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OODA Loop

Activate when: competitor outmaneuvers you despite worse resources; decisions take longer than the situation allows; team is losing a competition they should... Skill: OODA Loop Owner: deciqai Summary: Activate when: competitor outmaneuvers you despite worse resources; decisions take longer than the situation allows; team is losing a competition they should... Tags: latest:1.0.5 Version history: v1.0.5 | 2026-07-16T18:09:44.554Z | user Description tail link + agents machine-readable metadata line (deciqai.com/s/ooda-loop.json) v1.0.4 | 2026-07-09T11:19:51.164Z | user Refresh

OpenClaw

View on ClawHub Homepage

Rank

Safety

Downloads

1.1k

Updated

Oct 11, 2026

Version

1.0.5

Source

CLAWHUB

About

What it does, and when to use it.

Capability contract not published. No trust telemetry is available yet. 1.1K downloads reported by the source. Last updated 10/11/2026.

Avoid when

Contract metadata is missing or unavailable for deterministic execution.

Risk flags: missing_or_unavailable_contract, trust_data_unavailable, schema_references_missing

Public facts

Every fact links back to the source it came from.

Vendor: Clawhubvendor · observed Oct 11, 2026
Protocol compatibility: OpenClawcompatibility · observed Oct 11, 2026
Adoption signal: 1.1K downloadsadoption · observed Oct 11, 2026
Latest release: 1.0.5release · observed Jul 16, 2026
Handshake status: UNKNOWNsecurity

Install and run

Setup complexity: low.

clawhub skill install s17a4mqcnk515kvaca5ze55d0x88pfpx:ooda-loop

Setup complexity is classified as HIGH. You must provision dedicated cloud infrastructure or an isolated VM. Do not run this directly on your local workstation.
Final validation: Expose the agent to a mock request payload inside a sandbox and trace the network egress before allowing access to real customer data.

Contract: missing

curl -s "https://www.xpersona.co/api/v1/agents/clawhub-deciqai-ooda-loop/snapshot"

Documentation

CLAWHUB

143,623 characters of source documentation, loaded on request.

Extracted files

5 files captured from the source.

SKILL.md

---
name: ooda-loop
description: "Activate when: competitor outmaneuvers you despite worse resources; decisions take longer than the situation allows; team is losing a competition they should win; setting up crisis or incident response; someone says 'Boyd', 'decision cycle', 'get inside their loop', or 'tempo'. Do NOT activate when: situation is genuinely non-competitive and slow deliberation is right; speed was recently optimized at the expense of orientation quality. More: deciqai.com/c/ooda-loop"
---

# OODA Loop

## Overview

Colonel John Boyd (1927-1997) derived the OODA Loop from Korean War air-combat data: the F-86 Sabre achieved a ~10:1 kill ratio over the technically superior MiG-15 because better cockpit visibility and hydraulic controls let pilots cycle Observe → Orient → Decide → Act faster — the slower pilot was always reacting to obsolete information.

The strategic claim: **whichever side cycles faster wins** — but the bottleneck is almost always **Orient** (the synthesis step), not raw speed. A team that orients badly just produces wrong decisions faster.

Composes with `metacognition` (Orient is where reasoning errors surface), `feedback-loops` (OODA is a competitive feedback loop), `first-principles` (orient from bedrock, not inherited belief), and `momentum-and-form` (cycle-time advantage builds momentum).

## When to Use

- Competitor outmaneuvers you despite your better resources, capital, or product
- Decisions take longer than the situation allows; losing a competition you should win
- Designing org structure where decision-speed is a competitive variable
- Crisis / incident response — OODA is the operational frame
- AI-native startup out-shipping a slower incumbent as model capabilities shift monthly (AI adoption, AI capex, ship-on-release-day tempo)

**Not when:** genuinely non-competitive setting; your slowness is high-quality orientation worth keeping; speed was recently pushed at the expense of orient quality.

## Coaching Novices (Adaptive Front Door)

- **Engine mode:** user has a concrete competitive case → run The Process directly.
- **Coach mode:** user is unfamiliar or has no concrete case → guide step by step.

In Coach mode, respond one step at a time. Each [WAIT] is a hard stop — output only that step's question, then stop.

1. One-line: the side cycling Observe-Orient-Decide-Act faster wins because the slower side reacts to obsolete info — but the bottleneck is usually *Orient*, not raw speed.
2. Check fit: non-competitive settings → not this lens.
3. Elicit the real situation: what competition or decision problem are you facing?
> **[WAIT — do not advance until user responds]**
4. Run The Process one step at a time: map your loop, estimate the opponent's loop, find the bottleneck, test Orient quality.
> **[WAIT — do not advance until user responds]**
5. Close by naming the specific stage to accelerate and, if Orient, the exact mental-model fix they uncovered.
> **[WAIT — do not advance until user responds]**

_meta.json

{
  "ownerId": "kn754b8sk22s8c6gjxt02bftbn88q7ye",
  "slug": "ooda-loop",
  "version": "1.0.5",
  "publishedAt": 1784225384554
}

references/sources.md

# Sources — ooda-loop

> *Primary sources for the [ooda-loop](../SKILL.md) skill.*

- Boyd, J. R. (1976-1995). "Patterns of Conflict" briefing slides. Unpublished primary source; reproduced in multiple subsequent works.
- Coram, R. (2002). *Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War.* Little, Brown. ISBN 978-0316796880. The accessible biographical treatment with extensive coverage of Korean War analysis.
- Osinga, F. P. B. (2007). *Science, Strategy and War: The Strategic Theory of John Boyd.* Routledge. ISBN 978-0415459525. The canonical scholarly source on Boyd's strategic theory.
- Hammond, G. T. (2001). *The Mind of War: John Boyd and American Security.* Smithsonian Institution Press. ISBN 978-1588340788. A second comprehensive treatment.
- US Marine Corps (1989/1997). *Warfighting* (MCDP 1). The doctrinal manual that integrates Boyd's framework into modern military doctrine.
- Richards, C. W. (2004). *Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business.* Xlibris. ISBN 978-1413449037. Business-application synthesis.
- Stanford HAI (2024, 2025). *Artificial Intelligence Index Report.* Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI. https://aiindex.stanford.edu — tracks frontier-model release frequency, capability trends, and the growth of open-weight models; background for the 2024–2026 AI-competition example.
- Frontier-lab public release announcements (2023–2025): OpenAI (openai.com/blog), Anthropic (anthropic.com/news), and Google DeepMind (deepmind.google) model-release pages — primary, durable documentation of the accelerating release cadence referenced in the 2024–2026 example.

examples/ai-startups-out-cycling-incumbents-2024-2026.md

# Method in Action: AI Startups Out-Cycling Incumbents When Capabilities Shift Monthly (2024–2026)

> *Example for the [ooda-loop](../SKILL.md) skill.*

The Korean War case shows OODA at the scale of a dogfight; the Gulf War case shows it at theater scale. The 2024–2026 AI wave shows the same mechanism in a market where the *ground itself* — the underlying model capability — moves faster than most incumbents' planning cycles. When a frontier model release can reset what is buildable every few weeks, the strategic variable is no longer who has the most engineers or capital; it is who can Observe a new capability, re-Orient a product around it, Decide, and ship before the advantage decays.

This is a *pattern* case, not a single-company case: it maps the OODA structure common to how AI-native startups repeatedly beat larger, slower rivals during this period. Where a specific fact is not durably public, it is described in qualified terms rather than invented.

**The environment: monthly capability shocks.** Across 2023–2025 the frontier moved on a cadence measured in weeks to months, not years — successive releases from multiple labs (OpenAI's GPT-4 and later models, Anthropic's Claude family, Google's Gemini, and a wave of strong open-weight models such as Meta's Llama and Mistral's releases) meant that a capability which was a moat one quarter was a commodity API call the next. In OODA terms, the *tempo of the battlefield itself* accelerated. That is the condition under which cycle-time advantage compounds fastest.

Now the mapped steps.

**Step 1 — Map your loop (the AI-native startup).** Observe: a small team watches model releases, changelogs, and developer chatter directly — often within hours of a release. Orient: because the team is small and un-committed to a legacy architecture, it re-frames "what is now buildable" quickly. Decide: founders hold decision rights, so a pivot needs no committee. Act: a thin product wrapped around model APIs can ship an update in days. Total loop: on the order of days to a couple of weeks.

**Step 2 — Estimate the opponent's loop (the incumbent).** A large incumbent Observes the same release but through slower channels (strategy reviews, analyst briefings). Orient is anchored to an existing roadmap, an installed base, and prior investments — synthesis is heavy and politically loaded. Decide runs through planning cycles, legal, and brand review. Act is gated by release trains, integration testing, and backward-compatibility obligations. Total loop: frequently a quarter or more. The *relative* gap — days versus a quarter — is the whole story.

**Step 3 — Find the bottleneck.** For the startup the binding constraint is usually **Act** (can we ship the new capability into the product fast enough?), and the accelerant is a thin, deploy-often architecture. For the incumbent the bottleneck is almost never Observe — they see the release too — it is **Orient and Decide**: re-framing around a capability that may canniba

examples/gulf-war-left-hook-maneuver-warfare-1991.md

# Method in Action: The Gulf War "Left Hook" and Maneuver-Warfare Doctrine (1989–1991)

> *Example for the [ooda-loop](../SKILL.md) skill.*

The Korean War case shows OODA at the scale of a single dogfight. The 1991 Gulf War shows the same mechanism at the scale of a theater campaign — and shows the loop being deliberately *engineered* rather than inherited from cockpit design.

**The doctrinal setup.** Through the 1980s, Boyd delivered his "Patterns of Conflict" briefing hundreds of times to military audiences. The US Marine Corps, under Commandant Al Gray, codified the result in *Warfighting* (FMFM 1, 1989; reissued as MCDP 1, 1997), which made **tempo** — operating at a faster cycle than the enemy can process — a central doctrinal concept, replacing attrition warfare with maneuver warfare. Coram (2002) documents that during Desert Storm planning, Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney — who had attended Boyd's briefings as a congressman — called Boyd in to discuss the ground-campaign concept, and rejected an early head-on assault plan into Kuwait in favor of a wide envelopment.

**Degrading the opponent's Observe.** The coalition air campaign (opening January 17, 1991) systematically destroyed Iraqi radar, reconnaissance, and command-and-control before any ground movement began. Iraq's Observe stage was not merely slower — it was blinded, while coalition satellites and JSTARS aircraft watched the whole theater.

**Corrupting the opponent's Orient.** Coalition deception fed Iraqi command exactly the picture it already expected: Marine amphibious forces rehearsed landings offshore, and demonstrations near the Wadi al-Batin reinforced the assumption of a frontal attack into Kuwait. Iraqi orientation locked onto a coastal-and-frontal defense — a framework inherited from expectation, never updated against reality, because the instruments for updating it had been destroyed.

**Stalling the opponent's Decide.** Iraq's rigid, top-down command style required decisions to flow through Baghdad. With communications cut, subordinate commanders could neither report accurately nor receive timely orders. The Decide stage did not just slow; it effectively stopped.

**Out-cycling on Act.** Meanwhile the coalition shifted two entire corps (XVIII Airborne and VII Corps) hundreds of kilometers west along the Saudi border, undetected. When the ground offensive opened on February 24, 1991, the main effort swept through the lightly defended western desert and hooked behind the Iraqi army in Kuwait — the "left hook." By the time Iraqi commanders understood where the main attack actually was, coalition armor was already behind them; every Iraqi response addressed a coalition position that no longer existed. The ground war ended in roughly 100 hours, with mass surrenders of units that were physically intact but organizationally paralyzed — Boyd's predicted end-state of an opponent whose actions have become disconnected from reality.

After Boyd's death in 1997, Marine Corps C

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