Execution Under Fire: The OODA Loop in Practice.

Early 1991: The Brief Before the Sun

The brief begins long before the sun. It is early 1991. Operation Desert Storm is underway, and I am a young Lieutenant with a kneeboard full of cards in my own handwriting. The intelligence officer walks us through what is known and, just as carefully, what is not. Then the part every good brief includes and every bad one skips: what we will do when the plan stops working.

Somewhere along the route, the plan changes. It always does. I say out loud what has changed and what I recommend. The answer comes back as agreement or as one sharp question, and we adjust. Fear is there, quiet and patient behind my sternum. But it is not in charge. I have a job to do every few seconds. Hours later we are home, and before anyone sleeps, we debrief.

I flew eighteen of those missions. I remember very few of them as heroic. I remember them as disciplined.

The Core Idea

Execution is the OODA Loop run at tempo by a team that trusts each other. Under real uncertainty, the advantage does not go to the side with the best plan. It goes to the side that orients and adapts faster.

Most founders do not fail for lack of ideas. They fail in execution. They plan too long, decide too slowly, or act on a picture of the world that went stale weeks ago. The cure is not working harder. The cure is a better loop and a team that can run it with you.

Missions Are Won Before Launch

Every mission I flew in Desert Storm was won or lost, in large part, before we ever left the ground. Helmuth von Moltke is usually credited with the point that no plan survives first contact. He did not mean planning was useless. Planning is how you learn the terrain well enough to improvise when the plan breaks.

Preparation

The brief builds the shared picture. The checklist protects you from your own stress. The contingency plan does your hardest thinking in a calm room.

Fear needs a job

The worst nights are rarely the busy ones. They are the nights you wait for a term sheet or a board vote. Give your mind a job in those hours.

Trust is a working condition

It is not built in combat. It is built in hundreds of hours of training and honest debriefs. Nobody executes alone.

Waiting Is a Decision Too

In business the feedback is slower and the stakes are fuzzier, and that creates a dangerous temptation. Leaders wait for more data, more consensus, more certainty. They tell themselves they are being prudent. Usually they are being afraid. Four ideas from my military years have helped me fight that temptation.

1. Intent outlives the planEvery important project starts with three sentences: what are we trying to achieve, why does it matter, what does done look like.
2. Decide at seventy percentSpeed of correction buys you speed of decision.
3. Most doors swing both waysMake two-way door decisions fast. Save your deliberation for the few you cannot undo.
4. Orient before you accelerateSay the new picture out loud before you act on it: here is what I believe has changed since last week.

At Scale, You Design the Loops

Lycos acquired WiseWire, and almost overnight I went from building with a small team to running a unit of more than twenty-five products and about 350 people. Over my time there, we grew that unit's revenue from $75 million to $135 million. I could not observe everything or decide everything. If I tried, the unit would run at the speed of my calendar.

When you lead leaders, your job changes from running the loop to designing the conditions in which many loops run well at once.

1. RhythmWeekly reviews, monthly business reviews, quarterly planning. People knew when decisions would be made, so they stopped hoarding issues and stopped surprising me.
2. MetricsTwo or three numbers each product team owned, connected to the unit's revenue. When a metric moved, the team was the first to know and I was the second.
3. DelegationCommander's intent, then step back. If a call was a two-way door, I let it stand and we debriefed the result later.

A product leader once brought me three options and asked me to choose. I asked which one she would pick and what would happen if she was wrong. We could roll it back in a week. “Then it’s your call,” I said. Over the following months, she stopped bringing me choices and started bringing me results.

Speed Is Life

I heard it on every mission, starting in flight school. In the air, speed is options. At Lycos I meant something closer to Boyd: tempo. I said it at every management meeting, and to Bob Davis, our CEO, so often it became a refrain. That was in 1997 and 1998, as Lycos raced the other portals. Bob heard it enough times that he wrote a book and titled it Speed Is Life.

Speed is not haste. Haste is moving fast on a stale picture. Speed is a short distance between seeing and acting. At scale, your mood also becomes weather. A calm leader is not performing calm for show. He is protecting everyone else's orientation.

Scale also hands you days you would never choose. In 1999 Lycos decided to close its Pittsburgh operation, where many of the original WiseWire team worked. I met with the team to tell them. Composure does not mean softening the news. It means delivering it straight, so people can orient and make their choice.

Great Teams Guard One Shared Picture

A Navy squadron and an internet company could not look more different. Underneath, the best teams in both places shared four traits. I have since seen the same four in every high-performing team I have backed or built.

1. Clear rolesEvery person can say, in one sentence, what they own.
2. A shared missionThey can tell you which customer they serve and why it matters.
3. Blameless debriefsRank goes quiet and facts get loud. Discuss decisions, not people.
4. High standards with high trustStandards without trust produce fear. Trust without standards produces comfort. The squadron had both.

Leading is not what comes out of your mouth. Leading is about the actions you take.

Tempo Has a Cost

Execution is not a mystery. It is a loop, a crew and a set of habits practiced until they hold under pressure. Speed is life. I still believe it. But in the air, recovery was built into the system. In business, nobody built it in for me. I kept the tempo of combat for years after the combat was over, and I told myself it was dedication.

This page is an overview of the chapter. The full chapter is in The Creator's Journey.

The Practice

Execution is a set of habits. These exercises are designed to install them before your next storm. Use your journal.

1. Write commander's intent for your top priorityThree sentences: what we are trying to achieve, why it matters, what done looks like. Ask your team to say it back in their own words. Where their words differ, you have found a gap in orientation.
2. Brief and debrief your next important meetingA two-minute brief before: objective, outcome, risks, the plan if it goes sideways. A debrief after. One meeting a week for a month.
3. Sort your open decisionsLabel each one-way door or two-way door. Make every two-way door decision this week. Schedule real thinking time for the one-way doors.
4. Ask your team what slows their loopWhat slows your ability to see, decide or act? Do not defend. Fix one thing within a week and tell them you did.
5. State your orientation out loudOpen your next hard meeting with: here is what I believe has changed since we last met. Invite challenge.