Written By Jon Duke, Head of Aviation at Airbox Systems.

Jon is a former military air traffic controller and pilot with two decades of experience in aviation, where the OODA loop was a fundamental component of his profession. As a search and rescue pilot, Jon operated in some situations similar to those described in this series. His time as an Air Traffic Controller and instructing new pilots allowed him to see the cockpit from different perspectives, and led him to where he is now. He is passionate about helping overcome the threats faced by mission-critical aviators, by bridging the gap between life-saving technology and the people who use it.

Part 2

How can you avoid a series of good decisions leading to a bad outcome?

It’s one of the most frustrating paradoxes in any debrief: the major decisions were sound, the plan was solid, yet it felt like the team were constantly playing catch-up. How can a series of good decisions lead to a bad outcome?

The answer is that we're often analysing the wrong decisions. The real threat to tempo isn't the one or two "big calls," but the invisible workload of countless micro-decisions that happen in between. To see this hidden workload clearly, we need a new mental model. We call it the Decision Iceberg.

The Decision Iceberg and Decision Friction

The visible tip of the iceberg represents the major, strategic decisions everyone recognises. But the vast, submerged mass is the constant, unacknowledged work. It's not that the smaller decisions were made poorly, it’s that there were so many to make.

This is the relentless stream of ‘micro-decisions’ that every person on the team must navigate just to function. They are so basic that they are almost never discussed, and often don’t even register as decision: "where do I go for the information that I need?", "should I contact operations now or will I distract them?", "Which radio channel do I need to be on?", or "Where do I even find the information I need?"

These moments create what we call Decision Friction, and this itself is composed of two distinct components.

First is Cognitive Friction: the direct mental cost from the sheer quantity of micro-decisions. Each decision takes time and comes with the attendant cost in effort, burning down human energy and causing fatigue.

Second is Procedural Friction: the operational cost imposed by the system itself, caused by the need for people to 'pull' information. This slows down decisions simply because of the delay waiting for the necessary details to arrive.

These effects can be best understood by imagining that the incident is a heavy boulder that needs to be moved. The major decisions are the large, unavoidable steps you must lift it over - they just have to be tackled and you’ll need all your decision making strength to do so.

But Decision Friction is the roughness of the ground between those steps. It’s the cumulative resistance from thousands of tiny pebbles and bumps, each one a micro-decision from the iceberg, that can grind your progress to a snail’s pace and leave you worn out when it comes to the heavy lifting. While you can't change the boulder's weight (the incident's complexity), you can work to polish the surface of the ground you must drag it across.

How Critical Responders Fight Decision Friction

The most effective way to handle the Decision Iceberg is to shrink it. This calls for deliberate process design.

1. Invert the Information Flow. Most friction comes from people having to "pull" information (making calls, asking questions). Instead, create systems where information "pushes" to them automatically. The simplest example is a proactive reporting protocol, where crews provide updates upon completing a task, rather than waiting to be asked.
2. Design communications for clarity. Verbal communication is a minefield of ambiguity. In Search and Rescue helicopter hoisting operations, it’s common to have ‘protected words’. For example the crew member on the winch being referred to as either "ATTACHED" or "DISCONNECTED." Never "connected" or "detached." These Brevity Pro-words, protected words with one specific meaning, are unambiguous even in a partial radio transmission and provide immediate context to anyone on the net.

Automate with Process, Not Just Tech. A team's high-level brainpower is its most valuable asset. It's vital not to waste it on routine memory tasks. Checklists are the simplest and most powerful form of procedural automation. Instead of relying on an individual to remember to check a crew's status, a checklist item formalises the task. This offloads routine work to a process, freeing up cognitive capacity for the decisions that truly matter. Even better if that checklist is on a digital tool which alerts other responders that your actions are complete.

So, the paradox of "good" decisions derailing an incident is solved by looking beneath the surface. It’s not the "big calls" at the tip of the Decision Iceberg that drain a team's momentum; it’s the cumulative Decision Friction from the submerged mass of micro-decisions, the "rough ground" the boulder must be dragged across.

The strategies that combat this, like inverting information flow, enforcing brevity, and automating with process, are all powerful ways to 'polish that surface.' They are not just minor efficiency tweaks; they are a deliberate method of reducing cognitive load and preserving the mental capacity for the "heavy lifting" of the major decisions.

But even on a perfectly smooth, frictionless path, the OODA Loop is still sequential. A crew must complete the Action of travelling to the scene before they can Observe and Orient. A supporting team must still receive a request before they can Act to fulfil it. This "one-step-at-a-time" model is the next great bottleneck.

In our next post, we will explore the powerful principles that finally break this sequential model, to unlock massive reductions in response and recovery time.