I was recently reading the artofmanliness on OODA loops, and the exploits of John Boyd. Great piece.
7,000 words on improving thought processes naturally leads one to thinking. Reapplying models from one discipline onto a problem from another discipline is one of my favorite ways of finding novel solutions to problems.
I’m not an expert on intentional OODA loops, but I may add that to my mental toy box. As for the strategy of remapping the methods of one discipline onto the problems of another, this is a good topic not for one post but a while blog, so I may start posting on this topic more.
How does it work?
Have you ever seen an artist’s model, made of wood and wire? Are you familiar with using it to draw different people, based on some familiar limb ratios? No? How about CSS in web programming? An excel sheet or word template?
In each of these some likely commonalities are factored out, copied, and only what’s different is added to each iteration. This is an effective meta strategy for solving all kinds of problems, but it really comes into its own when you use it in problem solving itself.
For counter-example I will also point to the now familiar axiom, “If your only tool is a hammer every problem looks like a nail.” This is an ineffective way of dealing with lots of problems. With only one method of problem solving available, trying to map the solution onto other problems doesn’t work at all. A hammer is good only for breaking things, unless they are built to be hit (like a nail).
It’s rarely much use in surgery (or other repair work).
So what do you do? Build out your tool box. Prior proper planning prevents piss poor performance. You can plan to improvise the same way an athlete plans on having speed and strength. Just being fast, or strong wrong win the game with nothing else, but they sure seem to help. So your plans need the innate ability to adapt. Having a whole playbook is a good start.
Biology is my go-to move. A while host of problems under a wide range of life and death circumstance reported by the necessity of survival over eons is a strong start to a full set of tools. The U.S.Navy just built a stealth submariner drone modeled after a map shark. No need to reinvent the wheel. There was plenty of advanced research done in terrorizing lesser swimmers for hundreds of millions of years. “All artists borrow, great artists steal.”
I’m not advocating plagiarism, in fact I’m going to go ahead and plug the article that inspired this post again, because it’s a great primer, and I intend to use it as a framework for this series much like our artist’s mannequin above.
Back to biology. I was a Discovery channel kid. Back when it wasn’t just Mythbusters (great show!) and a sad collection of reality shows (boo!).
If you aren’t familiar with the work of David Attenborough, get acquainted. The behind the scenes problem solving to get the spectacular shots they use is a story into itself. The meat of the show(s), is the animals themselves, interacting with their environment. An ambush predator, vs. a stalker; monogamous breeding strategies or simply releasing as a group (like coral); camouflage vs. armor; and countless other examples of the different ways animals solve similar problems are all great teaching examples. Occasionally, there are even examples of similar strategies for dealing with wildly different problems. Here I would cite winged flight as a way to avoid predation By land (and even sea!) predators. It’s elegant, effective, and consistent.
There are countless variations, all instructive, and much of the material is available on YouTube. Coursera even had a class on animal behavior (based largely on game theory), as well as a Model Thinking course from University of Michigan. Both are fantastic.
(I need to add some links when I find them, but I’m going to pay this as is for now)
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