OODA loop

Talk to us about the complexities of AI governance.

Yeah, and you know, the framing that seems to really work for this is the OODA loop, which of course stands for Observe, Orient, Design, and Act.

And I'd say...

We've gotten pretty good at the bookends, at the observing and the acting.

And the most valuable thing that you could do, the biggest lever that you have when you have a hard problem to solve is to spend some time up front to make it smaller.

And I would really encourage the listeners to think about that, to spend some time up front.

This is what the orient and decide in the OODA loop is all about, is how do you make this problem smaller so it actually becomes much more likely that you're going to solve it well and solve it effectively and efficiently? our approach has been the Databricks AI Security Framework, which is publicly available.

You don't have to be a Databricks customer.

The World of Ready is the colorful, short, fully illustrated adventure that I think is a great way to get kids talking about preparedness.

The World of Ready, OODA.

get to meet Uta, get to know what, what kids are worried about in this day and age with preparedness.

And then at the end of every book, you get a pretty clear breakdown of, of some sort of preparedness thing or survival thing, right? This, this book in particular book one is about building a go bag.

So we make a decision at the beginning, but who earns that decision when it's underway? How do we manage the boundaries of it? And how do we abort? And I see a lot of companies struggling to abort from a decision at the right time.

Well, I think this is a fantastic connection as when we talk about the OODA loop, Observatory Decide Act, there's one that has an orientation that is designed for the individual agent.

And then John Boyd never finished up that second one.

You know, he passed away.

And that's what intent based leadership is really is noticing how people speak, how people respond and the language that people use.

So I

do want to bring up some of the concepts that you have in your, actually not just your book, but some of the things you've written about recently and make some connections to just the OODA loop.

And then of course, what we're talking about with elite sports skill acquisition.

I just think they've moved from limited observation to deciding and acting very quickly.

Now, I am a massive fan of the OODA framework.

So observing, orienting, deciding and acting.

And the observation area of decision-making is by far the longest period.

And figuring out what that is, that's the key to decision-making.

And when you go back to that

OODA technique, so we spend a lot of time in information gathering, the observations, okay? But I would argue that probability orientation, how you orient yourself is critical.

And I think one thing that

The steps leading to this decision constitute a decision-making process.

Three models of a structured framework for problem-solving and decision-making are the five P, the three P, the three with care and team, the OODA, and decide models.

They provide assistance in organizing the decision process.

All these models have been identified as helpful to the single pilot in organizing critical decisions.

Second, practicing risk management needs to be as automatic in general aviation flying as basic aircraft control.

As is true for other flying skills, risk management thinking habits are best developed through repetition and consistent adherence to specific procedures.

The OODA loop.

Colonel John Boyd, United States Air Forces retired, coined the term and developed the concept of the OODA loop.

And I actually want to get your opinion on this.

I'm assuming you do know about the OODA loop, right? The John Boyd OODA loop.

Oh, yeah.

I'd like to get your opinion on that, especially coming from yourself being a pilot.

When it comes to the observing piece, we're talking about AI.

And one thing that I always say is AI will be great as an information collation thing, right? It should be able to pull information from different sources and give you the information instantly so it can improve decision quality.

What are your thoughts on AI within the OODA loop and its application? Yeah, so

for those that don't know what the OODA loop is, I can give you a real short history.

And he kept his other shit to do was building and building and building on this, which you and I have talked a ton of times about how...

The logical follow-up to this exact paper academically would be conceptual spiral and then the essence of winning and losing, which is the only place he ever drew OODA loop sketch.

And then there's the peripheral things that are kind of like the test beds for the arguments, powers of conflict.

strategic game etc so to your point you hit it the nail on the head like if a lot of people read it or try because it is dense you think oh it's just this little paper it's not this little paper it is dense i really have to be clear with people um that i didn't grasp it fully until chuck spinney came out with his evolutionary epistemology which he's revised and refined too and that's an excellent companion but nowadays with ai and models that can pressure test things i mean this it it If you don't understand destruction and creation, something's wrong.

So I think you nailed it.

Everybody that they think they know the OODA loop, everybody who says they do, almost nobody has read this.

We're going to kind of go through this.

We have a slide deck up.

If if I recall correct, I think we rolled it in 2024.

Going to pop the hood on disinformation and narrative attacks and just the whole sort of knowledge ecosystem with the rise of AI and all of the chaos that ensues into the OODA loop.

So, Wassim, brother, thanks for being here, man.

It's so glad to have you back, dude.

So many hoops that one has to go through.

But if you talk to the people who are responsible for this kind of thing, um electronic warfare information warfare they need the tool set still they don't have the right tools in place particularly because everyone now wants like full effect and closing the ooda loop and that's something that we spent a lot of time trying to get right uh and now we can't really get it into the right operators um because maybe we're missing you know some some you know dotting of the i's crossing the t's right now from a compliance perspective that we're working on yeah

yeah Given that, you alluded to the OODA loop, but talking about the

OODA loop