Certainty in Uncertain Times (Part 3)

Who Wins?

Imagine a game of Chess, Checkers, or Uno where one player gets to move twice for every move their opponent makes. Who wins? The player who moves twice as often.  

In part 1 of this series, we examined how the Ukrainian military has, thus far, been able to overcome tremendous odds as they have battled Russia to protect their homeland. They used the lessons learned from the loss of Crimea in 2014 to overhaul their military, modernizing their command style from top to bottom. Utilizing the latest technologies to gather intelligence and expecting personnel to assess and adapt based on available intelligence has kept the Ukrainian military more agile and adaptive. If you missed part 1 and want to read our analysis, you can find it here: Certainty in Uncertain Times (Part 1). 

We explored the battle between the Soviet MiG-15 and the US F-86 Sabre fighter planes during the Korean War in part 2. At the time, the MiG-15 was considered the superior aircraft. However, the F-86 Sabre stood out in battle, defeating the MiG-15s ten times out of eleven. And this result repeated, even when Americans were piloting both in later tests. So, what was the key? It turned out that the F-86 had two critical advantages in battle: a bubble canopy that provided superior situational awareness and hydraulic controls that provided quicker response times between maneuvers. If you missed part 2 and want to read our examination of these competitors, you can find it here: Certainty in Uncertain Times (Part 2). 

Awareness and responsiveness are the two key contributors to success in the examples above. Let’s turn our attention now to a few examples in business. 

How does all of this apply to everyday business? 

Luckily, we have some images to help close the loop on this analogy. A modern Fighter Jet cockpit is 100% focused on providing the pilot with as much RELEVANT information as possible. The screens are designed so that the pilot can refocus the data presented on what is most critical. In a long flight, that might be diagnostics on the aircraft, fuel load, etc. While in combat, the pilot needs it to show them as much of the battlefield (airspace and ground) as possible. This modern marvel has been designed to make its pilot seem omniscient to their enemies. To enable them to make sense of the chaos of war and thus make better decisions more quickly. 

In today’s business world, that’s analytics. Full stop. A well-designed analytics team/platform should enable your employees, from executive leadership down to front-line workers, to make sense of the complex chaos in our global business environment. They should be able to quickly understand what is happening at a 100K foot aggregate level and pinpoint problems and opportunities at the most granular level.  

To use a recent example, in September 2022, Ford had to suspend production of vehicles not because of computer chips or any other “important” part but due to a lack of blue Ford logos. That ten-cent part cost them millions of dollars daily in lost revenue and productivity. But something like that would never appear in an Excel pivot table of 12-month aggregates or the top 20% of your procurement spend. Your only shot at catching it is either a) someone on the warehouse floor noticing the dwindling stock, putting the whole picture together on their own, raising their hands, and then running it up the bureaucratic chain, or b) an embedded analytics capability that set up to flag anomalies and to infer potential issues based on CURRENT data. Not last year’s data… today’s data. 

Back to our fighters. The only value of the pilot seeing more is if the pilot can do something with it. While the F-86 pilot could hypothetically take four actions in a given period, the MiG pilot could only make 1-2. The MiG pilot could have had that same bubble canopy and been able to see the F-86, but they still would not have been able to close the loop and act on this information. They simply could not react as quickly. 

Better information AND the ability to react quickly led to the aforementioned 10 to 1 victory ratio favoring the F-86. This combination resulted in what is called fast transients, enabling the American pilot to set up and exploit unexpected situations before the opponent could react. 

In our business world, the equivalent is democratizing intelligence to every level of decision-makers AND empowering them to act on it.  

React Before it Becomes a Problem.

Yamaha set out in 1981 to overtake Honda and become the world’s largest motorcycle manufacturer, literally announcing their intentions. Honda countered using speed and agility, introducing 113 new models to Yamaha’s 37. With each new model, Honda gathered new insights into their customer’s wants and needs, constantly adapting and adjusting. Yamaha surrendered with a public statement seeking to end the “war”. How had Honda been able to bring Yamaha to its knees in surrender? A quick decision cycle time enabled Honda to create marketplace opportunities, learn what customers wanted, and help to shape wants simultaneously. How might things have played out differently had Honda waited to see what Yamaha could do instead of acting decisively and immediately based on the current and immediate threat? Their combination of awareness and quick reaction time was vital to Honda winning the “war.”1  

Shifting to automobile manufacturing, Toyota is famous for the build quality of their cars and the efficiency of their production processes. Every employee involved in manufacturing has the authority and mandate to stop the production line if they see a problem. The downside is that there will likely be some unnecessary stoppages. However, by pushing this authority down to the level with the most immediate information, the organization can react to a problem right when it starts instead of allowing it to metastasize and wreak havoc on the business. Once again, front-line awareness and reaction time lead to quick decision cycle times and are critical to their success. 

Let’s put this all back together in our OODA loop framework: 

• Observe - Business Intelligence 
• Orient - Analytics 

• Decide - Leadership (all levels) 
• Act - Execution 
  

Modern business intelligence groups are your eyes and ears. They can help each business function improve its ability to gather and aggregate all the data thrown at you every second of every day. 

Decision Making - FASTER 

Over and over, history has taught us how valuable having even just a smidge more information, having information sooner, and then acting on it can turn the course of events. Now truthfully ask yourself, how does your business make decisions? How does it gather and disseminate intelligence? Which of the scenarios examined over these first three parts in our series most resemble your business intelligence gathering and decision-making? Which would you prefer? 

Is your decision loop tighter than your competitors? Can you act so quickly that they throw up their hands and say, “What the …..”? 

Stay tuned next week as we delve into how to give your business the 10 to 1 ADVANTAGE. 

1 Richards, Chet. “Nor the Battle to the Strong.” CERTAIN TO WIN: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business. By Chet Richards, 2004, pp. 13-27.