Social OODA Super Speedway

By Ali Anani and Bas de Baar

In our previous article we painted the image of people walking on the OODA highway, continuously performing OODA loops, interacting with the environment, in the search for information packages that help them adapt to changes. In this posting we want to extend this notion to the use of social OODA loops.

Image by kk+

Humans are social. A group of people interacting with each other has to be viewed in a social context. (Human) needs are all expressed in comparison of other members of the globe. That is why they are considered social. In this context we also consider the concept of group affiliation. Group affiliation is what it is all about in our lives. During your life you are a member of a lot of social groups, by default, by choice or by force (…) The group memberships determine how we see ourselves in the whole of society, it determines our identity. (source)

If we want to have a proper understanding of how groups of people adapt to different situation, we need to have a look at how resilience is created within a social complex system. Making the system social affects the OODA Highway view at two levels:

• the effects on the mental constructs we use in the observe step;
• as a driving force in our behavior as a goal to satisfy.

Curtis Gale helps us explaining the first aspect by his introduction of social OODA loops. He points out that in a traditional OODA loop the orient phase is assisted by mental models and experiences from the individual person.

Image by PhatIcCommunion.com

But in the context of social systems being affiliated with a certain social group brings a specific set of mental constructs with it. If consider yourself religious, you are guided by a different mental model than when you are a Darwinian. The notion as that these mental constructs are shared among the members of the social group.

Image by PhatIcCommunion.com

The effectiveness of adaption in social complex system can be considered depending on the quality and amount of mental constructs a person has as its disposal. Like people on the previous OODA Highway, who were eating information like PacMan for their survival, our social PacMans must have food too.

We are proposing the concept of social capital as being the central available element that expresses the effectiveness of resilience and adaption within a social system. Although there are a lot of definitions going around for this concept, it provides the notion that a higher value shows better access to other people, to either share, exchange or in an other form influence shared constructs. A definition that comes close in reflecting this aspect: The individual and communal time and energy that is available for such things as community improvement, social networking, civic engagement, personal recreation, and other activities that create social bonds between individuals and groups. This mirrors our observation that people are forming social clusters.

Closely related to social capital are social networks. If you are better connected, you are more likely to have a larger social capital. This turn us to the question on how social capital is distributed among the system. The information OODA Loop and the Social OODA loop interact. E.g. Information exclusion might lead to social exclusion, which in turn affects social interactions. The network effect was ably recorded by Buchanan. This effect leads to the spiky and flattened social landscape, in which agents experience differences in their ability to observe and gather information depending on their location on the landscape network organization. Moreover, a network organization depends only weakly or not at all on the actions or character of their individual members. In other words, your own individual actions have no real impact on the whole, its your place within the network, who you know, that makes the difference.

The question turns into if information is not evenly distributed would they result in uneven social OODA loops? Or, will social networks produce different landscape of interactions than that of the information network? It turns out that social networks behave similarly. If we take a look at how social structures have evolved over the centuries, you can see that we went from a flat distribution to a long tail.

Image by PhatIcCommunion.com

The social network occurs in steps, much like an assembly line. Most systems designed by man are sequential. Branching operations, however, have a more involved structure: they contain feedback loops, branches and bifurcations, and jumps from one linear sequence to another.

Electronic social networks introduce new parameters to the complexity of interactions. The speed of interaction and the removal of the impact of direct feelings are noticeable factors. Feelings impact the quality and frequency of interactions on the network. Good feeling affects actions and these in turn affect outcomes. To get good results you need to create good feelings. A leader who is emotionally intelligent will induce loving feeling among his staff, and this will in turn produce likeable outcomes.

Although we insinuated above a direct relationship between social capital and the level of connectivity in the social network, in reality the dimensions are a little more complex, and we used this sample just for illustration. E.g. the location in the network is a balance between direct bonding and keeping a little distance. Some possible negative effects like too strong bonding, exclusion of outsiders, bullying of deviants and resistance to change are associated with being in a center of a social network and are not contributing to adaptability.

The process of social interactions is complicated and may bifurcate into new directions. These interactions might unfold novel ideas. The Long Tail Distribution is an outcome of these positive interactions. To give one example, a publishing company might have a book that is selling very well (a spike) and another book that does not sell very well. By recommending the low-selling book (flat sales) to the readers of the high-selling book customers might be tempted to buy the book and spur its sales. Social interactions are impacting our economic lives as well. The landscape of the emerging social communities is having an impact on the economic landscape. However; all interactions are based on observing (information collection), which leads to visualization of the new situation (orientation) and then to decision making and acting.

This OODA loop has a long tail distribution, and accordingly social interactions and economic interactions are likely to have the same distribution.

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.