I’d had a long standing to-do note to post some of my thoughts regarding Shloky’s references to doom loops. His post yesterday reminded me of it and so I’m getting this out before something else grabs my attention.

Companies fall into doom loops when they attempt to launch enormous change programs without addressing the underlying reason they haven’t been innovative in the past. Failure inevitible results, since the underlying issues haven’t been addressed, and these disappointing results spur an even more massive change program. This, in turn, fails. As the cycle continues, the company becomes increasingly internally focused and more isolated from the actual issues that matter.

The dynamics of doom loops are a special case of isolated orientation (within the structure of John Boyd’s OODA loop model). Some specific examples from “Good to Great,” the Fast Company Article references by Shloky, illustrate this.

Consider the Warner-Lambert Co. — the company that we compared directly with Gillette — in the early 1980s. In 1979, Warner-Lambert told Business Week that it aimed to be a leading consumer-products company. One year later, it did an abrupt about-face and turned its sights on health care. In 1981, the company reversed course again and returned to diversification and consumer goods. Then in 1987, Warner-Lambert made another U-turn, away from consumer goods, and announced that it wanted to compete with Merck. Then in the early 1990s, the company responded to government announcements of pending health-care reform and reembraced diversification and consumer brands.

Between 1979 and 1998, Warner-Lambert underwent three major restructurings — one per CEO. Each new CEO arrived with his own program; each CEO halted the momentum of his predecessor. With each turn of the Doom Loop, the company spiraled further downward, until it was swallowed by Pfizer in 2000.

Any programmer who has confronted the problem of algorithm churn will probably recognize the ominous nature of such flailing. I’ve experienced a similar paralysis due to self-defeating restarts in games of go against vastly superior players. I spend minutes reading a tactical board position, straining to find the proper response, only to have my opponent respond in a completely different area of the board, forcing another exhausting reading exercise for me, which is followed by another immediate response in yet another area of the board. I lose the ability to see the strategic picture because I’m using all my energy to put out the latest fire. In go, the antidote to this problem is gain sufficient experience to be able to read entire tactical situations without wasting one’s time exploring dead-end moves. This frees the mind to focus on seeing the whole board. It allows a player to focus his energy upon accurately orienting to the strategic situation as a whole.

Jim Collins’ solution is that successful leaders need to develop Hedgehog Concepts:

An ancient Greek parable distinguishes between foxes, which know many small things, and hedgehogs, which know one big thing. All good-to-great leaders, it turns out, are hedgehogs. They know how to simplify a complex world into a single, organizing idea — the kind of basic principle that unifies, organizes, and guides all decisions. That’s not to say hedgehogs are simplistic. Like great thinkers, who take complexities and boil them down into simple, yet profound, ideas (Adam Smith and the invisible hand, Darwin and evolution), leaders of good-to-great companies develop a Hedgehog Concept that is simple but that reflects penetrating insight and deep understanding.

What Collins calls a “Hedgehog Concept” can been seen as achieving an accurate orientation in Boyd’s OODA model. As Boyd put it:

…orientation shapes observation, shapes decision, shapes action, and in turn is shaped by the feedback and other phenomena coming into our sensing or observing window. Also note how the entire “loop” (not just orientation) is an ongoing many-sided implicit cross-referencing process of projection, empathy, correlation, and rejection.

All else flows from orientation. Without it, our actions lose the focus necessary to achieve results. The orientation process synthesizes and analyzes complexities in order to distill simple yet penetrating understanding.

With this context, the doom loop can be seen as an instance of an organization’s orientation becoming isolated from its operating environment. Isolation leads to confusion, non-cooperate centers of gravity and loss of motivation. It doesn’t matter whether this islolation was intentionally created by an opponent or emerged from an inability to adapt to a changing environment; both dynamics can be understood through Boyd’ model.

As Chet Richards has eloquently described, the same organizational characteristics that allow effective military forces to operate within an adversary’s OODA loop can allow private companies to successfully innovate and profit in the market. Both need to be relentlessly focused upon reality and results, both need to find ways to harness the passions of individuals, and both depend upon self-motivated people. The overall focus needs to be on finding the best answers, not on winning a debate or proving that the CEO or General was right all along.

Incidentally, organizations with these characterisitics are also extremely resilient. Innovation doesn’t come from highly publicized “innovation transformation” programs. Similarly, resliency is a by-product of results-focused problem solving and not a result of powerpoint briefings about “resiliency inniatives.”