thinking-ooda

# OODA Loop **Core rule:** For reversible moves under time pressure, act on ~70% confidence, then immediately re-observe. Cycle faster than the situation compounds; a late perfect plan loses to a fast loop. ## When to Use - Incident response, outage, or ongoing degradation where state is still moving. - Debugging a moving target (intermittent failure, live traffic shift). - Any time-bounded decision where waiting for full certainty costs more than a reversible action. ## When NOT to Use - The situation is static and you have time — deliberate analysis or a hypothesis differential wins. - The next action is irreversible or high blast-radius — raise the evidence bar; 70% is not enough. - You can cheaply localize the cause (read the failing diff, log, or metric) — test that hypothesis directly instead of looping in the dark. - There is no time pressure and no changing environment — OODA adds churn without value. ## Procedure 1. **Observe (time-boxed):** gather the cheapest high-signal state now — metrics, logs, alerts, recent deploys/config, and feedback from the last action. Cap the window; do not collect forever. 2. **Orient:** match observations to a pattern and form **≥2** candidate explanations. Update or discard the mental model when data contradicts it; refuse single-hypothesis lock. 3. **Decide:** pick one reversible action that tests the leading hypothesis. State confidence (~70% threshold for reversible moves), the predicted effect, the observation you will check next, and a time box for that check. 4. **Act:** execute once, decisively, with a known rollback or degrade path. 5. **Re-observe immediately:** compare outcome to prediction within the time box; feed the result into the next Observe. Loop until stable or until the next move is no longer reversible enough for this skill. 6. **Stop condition:** exit the loop when the system is stable, the remaining work is static analysis, or the next step requires irreversible commitment — then switch method. ## Output A cycle record (repeat per loop): 1. **Observed** — current signals and what changed since last cycle. 2. **Orientation** — ≥2 hypotheses; which one leads and why. 3. **Decision** — action, confidence, predicted effect, next observation, time box. 4. **Act + result** — what ran and what the immediate re-observe showed. 5. **Loop status** — continue / stable / escalate out of OODA. ## Verification - **Falsify/stop:** if you cannot name a reversible next action and a near-term observation that would refute it, stop looping and gather more evidence or escalate. If re-observe never happens after act, the loop is broken — fix that before another action. - **Over-application guard:** do not OODA static design work, irreversible launches, or cases where a single cheap localization check ends the uncertainty. Do not wait for 100% confidence on reversible mitigations under active incident pressure.