to be in situations where things seem out of control and you don't understand everything that is going on. Patching the problem and getting everyone back to normal seems like something it would be good to do as quickly as possible.

The quick fix often owes much to the old story and does not work well, if it works at all. Slow BI, learning as much as possible while the light of consciousness is shining strengthens your organization and increases the chances that the new story you find will be successful.

There is a lot to say about how you slow down the learning loop, but the short answer is: spend more time talking, a lot more.

Get more people involved in trying to understand the problem. Open the conversation up beyond the circle of people that are immediately involved. Follow up into other areas that are revealed by the bright light of the crisis. You might have other problems just below the surface and just waiting to happen.

It is especially important to include as many people as possible in the effort to craft a new story, a story that will be able to handle the crisis. There is a good chance that if people are involved in telling the new story it will make their lives easier and their work better as well.

• Read more at WeTalkBI.com, find out more about me at Slow BI.