Boyd was a U.S. Air Force fighter pilot, but calling him that undersells him. He was part pilot, part mathematician, part philosopher, and part troublemaker. He asked questions nobody wanted asked, and once he started, he wouldn’t stop until you saw the world differently.
The 40-Second Rule and Energy–Maneuverability Theory
Boyd’s legend began in the cockpit. They called him “40-Second Boyd.” His standing bet was simple: start in any position, and within forty seconds he would maneuver behind you for the kill shot. Nobody could beat him. What made him unbeatable wasn’t just raw reflexes—it was science. Boyd created the Energy–Maneuverability Theory, which quantified aircraft performance in terms of energy gained or lost during combat. Suddenly, dogfights weren’t just instinct—they were math. Pilots who flew by feel now faced someone who could calculate their every move in joules of energy. That gave Boyd an unbeatable edge and reshaped how aircraft were designed and flown.
The Birth of OODA in the Sky
To understand why Boyd created the OODA loop, you need to imagine the cockpit of a fighter jet in the middle of a dogfight. The airframe is rattling under g-forces that press your body into the seat like a lead blanket. Your vision tunnels. Blood drains from your brain. Every turn, climb, and dive squeezes your body until you fight to stay conscious. At the same time, you are calculating airspeed, altitude, fuel, weapons, enemy position, and the physics of the sky. One hesitation—one wrong assumption—and you are dead.
Boyd thrived in this environment. He constantly observed what the enemy was doing, oriented himself in relation to the changing situation, decided on the best maneuver, and acted—all before the other pilot could finish their thought. In aerial combat, that tiny advantage in loops meant life or death.
Fighter pilots in dogfights have to track dozens of variables at once: the position of the sun blinding the canopy, the enemy’s angle of attack, the feel of the jet shuddering near a stall, the shrinking margin of fuel, the blur of tracers arcing past. Every second, the environment changes. Every second, new data floods in. The pilot who loops through that chaos faster seizes the initiative and forces the other to react on stale information. That is the heart of OODA—speed to truth.
Interlude: Loops Bring You Closer to Truth
“Understand what is real as fast as possible. Guessing, modeling, forecasting, conjecture etc., has value, but knowing truth is better. Visibility into what is real enables actions to be taken efficiently based on fact.”
Think about trying to sink a basketball shot. The first time you miss, you adjust. Bend your knees a little more. Give the ball more spin. Aim higher. Each attempt is a loop—act, observe the result, adjust, and try again. Over time, the shot improves because each loop pulls you closer to the truth of what works.
Inventors used loops the same way. Thomas Edison didn’t stumble on the light bulb by guessing once. He tested thousands of materials, looping through trial and error until he found one that burned bright without burning out.
The Wright brothers weren’t lucky amateurs. They built gliders, tested them, crashed them, adjusted the wings, and tried again. Each loop taught them something new about lift, drag, and control. Step by step, they moved from failure to flight.
Now zoom out to the biggest loops in history. For centuries, Europeans only guessed about the size of the world. Maps were filled with speculation and sea monsters. Then Magellan set sail. His loop was massive—years of hardship, ships lost, men dead—but when one battered ship returned, it brought back the truth: the Earth could be circumnavigated. Conjecture was replaced with fact. The next generation of explorers didn’t start from scratch; they started from truth.
That’s how loops work. Each cycle strips away assumptions and replaces them with evidence. The tighter the loop, the faster you reach reality. Edison and the Wright brothers compressed their loops into days and weeks. Magellan needed years. Today, technology allows businesses to loop in seconds. A product feature can be tested, measured, and adjusted in real time. Supply chains can spot delays the moment they occur. Feedback that once took quarters now takes hours.
The most dramatic example of this is the U.S. fighter jet, the F-35. This aircraft is not really “flown” by a human in the traditional sense. It relies on millions of lines of code, automation, AI, sensors, and feedback loops operating at millisecond speeds. No human pilot could possibly manage that level of complexity unaided.
What makes the F-35 work is a polyintelligent triad: human intelligence for mission management, judgment and ethics, machine intelligence for speed, automation and computation, and ecological intelligence through sensors that constantly scan the environment.
Each element alone is insufficient, but together they create a platform of unmatched capability. The benefit of operating a polyintelligent-dependent flight system is unsurpassed performance, power, and capabilities. It is not just a plane; it is a polyintelligent ecosystem in the sky.
This is where polyintelligence changes the game. By combining human judgment, machine speed, and ecological awareness, polyintelligence lets us reach truth, facts, and clarity far faster than human capabilities alone. Machines can process signals, data, and feedback loops at digital speed, while humans provide context, meaning, and ethical direction. Together, they strip away illusions and surface reality at a pace that makes the old, slow loops of history look prehistoric.
Measurement: The Compass Inside the Loop
Peter Drucker once quipped, “You can’t manage what you can’t measure.” Lord Kelvin said it even more sharply: “If you can’t put it in numbers, your knowledge is lacking.” Boyd might not have quoted either of them, but their logic pulses through his OODA loop. The OODA loop is a measurement machine. Each step either refines or corrupts the loop depending on what—and how—you measure.
• Observe – The Right Numbers at the Source. Observation is measurement in its rawest form. Get it wrong here, and everything downstream collapses. The British textile industry in the 1800s thrived not only because of steam engines, but because of standardized gauges and precise measures of cloth and thread. Competitors who couldn’t measure consistently couldn’t scale. Their “observe” phase was guesswork. Britain’s was data.
• Orient – Measuring What Matters. Orientation is where you interpret what the numbers mean. Henry Ford got this right. He didn’t just observe how long cars took to build; he measured every movement of workers’ hands, every second wasted on unnecessary motion. By orienting around time as the critical unit, he reimagined production, shrinking build time for a Model T from twelve hours to ninety-three minutes. Others saw a factory. Ford saw a stopwatch.
• Decide – Metrics as Filters for Choice. Decision-making is about choosing the best option based on orientation. Toyota showed how this works with lean manufacturing. They didn’t just count cars rolling off the line; they measured defects, waste, and cycle times. By deciding with those numbers, they built continuous improvement into their DNA. Detroit, meanwhile, kept deciding based on volume alone. Toyota’s loop sped ahead while Detroit’s spun in circles.
• Act – Feedback That Fuels the Next Loop. Action without measurement is theater. Action with measurement is iteration. McDonald’s proved this by making the burger business less about flavor innovation and more about measurable consistency. Temperature, cook times, wait times—each act of serving a meal fed back into the system. That’s why a Big Mac in Boise tastes suspiciously like a Big Mac in Bangkok.
Measurement sharpens every turn of the OODA loop. Observe with bad numbers, and you’re blind. Orient on the wrong numbers, and you’re delusional. Decide without meaningful numbers, and you’re guessing. Act without feedback, and you’re just busy. The right metrics, by contrast, turn the loop into a compass—keeping you aligned with reality while competitors get lost in their spin cycles.
Disruptive Clarity and Tempo
Boyd didn’t just theorize about loops; he lived them. His relentless push for clarity and speed disrupted both the U.S. military and later the corporate world. He forced organizations to confront the uncomfortable truth: if your decision cycle is slower, sloppier, or less accurate than your opponent’s, you’re toast. Robert Leonhard, another strategist, captured this perfectly: “If I can develop and pursue my plan to defeat you faster than you can execute your plan to defeat me, then your plan is unimportant.” That’s pure OODA logic. Your carefully drawn five-year plan isn’t just vulnerable—it’s irrelevant if someone else can loop around you in five months.
All of this changes the speed and tempo of business today. Organizations no longer operate on quarterly cycles of review and adjustment. The tempo has accelerated to daily, hourly, and in many cases, continuous loops. Decisions are made faster, but they must also be revisited faster. Strategies that once lasted years may now require adjustment in weeks. This relentless pace demands change—not just in technology, but in culture, leadership, and the way people work together. Businesses must learn to operate at a tempo beyond human comfort, powered by machines but guided by human purpose.
Boyd’s Legacy for Leaders
Today, Boyd’s thinking is baked into fields far beyond aviation—startups, logistics, sports, politics, and medicine. Anywhere decisions must be made under uncertainty, his fingerprints show up. Leaders who thrive in chaos aren’t the ones with the most data, the biggest budgets, or even the best ideas. They’re the ones who loop on reality faster, using measurement to fuel orientation, orientation to sharpen decisions, and decisions to power action. That’s how adaptation beats brute force.
Boyd never wrote a book, but if he had, it would’ve been short, sharp, and probably banned by HR. It would’ve said: loop fast, measure well, stay real, and keep disrupting. Or, in fewer words: adapt or die.
Adaptation requires more than quick thinking. It takes understanding why you are adapting, and how it is likely going to evolve in the future. In the next section, futurist Frank Diana explains how to think about and plan for our unpredictable future.
*I use AI in all my work.
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Kevin Benedict
Futurist, and Lecturer at TCS
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***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.
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