Allan Samson
Founder and Principal, 5FiVeO Protect
How Observe, Orient, Decide, Act made relaxed alertness possible on the hardest day of a career.
On September 11, 2001, Allan Samson was leading a team of federal special agents in New York. In the hours that followed, they helped evacuate people by ferry from the World Trade Center zone. Looking back, he credits one simple framework with keeping his thinking clear: the OODA loop.
Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. Developed by military strategist John Boyd, the loop describes how people make decisions under pressure. You take in what is happening, place it in context, choose a course of action and carry it out, then begin again as the situation changes.
On that day the loop made relaxed alertness possible. Instead of freezing or reacting blindly, the team cycled quickly through what they could see and what they could control, adapting minute by minute.
The lessons reach well beyond that morning. Crises demand unified incident command, so agencies and organizations act as one rather than as many. Threat intelligence must be shared upstream and downstream, from the field to leadership and back again. And public private partnerships have to be built before a crisis, because there is no time to exchange business cards when the sirens start.
Every organization can apply the loop today, in planning, in exercises and in the way leaders are trained to think when the unexpected arrives.
