By Ali Anani and Bas de Baar

After reading about OODA loops and Social OODA some of you (yes you!) might have had one big question: What the heck has this to do with fish? In this post we will go back to the Fish Pond and explain the connection. Well, we'll try.

Fish do not simply float around in a tank. Although they once in a while bump into glass walls, they are able to find food, detect other fish and perform other cases of interacting with their environment. Fish in general can sense changes in the environment either by vision, by smell, sound and by the sensitivity of the skin (changes in water pressure, acidity and temperature). Yes, if fish want to communicate, they blow bubbles.

Photography by Sergis.

In a pond or ocean fish will continuously sense their environment, make something of that information and change their behavior if needed. This is an OODA loop. We can discuss to what level a fish uses a mental model to make explicit decisions. But at some level, conscious or at a more hard-wired biological level, information is processed into action. For fish the speed of which they can make use of the latest information is essential. Be too slow and your a fish stick.

A useful aspect for our metaphor is that some fish are social. They group together for a purpose. They travel in schools.

"Fish travel in schools because they are programmed by evolution to know that safety lies in numbers. Should a hungry predator approach the group, the first line of defense begins with the many confusing silvery flashes or mesmerizing stripes that make it difficult to focus on a single fish. Schools also seem to make finding food an easier task. And some fish schools are more like street gangs, patrolling their territory and running out any trespassing intruder. "

Photography by Suneko.

This does sound familiar to our previous discussion on clustering. We group together for economic reasons: it is easier or even essential to get life's necessities being part of a mob instead of being on your own. The other reason for forming clusters is social: it determines our position in the world, it is how we make a stand for our selves while protecting our brain against the complexity of the world.

In the metaphor we link the two reasons for schooling (food and protection) respectively to the notion of economic and social clustering.

In our first posting of this series we started out with this question:

Imagine a piece of pacific ocean: the fish, the water, the vegetation, the currents, the depth, the enormous width of it all. And now imagine you put four glass walls side by side in the ocean, to isolate a small column from surface to bottom. What happens?

What happens to schooling if you put a few fish in a more confined space like a tank?

If a pair of schooling fish are kept in a community tank, one of them will eventually begin to dominate, nipping at its companion's fins, pursuing it mercilessly and bullying it to the point of exhaustion. To find relief, the weaker fish is often forced to hide, especially during mealtimes. After a short time of such torment, the weaker of the two commonly succumbs to disease and inevitably dies. But having only one of a kind does little to solve the problem. The inherently social fish may seem lonely, keeping to itself in a corner or hiding most of the time. Or, it may attempt to play with its tank-mates of another kind, terrifying them or damaging their fins.

Keep remembering this line: Practices perceived as best practices become worst practices under changing environments.

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.