On Attempted Coups and OODA Loops

A Real-Time Case Study

For me, one of the best frameworks for thinking about strategy and organizational effectiveness is the OODA Loop (which I mentioned in a previous post). It’s the process of observing, orienting, deciding, and acting in an iterative manner.

When the loop is fast and continual, good things happen. And when it’s slow—well, this week’s events at the Capitol are a good example of that.

Of course, we’ll learn more about what happened on Wednesday as new information is released. But what’s already known can be instructive for thinking about how well our own organizations are set up to respond to challenges. 

What follows is a longer post than usual to share some of those lessons.

Lesson 1: Our weakest link is often our orientation. 

The first step of the OODA Loop—observation—is collecting information about the external world. Most leading organizations have some form of customer insights, marketplace monitoring, or threat detection system.   

But what often matters more is the organization's orientation, or what frameworks and biases it uses to interpret the information it collects. 

Based on several reports, there appears to be an orientation gap that affected the preparation and response to this week’s attempted coup at the Capitol. 

First, by the Capitol Police: “‘We knew it would be bigger,’ Sund said. ‘We looked at the intelligence. We knew we would have large crowds, the potential for some violent altercations. I had nothing indicating we would have a large mob seize the Capitol.’ Sure, there were claims that alt-right instigators had discussed storming the building and targeting lawmakers. But Sund said such threats had surfaced in the past.”

And second, by their supporting partners: “Defense Department officials, he added, didn’t in their ‘wildest imagination’ envision the crowd breaching the Capitol grounds.”

It’s easy to imagine that the police were naively unprepared for Wednesday. But if we take officials at their word—though they now have conflicting stories about who did what, when—these statements would indicate that they were prepared in that they saw the information and made a decision about what they thought it meant.

The problem was that their orientation translated the signals as lower risk than they actually were, impeding the right preparation. 

If I think about the most stunning national security failures that have occurred in my adult life, almost all sound like what happened on Wednesday. 

Namely: A generic threat was known to decision-makers. Someone in the organization wrote a memo warning, “this is a five-alarm risk, and we need to get prepared.” That warning never made it to the right people, or was dismissed as alarmist. And then the security response that followed showed that existing plans were inadequate. 

This happened with 9/11. This happened in Benghazi. Even the recent Christmas Day bombing in Nashville was reported to police as a potential attack several months in advance.

And after a massive failure, it’s really easy to sit in judgment of decision-makers. “Those guys are idiots. It was painfully obvious what would happen.”

But if trained professionals continually get it wrong, what gives any of us confidence that we would have done better in that same situation? What makes us confident that we would have predicted an unprecedented event?

I think we should have default skepticism of our ability to do so. A bit of humble pie is in order.  

The implication for leaders is to ask themselves questions like: 

When I hear of an issue, what framework do I use to make the first-look determination of whether it’s low-risk or high-risk? 

What decision-making system do I use to further evaluate my assumptions?

How well do we, as a group, listen to those views that fall outside of the consensus?

Lesson 2: Leaders need to proactively build the right organizational orientation. 

It’s not just individual decision-makers that have an orientation. Rather, organizations as a whole have them in the systems that turn information into potential decisions. 

This Washington Post article states it well: “While District police, major federal law enforcement agencies and neighboring police departments have agreements to assist each other in cases of emergencies, the Capitol Police did not make early requests for mutual aid with the D.C. National Guard or D.C. police…. And unlike other major government events like inaugurations, there was no large-scale frozen security zone around the building, and Justice Department officials did not create a multiagency command center.”

In other words, the response was hampered because the (collective) organization was not oriented for rapid response. So even as the situation unfolded, the emerging information could not be used effectively.

What this highlights is that there’s seldom one actor in the OODA Loop. In most situations, multiple people need to coordinate to make a decision relevant—either in agreeing to the decision or implementing it. 

That’s why, for decision-making to be efficient, teams need to be both organized and practiced for operating with speed. And those working relationships and capabilities need to be built ahead of the crisis moment.

As Jim Mattis wrote in Call Sign Chaos: “I don’t care how operationally brilliant you are; if you can’t create harmony—vicious harmony—on the battlefield, based on trust across different military services, foreign allied militaries, and diplomatic lines, you need to go home, because your leadership is obsolete.” 

Lesson 3: We need to make our backup plans actionable for them to be effective.

Even if an organization is set up to make decisions efficiently, those decisions are only as effective as the organization is prepared to carry them out. Their OODA Loops are constrained by their execution agility.

An example of how that failed on Wednesday: “[Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy] said a contingent of guardsmen already deployed were taken off their traffic posts, moved back to the armory to put on riot gear and then sent back to [the] Capitol within two hours after a request for additional assistance was made.” [Emphasis added.]

And another: “In fact, a small quick-reaction force at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland had been assembled by the Defense Department to assist if needed — but it did not immediately respond because of a lack of a prior planning with Capitol police over how it might be deployed, Pentagon officials said.”

In other words, the “quick-reaction” forces were not quick. The decision to deploy them, which was already delayed, was almost irrelevant because of how long it took to join the battle.

The lesson is that our backup plans need to be real. 

A good cinematic example of this is the final dogfight scene of Top Gun. Maverick is the reserve element, the quick-reaction force, with the task to back up the pilots on patrol (Iceman and Hollywood). 

Here’s the key: As the quick-reaction force, Maverick was set up to, you know, react quickly. He was waiting in the cockpit of his plane with the engines on, ready to take off several seconds after the commander said, “Launch Maverick on Alert 5.”

On Wednesday, the fact that the guardsmen had to go back to the Armory to get riot gear is the signal that the reaction forces weren’t actually staged to react. It’s the equivalent of Maverick having to go put on his flight suit and ask for his plane to be brought up to the deck once he heard there was an issue.

Unfortunately—both in our personal lives and our professional lives—our backup plans are often not real. They’re just theories. We know what we want to happen as Plan B, but we don’t do the work to ensure we could actually carry them out.

It’s the equivalent of naming someone in our will as the guardian to our kids, but never telling them about it. Or having a fire evacuation plan, but never holding a fire drill. 

While the Capitol was being breached, I was on a video call with a strategy leader at a national nonprofit. 

When she commented that her organization wasn’t particularly agile, I described the OODA Loop and asked where the organization most struggled.  She said (paraphrasing): 

“We have a field organization who sees everything happening, but that information doesn’t reach the headquarters staff quickly and in a way that affects our strategy. And when we make decisions, it’s hard to repurpose staff from existing activities to new ones.”

Well, that describes most organizations I’ve worked in and with! 

She was describing how organizational boundaries—and how leaders see themselves within those boundaries—inhibit the organization’s ability to implement change even when everyone is officially supportive of that change. In that sense, its agility is theoretical rather than real.

The implication for leaders is to ask themselves questions like: 

What is our contingency plan for [the common risks we face]?

Does everyone who would need to know about the plan know about it?

Have we actually practiced the plan to give ourselves confidence that we could pull it off in reality? 

Do we have the kind of culture in which leaders would rally across organizational boundaries, including giving up their initiatives or resources, for the common good?

Final Thoughts

Every analysis I’ve read about Wednesday’s events at the Capitol frame it as a security “failure”—and this analysis is no different. But by focusing on what went wrong, it’s easy to lose sight of what went right. I suspect that once the after-action report is published, we’ll see how many parts of the security plan worked effectively and exactly as designed. 

For example, much of our shock at the riot stems from the fact that the building was breached. But what may not be appreciated is how long it took for the building to be breached. The rioters didn’t just walk in. They were slowed down by overlapping security layers outside of the building. And they had to break reinforced windows before they could open the doors.  

All of that took time—enough time that it allowed for elected officials and staff to evacuate and barricade themselves. That’s a win.

Second, despite the strategic lapse by leaders, the officers on the ground appeared to perform admirably. Officers held their ground until it was untenable. And then they tactically retreated until they had a defensible space. It’s telling that the only shots fired were right outside of the House chamber—or, as far as they could have retreated. 

In other words, officers sacrificed space to protect life. 

There could have been a bloody firefight outside of the Capitol to prevent the breach, and I’m thankful that there was not. Officers opted for standoff rather than shootout.  

I hope that we hear more about these successes over time. There may be as much to learn from those successes—especially as it relates to restrained use of force—as there are from the failures.