OODA, unrolledeight days beforePutting jank and the OODA loop next to each other, it’s hard…Micro and macro jank

Jankless2021What would it be like to work in a team that experiences…The compounding effects of OODA2021The aversion cycle is the shortest and most brutal of the three.…The model underneath2021It will probably not come as a surprise to you that we…Jank2021I first learned about jank when I joined the Chrome team. It’s…If our team’s OODA loop runs just a tiny bit slower than the clock of the environment, we will generate a flurry of micro-jank — many incidents that are so tiny, we can barely notice them. Unlike with machines, our collective resilience will helpfully wallpaper over these thousand cuts. However, as we’ve learned before, an incident of jank creates a deficit for the next cycle. It is fairly easy to see that this deficit continues to accrue over time. So the micro-jank grows into larger problems over time.

Prediction errors and jank2021

This larger problem usually manifests as macro-jank: a big reset that is clearly felt by everyone in the organization. The whole team seizes up and briefly stops listening to the environment’s clock, focusing inwardly to sort out their own mess.

OO and DA2021Each presents two different configurations for the OODA loop: I’ll call them…The ODA and OODA stances2023Organizations operating in the OODA stance focus on bettering their mental models.…Why will this be hard for us?2021I was working on a strategy and helping review another this week,…In my experience, this phenomenon has an easily recognizable marker. A team that accrues OODA deficit tends to fall into this gait of periodically changing things around to see if their troubles will go away. However, because the source of the deficit remains unexplored, the rearranging of furniture rarely results in lasting change. Be it a dramatic shift in priorities, changing of leadership, or a reorg — it’s at best a temporary fix, quickly leading back to deficit accrual.

Separating cargo from the train2023I’ve been puzzling over a problem that many engineering teams face and…One of my go-to examples of this sawtooth pattern is “leads reset.” As the team forms, a small group of leads is organized. At first, these leads operate as an effective unit, providing valuable direction and insights on priorities to the rest of the team. However, as the time goes by, leads discover gaps in their knowledge, and pull in more people onto the leads group. Sometimes this happens as a result of a team growing, but often, the breadth of the challenge is such that a small group of people simply can’t grasp it fully. Plus, it feels important to be in the leads group. After a little while, the group of leads becomes large and unwieldy. Effective conversations yield to bickering and eye-rolling. Leads themselves become disheartened, which percolates throughout the team. So what happens next? As you’d probably guessed, a new, smaller group of leads is formed — until the next reset.

Organizational cartography2022Given that this team is thriving, the various units within it collaborate…Having been part of these groups and an organizer of them, it always struck me as weird: why is it that we keep trying this same method to organize a leadership structure, over and over again? When a question like this pops up, it’s a good sign that the OODA deficit is being accrued.

Oodles of OODA loops2021Our discovery of the inner OODA loop was cool, but I bet…The OODA inside2021Because of the way we humans are wired, the expectation gradient is…The OODA Loop2021One of the lenses for which I tend to reach frequently is…Retained and immediate modethe same dayAt the core of the OODA loop is the concept of a…Can macro-jank happen spontaneously, without first accruing micro-jank? It seems possible. Like, let’s imagine a severe and rapid environment change… oh wait, we don’t have to. It’s right outside. The COVID-19 pandemic will likely be a subject of many studies as a dramatic disruption of our environment. But was it truly an unexpected event or rather an outcome of micro-jank accumulating over a long period of time? How might we reason about that? To get there, we need to take a closer look at the nature of the OODA loop.