OODA loops aren’t limited to competing strategies, and there’s more to an enterprise being cognitive than making use of OODA loops.

Sorry for starting in the middle. Regular readers will recall Colonel John Boyd’s OODA loop. For the rest, it stands for Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act, after which you review the results of your Action … you Observe, starting the cycle again.

OODA holds sway in time-bound competitions, where whichever side has the faster OODA loops wins, because the faster side’s actions invalidate the slower side’s observations, orientation, and decisions, forcing it to start over.

But OODA isn’t restricted to competitions, and in fact it’s a decent general-purpose model for cognition, which is why The Cognitive Enterprise — the book I co-authored with Scott Lee on this subject — uses OODA as a general-purpose way of making an enterprise more cognitive.

Time to take a step back, because OODA is a mechanism — a way for enterprises to become more cognitive. It isn’t the essence. At the heart of the concept is that the enterprise acts with intention — it’s akin to an organism that has a purpose and acts so as to achieve it.

Look at two enterprises, one industrial, the other cognitive, as a customer, from the outside in. An industrial enterprise looks like what it is — a collection of processes you as a customer have to figure out in order to do business. If the processes aren’t designed to deliver what you want to buy, you either live with the frustration or take your business elsewhere.

A cognitive enterprise, in contrast, interacts with each customer as if the interaction was a person-to-person conversation. The ability to act with intention in ways that adapt to each customer’s needs is what lets entrepreneurships survive while surrounded by much larger competitors. Cognitive enterprises figure out how to make entrepreneurship scale — not only when it comes to strategy, but throughout.

Take, for example, Amazon’s “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought …” and Netflix’s “Because you watched …” features. They’re excellent examples of enterprises being cognitive, right down at the level of one-on-one customer interactions. They follow the OODA model quite nicely, too — they observe what you shop for, interpret your behavior so as to infer your preferences (they orient), decide on what to offer you, and then show you the offer in a persuasive way.

Down at the level of individual customer interactions, the most successful companies right now all seem to be as cognitive as they can be.

Your challenge: Quite obviously, no business of any size can achieve cognition without a lot of information technology, some of which interacts with customers directly, the rest of which supports employees who interact with customers directly.

Is your IT department ready to provide it?

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And on a completely different topic, there’s Delta.

In case you somehow missed the story, Delta had a complete systems meltdown last week, grounding its fleet and stranding thousands of travelers for days.

Delta initially blamed the problem on a power outage, leaving all of us who know anything at all about the subject scratching our heads.

You don’t get to run a data center at the Delta scale without having sophisticated power management. Decades ago, when I was directly responsible for some of this, we made sure we were getting power from two separate substations so that a single transformer failure wouldn’t affect us; this in addition to our UPS and backup generators.

And, we tested all of the above from time to time to make sure they worked — this in a relatively small, 2,500 employee corporation.

Among the many puzzling aspects of this story, two stand out.

The first is that Delta’s explanation of what happened seems to change every day. First it was a power outage. Then it was a transformer. Then it was a failed electrical component that took down the transformer that provided power to the data center. That’s the transformer, not one of the transformers, which would mean Delta’s power distribution system was built with a single point of failure.

Then, maybe, there was a fire in the data center, too.

Which brings us to the second source of puzzlement: I’ve read few complaints about Delta’s ever-changing account of these events, but lots of speculation as to what might have been the “real” problem, even though Delta’s ever-changing account of things is an observable fact while the speculation — which includes the usual Strongly Held Opinions about Why Delta Should Be Ashamed of Itself — is largely fact-free opining.

The view from here: Let’s find out why Delta should be ashamed of itself first.