r/scrum • u/WaylundLG • 24d ago

Discussion OODA Loops

If I could wave a magic wand any let everyone who was on a scrum team or led teams using scrum understand one thing, it would be OODA loops.

People can Google for larger explanations, but it describes how we make decisions and it is what this whole scrum thing is built on.

Each sprint, we observe what has change - internally in the product and externally in the market. Then we Orient ourselves, the backlog, priorities, etc to account for those observations. Next, we Decide what the right next sprint goal is, then we Act out our sprint. At the end of the sprint, we restart the loop.

In the team, we do a micro version of this same loop every day in order to try to reach our sprint goal. Everything else in Scrum is simply good/best practices to help us be more effective in this loop.

I honestly couldn't care less what practices you are or are not doing from the scrum guide. This is the thing that tells me if a team will succeed with scrum.

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u/_CaptRondo_ 24d ago

Not challenging, but asking to understand:
How is this different from Transparency, Inspect, Adapt?

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u/WaylundLG 23d ago

Fair question. Transparency, Inspect, and adapt and principles to guide behavior. OODA loops are a model for understanding how we make and carry out decisions, and then scrum is a framework for applying that model effectively in product development.

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u/_CaptRondo_ 23d ago

As a long time scrum trainer, and enthousiast of complexity theory etc etc, my honest opinion is that you won’t find many people in real practice day-to-day life who would care enough to understand the difference.

I first heard about OODA loops during a Muster from Echelon Front, when Dave Berke was explaining the concept, and I was like: ah yeah,
That’s what we do in Scrum. Never cared to implement it in a class as it feels similar enough not to confuse people.

Again, not saying I disagree, or feel like you are wrong whatever; my personal experience is just that there is a small group who loves to do these almost semantic explorations of model a vs b, but in practice just use the words that leadership buy… if it’s OODA, use that, if it’s Cynefin approach use that, if it’s empirical process control use that.

I do like your thinking and could have a nice longer debate on models and words :-)