I love the idea of Observe, Orient, Decide, Act but I don’t go through it deliberately very often and I think part of it has been a lack of clear definition of Done in the Observe step.
I’ve had some experiences and thoughts this morning that I want to share. They are general and strategic but I’ll add a tech angle at the end, too.
Observe needs a definition of done
This morning I wrote down three important things that were true about my circumstances, and those were enough.
On to Orient I went, quickly but sufficiently informed decision, and now I’m acting.
There’s really something about the Power of Three. In so many circumstances. This is one more.
I wouldn’t want to make less than three observations about a situation! That’s clearly irresponsible. But maybe three is enough in many cases. Once I get to three, can I move on to Orient? Another one or two observations may dribble into my consciousness, but let’s go forward toward action!
I really think that the open ended nature of Observe in my mind has held me back from even beginning a loop in many, many circumstances.
The tech angle
Yesterday I made an MCP (model context protocol, a standards based web service my apps can query) that has a three way connection between my reading and life notes in Obsidian, my software development lessons learned in Claude Code, and the Claude app.
I wrote the post above, opened Claude with that MCP turned on as a connected tool, and said “what might my notes suggest about this draft blog post?”
The feedback was pretty awesome, because I’ve taken decent notes over the past few years of my life.
I scanned over it and probably took three 🙂 quick take-aways.
One of the is this: I have sometimes thought that LLMs are most helpful for the Orient stage of OODA. And they are great for that. But my own product Hawkeye uses AI to observe at far greater scale than a human brain can and then narrow down those observations to just what’s most relevant to your current priorities.
Maybe I should serve that up as three key Observations each morning, when Hawkeye emails people. Oh I like that idea a lot!
And now I’ve gone from paper and pen, sitting at my desk with a sand timer, so writing a blog post on my phone, to what feels like a potentially super useful feature idea! I will now turn it into reality!
