Google, Goliath and OODA

I've been reading What Would Google Do?, and one of the key themes is that Google "makes mistakes well." Google doesn't wait and hold back new technologies and programs that it has already deemed perfect. Instead, they release everything in beta, gather information, and then adapt, change and tweak the product until it meets their standards. Their ability to gather information and act on it, rather than simple genius, is one of the keys to their success.

Malcolm Gladwell, in this recent column in the New Yorker, argues that similar techniques aided David, Lawrence of Arabia and the Kentucky Wildcats in their quests to defeat larger opponents. He says that speed, adaptability, and rapid information gathering are why insurgents are capable of beating much "larger" foes. He uses David from the Bible as an example:

“The sudden astonishment when David sprints forward must have frozen Goliath, making him a better target,” the poet and critic Robert Pinsky writes in “The Life of David.”...David pressed. That’s what Davids do when they want to beat Goliaths.

In other words, David wasn't bigger, stronger or more skilled than his opponent. He just decided what he was going to do more quickly. He didn't wait for the opponent to respond. He didn't go along with the conventional back-and-forth, give and take, wait-your-turn culture of ancient combat. Gladwell also states that underdogs can win basketball games by employing the full-court press and doing away with basketball's wait-your-turn culture:

Pitino trains his players to look for what he calls the “rush state” in their opponents—that moment when the player with the ball is shaken out of his tempo—and L.S.U. could not find a way to get out of the rush state.

Reading about Google, Goliath and the Wildcats, I realized that bloggers operate in a similar state. They publish quickly, can tenaciously stay on a story if necessary, move to a new story when needed, enlist loyal supporters to help gather information and correct mistakes quickly and with ease. They are publishing insurgents.

The heart of this strategy was discovered long before the rise of Google. In the 1980s, U.S. military strategist, Colonel John Boyd, popularized the concept of the OODA Loop, a battlefiend decision-making strategy. OODA stands for Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. OODA is what Google, David, underdog basketball teams, and bloggers all do.

The basic concept is simple. Whoever can "cycle through OODA" the fastest will generally win in air combat. Rapid cycling through OODA puts the opponent in what Pitino called the "Rush State." The unpredictability and unobservability of a fighter pilot who is quickly cycling through OODA makes defeating him virtually impossible. If an enemy fighter pilot can observe, orient, decide and act in the time it takes you to observe, your observation is meaningless by the time you get to the second step.

A big part of success in the SPAN Society comes from having an OODA attitude. Using modern communication networks, you can surprise, stun and disorient your opponents. According to both Gladwell and Boyd, it's not necessarily the brute force applied or even tactical skill that makes the difference in combat. It's the ability to out-observe and out-decide your opponent that matters. Whoever gathers information (observes), processes that information (orients), makes a decision (decides) and executes that decision (acts) in the shortest period of time, cycling through the loop again and again, will win the battle.

These skills, above and beyond brute force or manpower, are the slingshots of SPAN.