By Ali Anani and Bas de Baar

In this part of the Fish Pond Series we will show how people are on a continuous OODA loop going through life. The effectiveness is depending on the amount of solid processed information. While traveling through life you have positions where you have more of the proper information and places where you are lacking information. The road of life in this way becomes flat and spiky.

Projects, organizations and even society in general are all abstractions of the interactions of individuals. When looking at the behavior of a person, we see that from a very high level perspective this is determined by:

• who he is: personal traits of the individual, as gender, age, race;
• how he is at the moment: the emotional internal state of a person;
• what he wants: the desires that drive human behavior, and
• what he thinks will happen: a normal person doesnt jump of a cliff, just because he expects that he will be dead when he hits the beach. A normal person will not slap a very huge and muscular guy, just because he assumes he will get his own butt kicked afterwards. In our everyday life, and in our project life, we are guided by our perception of what we think might happen, our expectations.

When dealing with complex environments it is the last item we have to cultivate to handle situations properly. This is what makes a human complex system adaptive. A complex system is a large collection of interacting parts or entities. In the language of complexity theory, the parts are commonly referred to as agents. These interacting parts create the environment in which they exist. Further, by constantly acting and reacting with one another, the parts continually perturb and modify their environment (source Michael Hugos).

Failing to adapt to change may be fatal and may lead to self-killing without agents being aware of the repercussions of their acts. The fish in a fish pond illustrate these points clearly. Fish in their confined pond space excrete ammonia, which changes the acidity of the water of the pond leading eventually to the killing of the fish! Variation of the temperature of pond water is also stressful to the fish. Truly, some fish adapt to the changing environment in different ways such as by changing color, hiding and schooling yet their respond to changes is not fast enough and may result in the Winter Kill and Summer Kill of the fish.

The OODA Loop And Information Processing

To have a complex system that is resilient to changes, that has a mechanism to transform itself and to be able to adapt to the environment it needs feedback from the environment. Feedback information needs processing and communicating to other agents. To do this an agent has to go through the OODA loop. John Boyd, a famous military strategist, created the so-called OODA loop to give us structure when discussing this subject. The loop consists of four steps: Observe, Orient, Decide and then Act.

This insight was made by Brian Walker et al. These authors ably mention that in general terms, complex systems possess the ability to process information. The systems sense their environments and collect information about surrounding conditions. They then respond to this information by using a set of internal models to guide their actions. The systems may also encode data about new situations for use at a later date. This characteristic is closely related to the adaptation that occurs near the edge of chaos.

When looking at how a cluster of people (organizations, projects, society) adapts to changes, we have created the image of individuals operating on continuous OODA-loops. Observing reality based upon absorbing information from other agents and the environment. The processed information is used for orientation in combination of the mental model a person has of the reality. Based upon the expectations resulting from both previous steps an agents decides what to do. Like a little PacMan we are eating information packages on the OODA highway. The higher the amount of high quality information, the better our effectiveness in adaption.

Long Tail Distribution Of Information

There is another emerging attribute of information apart from the use of OODA loops in processing information. This is related to the uneven distribution of processed information. Information is wealth and wealth follows the Long Tail distribution. Let us first show a graph that is commonly known as The Long Tail Graph.

The long tail is the colloquial name for a long-known feature of some statistical distributions (Zipf, Power laws, Pareto distributions and/or general Lévy distributions). The feature is also known as heavy tails, power-law tails, or Pareto tails. Such distributions resemble the accompanying graph.

In these distributions a high-frequency or high-amplitude population is followed by a low-frequency or low-amplitude population which gradually "tails off." In many cases the infrequent or low-amplitude events”the long tail, represented here by the yellow portion of the graph”can make up the majority of the graph.

Information is a type of wealth and is expected accordingly to follow the same distribution. Recent studies show that this is the case indeed. The Internet has drastically lowered the cost of stocking and distribution of information (music, news, art, etc.) and physical products. This opened the way for long tail applications (TV spreads out on the Web).

These findings tempt us to conclude that the information landscape is both spiky (large differences between the amount of processed information available to agents) and flattened (everybody has the same amount of information available). Not everyone has access to the same amount of processed information. Every agent has different amounts of information available depending on its location and place in time. As we get more information the spikes will still be their, but the shares of the agents of the long tail might get more flattened.

The information OODA Loop is spiral as on the completion of one OODA loop new loops initiates from a new level and again this loop upon completion initiates a new loop from a different level. The information OODA loop is spiral with spikes and flat zones.

Read part 2: Social OODA Super Speedway

Further reading
A solid study that relates OODA loop to information processing is that reported by Schechtman.

Ali Anani got his PhD in chemistry in the UK (1972). As of 1981 Dr. Anani got interested in applying scientific approaches to economic and social issues.

Bas de Baar works as a Project Manager for over a decade. Since 2001, he has been the editor of SoftwareProjects.org, a popular website dedicated to Software Project Management.