EXPLORING SITUATIONAL ETHICS AND BEHAVIOR DYNAMICS: THE SENSITIVITIES OF MORAL COMPASS – CHAPTER -02

***Continued from Chapter 01 (Covered previously: What is Situational Ethics, The Meaning & Context of Agape, The Three Views Of Situational Ethics)

Link to Chapter 01:

EXPLORING SITUATIONAL ETHICS AND BEHAVIOR DYNAMICS: THE SENSITIVITIES OF MORAL COMPASS – CHAPTER -01

The Four Working Principles of Situationism

Principle 1. Pragmatism

The situationalist follows a strategy, which is pragmatic. “Pragmatism” is a well worked-out philosophical position adopted by the likes of John Dewey (1859–1952), Charles Peirce (1839–1914) and William James (1842–1910). Fletcher does not want his theory associated with these views and rejects all the implications of this type of “Pragmatism”.

What makes his view pragmatic is very simple. It is just his attraction to moral views, which do not try to work out what to do in the abstract, but rather explores how moral views might play out in each real life situations.

Principle 2: Relativism

Even with his rejection of Antinomianism and his acceptance of one supreme principle of morality, Fletcher, surprisingly, still calls himself a relativist. It is just an appeal for people to stop trying to “lay down the law” for all people in all contexts. If situations vary then consequences vary and what we ought to do will change accordingly. This is a very simple, unsophisticated idea and just means that what is right or wrong is related to the situation we are in.

Principle 3: Positivism

His use of “positivism” is not the philosophical idea with the same name but rather is where any moral or value judgment in ethics, like a theologian’s faith propositions, is a decision — not a conclusion. It is a choice, not a result reached by force of logic or reasoning, rather it is a decision we take.

Principle 4: Personalism

Love is something that is experienced by people. So Personalism is the view that if we are to maximize love we need to consider the person in a situation — the “who” of a situation.

Conscience as a Verb not a Noun

“Conscience” plays a role in working out what to do. Conscience is not the name of an internal faculty nor is it a sort of internal “moral compass”.

Fletcher refers to conscience as a verb. Imagine we have heard some bullies laughing because they have sent our friend some offensive texts and we are trying to decide whether or not to check his phone to delete the texts before he does. The old “noun” view of conscience would get us to think about this in the abstract, perhaps reason about it.

Instead, we need to be in the situation, and experience the situation, we need to be doing (hence “verb”) the experiencing. Maybe, we might conclude that it is right to go into our friend’s phone, maybe we will not but whatever happens the outcome could not have been known beforehand. What our conscience would have us do is revealed when we live in the world and not through armchair reflection.

The Six Propositions of Situation Ethics

1: Only one ‘thing’ is intrinsically good; namely, love, nothing else at all

There is one thing which is intrinsically good, that is good irrespective of context, namely love. If love is what is good, then an action is right or wrong in as far as it brings about the most amount of love.

Agapeic Calculus is a moral framework rooted in the pursuit of maximizing neighbor welfare for the greatest number of individuals within a community. Unlike conventional notions of love centered on emotional attachment or desire, this concept emphasizes the broader notion of concern for the well-being of others. In this context, “welfare” encompasses not only material prosperity but also factors such as health, happiness, and overall quality of life. By prioritizing the collective welfare of the community over individual interests, Agapeic Calculus seeks to foster a society characterized by compassion, empathy, and a commitment to the common good. In essence, it advocates for a calculus of altruism and ethical decision-making that aims to uplift and support as many neighbors as possible, thereby cultivating a more just and harmonious social order.

2: The ruling norm of decision is love, nothing else

Given our modern context and how people typically talk of “love” it is probably unhelpful to even call it “love”. For instance, we will all recall the following news item. In February 1993, Mrs Johnson’s son, Laramiun Byrd, 20, was shot in the head by 16-year-old Oshea Israel after an argument at a party in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Mrs Johnson subsequently forgave her son’s killer and after he had served a 17-year sentence for the crime, asked him to move in next door to her. She was not condoning his actions, nor will she ever forget the horror of those actions, but she does love her son’s killer. That love is agápē.

Reference:

Mary Johnson and Oshea Israel

3: Love and justice are the same, for justice is love distributed, nothing else

Practically all moral problems we encounter can be boiled down to an apparent tension between “justice” on the one hand and “love” on the other. Consider a recent story:

This could be expressed as a supposed tension between “love” of family and doing the right thing — “justice”. Imagine we are trying to decide what is the best way to distribute food given to a charity, or how a triage nurse might work in a war zone. In these cases we might put the problem like this. We want to distribute fairly, but how should we do this? To act justly or fairly is precisely to act in love. “Love is justice, justice is love”.

4: Love wills the neighbor’s good when we like him or not

Agápē is in the business of loving the unlovable. So related to our enemies. Love does not ask us to lose or abandon our sense of good and evil, or even of superior and inferior; it simply insists that however we rate them, and whether we like them nor not, they are our neighbors and are to be loved.

5: Only the ends justify the means, nothing else

Any action we take, if considered as an action independent of its consequences, is literally “meaningless and pointless”. An action, such as telling the truth, only acquires its status as a means by virtue of an end beyond itself.

6: Love’s decisions are made situationally, not prescriptively

Ethical decisions exist in a grey area most of the time. No decision can be taken before considering the situation. Consider the example of a woman in Arizona who learned that she might “bear a defective baby because she had taken thalidomide”. What should she do? The loving decision was not one given by the law, which stated that all abortions are wrong. However, she travelled to Sweden where she had an abortion. Even if the embryo had not been defective according to Fletcher her actions were “brave and responsible and right” because she was acting in light of the particulars of the situation to bring about the most love.

The Criticism of Situational Ethics

John Robinson, an Anglican Bishop of Woolwich and Trinity College started as a firm supporter of situational ethics referring to the responsibility it gave the individual in deciding the morality of their actions. However, he later withdrew his support for the theory recognizing that people could not take this sort of responsibility, remarking that “It will all descend into moral chaos.”

The central focus on agape as the moral guide for behavior allows to claim that an action might be right in one context, but wrong in a different context — depending on the level of agape brought about. Despite how popular the theory was it is not philosophically sophisticated, and we soon run into problems in trying to understand it.

Another problem with teleological or consequential theories is that they are based on the future consequences, and the future is quite hard to predict in some cases. For example, it may be easy to predict that if we harm someone, then it will make them and those around them sad and/or angry. However, when considering more tricky situations such as an abortion, it is impossible to tell how the child’s life and its mother’s will turn out either way.

Specifically Christian forms of situational ethics of placing love above all particular principles or rules were proposed in the first half of the twentieth century by liberal theologians Rudolf Bultmann, John A. T. Robinson, along with Joseph Fletcher. These theologians point specifically to agape, or unconditional love, as the highest end. Other theologians who advocated situational ethics include Josef Fuchs, Reinhold Niebuhr, Karl Barth, Emil Brunner, and Paul Tillich.  Tillich, for example, declared, “Love is the ultimate law.”

Content Curated by: Dr Shoury Kuttappa

EXPLORING SITUATIONAL ETHICS AND BEHAVIOR DYNAMICS: THE SENSITIVITIES OF MORAL COMPASS – CHAPTER -01

Situational ethics, or situation ethics, is a teleological and consequential theory of ethics concerned with the outcome of an action as opposed to an action being intrinsically wrong as in deontological theories. The theory was principally developed in the 1960s by the Christian Episcopal priest Joseph Fletcher. He argued that sometimes moral principles could be cast aside in certain situations if love is best being served. He believed that there are no absolute laws other than the law of love, and that all the other laws were secondary. This means that all the other laws may be broken if other courses of action would result in more love. Thus, in the case of situational ethics, the ends can justify the means.

Joseph Fletcher (1905–1991), in his time, developed what he called an ethical non-system. His publication was questioned amongst the public because it legitimized the general post-war dissatisfaction with authority. The English term “situation ethics” was taken from the German Situationsethik. It is unclear who first coined the term either in German or in its English variant.

At the time it was written, it seemed to make some radical claims such as that it is not wrong to have extramarital sex, to be homosexual, or to have an abortion. All that said, Fletcher’s work is not widely discussed nor respected in philosophical circles. Fletcher called this ethical “non-system” Situationism.  

A few instances from the epic- The Ramayana- illustrate this. The Bible also has a few illustrations.

Because of its consequentialism, situational ethics is often confused with utilitarianism, because utilitarianism’s aim is the greatest good for the greatest number, although situational ethics focuses more on creating the greatest amount of love and it also has different origins. Having said that, however, situational ethics can also be classed under the ethical theory genre of ‘proportionalism’, which says that ‘it is never right to go against a principle unless there is a proportionate reason which would justify it’. Through situational ethics, Fletcher attempted to find a ‘middle road’ between legalistic and antinomian ethics.

The Meaning & Context of Agape

Our world has many definitions of love, but we most commonly think about love in a romantic sense. What if true love meant more than romance? What if there was a deeper, fuller expression of love?

The concept of agape has been widely examined within its Christian context. It has also been considered in the contexts of other religions, religious ethics, and science. For instance, in the New Testament, agape refers to the covenant love of God for humans, as well as the human reciprocal love for God; the term necessarily extends to the love of one’s fellow human beings. Some contemporary writers have sought to extend the use of agape into non-religious contexts.

The Three Views Of Situational Ethics

Situational ethics relies on one principle—what best serves love. According to Fletcher, love is unconditional and unsentimental. Situational ethics is based on the golden rule “love your neighbor as yourself” and altruism, which is putting others before yourself and showing agape (a greek interpretation of love – discussed shortly) towards everyone. It agrees on reason being the instrument of moral judgments, but disagrees that the good is to be disconcerted from the nature of things. All moral decisions depend on what the most loving thing to do is.

Fletcher says there are two unattractive views in ethics: “Legalism” and “Antinomianism”, and one attractive view, which sits in between them: “Situationism”.

Legalism: Someone who is following the system of Legalism is someone who “blindly” observes moral rules without being sensitive to the situation. For example, we ought to tell the truth in all situations, even if this means that, say, millions of people die. In 2002 the religious police of Saudi Arabia refused to let a group of girls escape from a burning building because they were wearing “inappropriate” clothing, which was against the will of God. Fifteen girls died.

Reference:

‘Saudi Police “Stopped” Fire Rescue’, BBC News (15 March 2002), freely available at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/1874471.stm

Antinomianism: The other extreme is Antinomianism (“anti” meaning against; “nominalism” meaning law). This is the view that says that an agent can do whatever he or she wants in a situation. An “existential” view – because it is one that says that people are always free to choose what they want. Any supposed laws and rules limiting the actions of people are simply a way of trying to comfort them because they are scared of absolute freedom.

Antinomianism means the moral agent is erratic and random, is unpredictable, and any decisions taken are ad hoc. There are no laws nor guiding principles, just agents and their conscience and the institutions in which they find themselves.

Situationism: The Middle Ethics. We might think that Legalism and Antinomianism exhaust the possibilities. If we reject moral laws then are not we forced into lawless moral anarchy?

Fletcher says that there is a moral law, and hence he rejects Antinomianism. But there is only one moral law, so he rejects Legalism. His one moral law is that we ought to always act so as to bring about the most love for the most people (“Agápē Calculus”). Fletcher’s Situationism is then a teleological theory- directed at the consequences that will determine whether an action is right or wrong. Of course, any teleological theory will ask us to look at the details of the situation. What makes his view different is the centrality of “love”, or as he calls it agápē.

There can be moral principles but that these differ from laws. Principles are generalizations which are context-sensitive and which derive from the one law regarding maximizing love. For example, we might have a moral principle that we ought not to murder. This is a principle because we might think in that in general murder is wrong because it does not bring about the most love. However, it is not a law because, murder is not wrong in all situations.

For example, a situation might arise where the child of a terrorist would have to be murdered in order to get information to stop a nuclear attack. From the universal law we can only derive principles, not other universal laws.

***To be continued in Chapter 02 (Four Working Principles of Situationism, Conscience as a Verb not a Noun, Six Propositions of Situation Ethics, The Criticism of Situational Ethics, How it falls short)

EXPLORING SITUATIONAL ETHICS AND BEHAVIOR DYNAMICS: THE SENSITIVITIES OF MORAL COMPASS – CHAPTER -02

Content Curated by: Dr Shoury Kuttappa

MORAL DILEMMAS: INTERTWINED BEHAVIOURS & WAYS TO NAVIGATE – CHAPTER – 02

***Continued from Chapter 01 (Covered previously: Meaning of Ethics/ Morals, Traditional Interpretations Of Ethics, Three Broad Types of Ethical Theory, Interpretation of Moral/ Ethical Dilemmas)

Link to Chapter 01:

MORAL DILEMMAS: INTERTWINED BEHAVIOURS & WAYS TO NAVIGATE – CHAPTER – 01

Moral Dilemma Questions

In a time when many question our national moral character, pondering what to do in various situations can be a positive exercise preparing an individual for worst-&-best-case. We will look at some examples of moral dilemma questions to aid in placing ourselves in the midst of them.

01. The Unfaithful Friend

You go out with your spouse for dinner at a new restaurant you have not frequented before. It is in a part of town you rarely visit. You are shocked to see your friend’s spouse having dinner with a very young, attractive person. From the way they are behaving, it is obvious they are more than friends. The couple finish their meal and leave without seeing you. They behave very affectionately on the way out the door.

02. An Office Theft
You are in charge of the petty cash at the office. However, a co-worker is responsible for making a weekly trip to the bank to make the business deposit and obtain petty cash for the following week. In a conversation with your mutual supervisor, you are asked if the increase in the petty cash amount was enough. You, however, have not seen any additional money. You realize your co-worker has been pocketing the additional money.

03. Midnight Death

You have worked years to be successful in your father’s business. You felt you were obligated to take over as he worked his whole life to build the business left to him by his father. However, the large businesses in town have seriously cut into profits and for several years you and your family have just managed to scrape by. Your father’s health has declined and he has been hospitalized. He has a substantial life insurance policy that expires at midnight. If he dies before midnight, you will inherit enough money to pursue a career you have always dreamed of and provide adequately for your family.

04. Get Rich

Your friend offers you an opportunity to make a great deal of money very quickly. He has arranged to set up an off-shore account for your profits. He will not tell you exactly how he is making this money, but you get the impression it is not exactly legal. He only wants an investment of Rs 50,000/- and promises you will have enough from your minimal investment that you will never need to work again.

05. Telling a Secret

Your friend tells you that they committed a crime. They explain that they are having trouble sleeping at night and feel you are the only one they can trust with their confession. A few days later, you read in the paper that someone has been arrested for your friend’s crime.

Moral Dilemma Scenarios

Here are some moral dilemma scenarios. Each scene is characterized by the need to make a difficult decision. As with all moral dilemmas, there is no right or wrong.

01. Sarcastic Friend
Your friend has a great sense of humour. However, sometimes his jokes involve making fun of others in inappropriate ways. He will point out a physical flaw or look for something odd or different about a person and make an unkind comment. You feel uncomfortable when your friend does this. Do you say something or just laugh along with him?

02. Hit and Run
Late one night you are driving home in a bad rainstorm. A drunk reels out in front of your car and you try to stop, but hit him. Nobody sees you. The guy looks and smells as if he is homeless. You check to see how badly he is hurt and realize he is dead. You have never even had a speeding ticket and are an upright, professional, with a family and are well-known and respected in your community. Do you make a report anonymously, confess your crime, or drive on home and forget about it, knowing no one is going to pursue the death of a homeless drunk?

03. Third Chance
Your teenager has had a rough few years. First came an arrest for shoplifting. The item was of little value, so it was only a misdemeanour. Then your teen was with some friends who were smoking pot and driving too fast. Your teen has promised they are turning over a new leaf and seem to be on the right track, doing better in school, coming home by curfew, and generally having a much better attitude. Now you get a call from the local police station saying your son was with a group of kids who broke into a liquor store and stole beer. Do you go to the station and see how you can get your teen out of this jam or let him accept whatever consequences befall him?

04. Reward a Job Well Done
You understand the importance of team work in your job. You share ideas and responsibilities with your team members on a daily basis. In your weekly team meeting with your supervisor, one of your co-workers takes credit for a time and money saving change in operating procedures you devised. Your supervisor erroneously thinks your co-worker came up with the change and your co-worker does not correct the misinterpretation, but allows the boss to not only commend him, but offer a bonus. Do you go to your co-worker and demand he correct the situation, go to your supervisor and explain you should receive the commendation and reward, or keep quiet as you do not believe in ownership of ideas?

Moral Dilemma Questions

Moral dilemma questions might be characterized as “What if?” questions. It can be hard to take a close look at ourselves and ask, “Will I do the right thing when confronted with a difficult choice?” Frequently, it is the small decisions we make that truly define our moral character.

Approaches For Ethical Decision-Making

The more novel and difficult the ethical choice we face, the more we need to rely on discussion and dialogue with others about the dilemma. There are three broad frameworks to guide ethical decision making:

While each of the three frameworks is useful for making ethical decisions, none is perfect—otherwise the perfect theory would have driven the other imperfect theories from the field long ago. Knowing the advantages and disadvantages of the frameworks will be helpful in deciding which is most useful in approach the particular situation with which we are presented.

In many situations, all three frameworks will result in the same—or at least very similar—conclusions about what to do, although they will typically give different reasons for reaching those conclusions. However, because they focus on different ethical features, the conclusions reached through one framework will occasionally differ from the conclusions reached through one (or both) of the others.

The Importance of Studying Moral/ Ethical Dilemmas

The exploration needs to dig deeper, taking into consideration not only how to make difficult decisions, but how the decisions reflect the underlying values that are important to us. The practice will not only foster better ethical decision-making, but exercises that require assessments of ethical dilemmas can improve reasoning and critical thinking skills—valuable assets in many contexts.

Ethical training develops important “soft skills” like respect, empathy and compassion. Exploring conflicts from different points of view—and striving to understand the value behind an opinion—also makes us more empathetic to others. Identifying the principles that comprise the foundation of our beliefs as well as those that guide others allows us to hone social and emotional competencies like self-awareness and social awareness.

A Framework for Making Moral/ Ethical Decisions

Decisions about right and wrong permeate everyday life. Ethics should concern all levels of life: acting properly as individuals, creating responsible organizations and governments, and making our society as a whole more ethical. One Framework that can be applied in daily instances may be:

Making moral/ ethical decisions requires sensitivity to the ethical implications of problems and situations.  It also requires practice. Having a framework for ethical decision making is essential for individuals and organizations.

Content Curated By: Dr Shoury Kuttappa

MORAL DILEMMAS: INTERTWINED BEHAVIOURS & WAYS TO NAVIGATE – CHAPTER – 01

Morality is defined as the principles concerning the distinction between right and wrong or good and bad behaviour (Oxford Dictionary). Effective ethics instruction is about more than distributing a list of moral guidelines; it requires educating learners on how to navigate their own moral decision-making. Learners learn to search for and evaluate their assumptions, to excavate the reasons behind those assumptions, to examine without prejudice another’s opinion and to make a thoughtful decision with confidence.

What Is Ethics:

Ethics provides a set of standards for behaviour that helps us decide how we ought to act in a range of situations. In a sense, ethics is all about making choices, and about providing reasons why we should make these choices.

Ethics is sometimes conflated or confused with other ways of making choices, including religion, law or morality. Many religions promote ethical decision-making but do not always address the full range of ethical choices that we face. Religions may also advocate or prohibit certain behaviours which may not be considered the proper domain of ethics. Many people use the terms morality and ethics interchangeably. Others reserve morality for the state of virtue while seeing ethics as a code that enables morality. Another way to think about the relationship between ethics and morality is to see ethics as providing a rational basis for morality, that is, ethics provides good reasons for why something is moral.

Traditional Interpretations Of Ethics:

There are numerous ways to think about right and wrong actions or good and bad character.  The field of ethics is traditionally divided into three areas:

Three Broad Types of Ethical Theory:

Ethical theories are often broadly divided into three types. Each of these three broad categories contains varieties of approaches to ethics, some of which share characteristics across the categories.

Consequentialist Theories

The Utilitarian Approach: Utilitarianism is one of the most common approaches to making ethical decisions, especially decisions with consequences that concern large groups of people, in part because it instructs us to weigh the different amounts of good and bad that will be produced by our action. This conforms to our feeling that some good and some bad will necessarily be the result of our action and that the best action will be that which provides the most good or does the least harm, or produces the greatest balance of good over harm.

The Egoistic Approach: One variation of the utilitarian approach is known as ethical egoism, or the ethics of self- interest. In this approach, an individual often uses utilitarian calculation to produce the greatest amount of good for him or herself. The Russian-American philosopher Ayn Rand (1905-1982), who, in the book The Virtue of Selfishness (1964), argues that self-interest is a prerequisite to self-respect and to respect for others.

The Common Good Approach: The French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) argued that the best society should be guided by the general will of the people which would then produce what is best for the people as a whole. This approach to ethics underscores the networked aspects of society and emphasizes respect and compassion for others, especially those who are more vulnerable.

Non Consequentialist Theories

The Duty-Based Approach: The ethical action is one taken from duty, that is, it is done precisely because it is our obligation to perform the action. Ethical obligations are the same for all rational creatures (they are universal), and knowledge of what these obligations entail is arrived at by discovering rules of behaviour that are not contradicted by reason.

The Rights Approach: This approach stipulates that the best ethical action is that which protects the ethical rights of those who are affected by the action. It emphasizes the belief that all humans have a right to dignity. The list of ethical rights is debated; many now argue that animals and other non-humans such as robots also have rights.

The Fairness or Justice Approach: The American philosopher John Rawls argued that just ethical principles are those that would be chosen by free and rational people in an initial situation of equality. This is considered fair or just because it provides a procedure for what counts as a fair action, and does not concern itself with the consequences of those actions. Fairness of starting point is the principle for what is considered just.

The Divine Command Approach: As its name suggests, this approach sees what is right as the same as what the Devine Beings command, and ethical standards are the creation of their will. Because Devine Beings are seen as omnipotent and possessed of free will, they could change what is now considered ethical, and they are not bound by any standard of right or wrong short of logical contradiction.

Agent Centred Theories

The Virtue Approach: One long-standing ethical principle argues that ethical actions should be consistent with ideal human virtues. Because virtue ethics is concerned with the entirety of a person’s life, it takes the process of education and training seriously, and emphasizes the importance of role models to our understanding of how to engage in ethical deliberation.

The Feminist Approach: This approach emphasizes the importance of the experiences of women and other marginalized groups to ethical deliberation. The principle of care as a legitimately primary ethical concern, often in opposition to the seemingly cold and impersonal justice approach. Like virtue ethics, feminist ethics concerned with the totality of human life and how this life comes to influence the way we make ethical decisions.

Interpretation of Moral/ Ethical Dilemmas

In philosophy, ethical dilemmas, also called ethical paradoxes or moral dilemmas, are situations in which an agent stands under two (or more) conflicting moral requirements, none of which overrides the other. A closely related definition characterizes ethical dilemmas as situations in which every available choice is wrong. The term is also used in a wider sense in everyday language to refer to ethical conflicts that may be resolvable, to psychologically difficult choices or to other types of difficult ethical problems.

The crucial features of a moral dilemma are these: the agent can do each of the actions; but the agent cannot do both (or all) of the actions. What is common to the cases in a moral dilemma (or ethical dilemma) is conflict. The agent thus seems condemned to moral failure; no matter what he/she does, he/she will do something wrong (or fail to do something that he/she ought to do).

When one of the conflicting requirements overrides the other, we have a conflict but not a genuine moral dilemma. So, in order to have a genuine moral dilemma it must also be true that neither of the conflicting requirements is overridden. What makes these questions dilemmas is an individual’s definition of right and wrong or good and bad. scenarios. Some ways in which such ethical dilemmas may be addressed are:

***To be continued in Chapter 02 (Moral Dilemma Questions & Common Situations, Approaches For Ethical Decision-Making, Importance of Understanding Moral Dilemmas, Framework for Making Moral/ Ethical Decisions)

Content Curated By: Dr Shoury Kuttappa

DECISION INTELLIGENCE FRAMEWORKS: THE OODA LOOP & SEAL – CHAPTER 02

***Continued from Chapter 01 (Covered previously: Decision Intelligence and its meaning, The OODA Loop, How The OODA Loop Works: The Four Steps, Success Of The OODA Loop)

Link to Chapter 01:

DECISION INTELLIGENCE FRAMEWORKS: THE OODA LOOP & SEAL – CHAPTER 01

Uses Of The OODA Loop

In general, military planning models are often applied to uses outside of their original context due to their effectiveness in extreme situations. The OODA loop has been adapted to become an important concept in various fields such as business, game theory, information security, law enforcement, litigation, marketing and strategy. Professionals find this compelling because of its common-sense approach to decision-making and its emphasis on staying competitive.

With technology being used everywhere and more emphasis being placed on a company’s ability to collect feedback and analyze competition, this method is now a common approach applied in organizations. In business, OODA loops typically examine what is happening externally and how results are performing to become more agile. Similarly, an organization with a security operations centre (SOC), computer emergency readiness team (CERT) or computer security incident response team (CSIRT) may use an OODA loop cycle to develop an organization’s incident response plan.

Additionally, due to the growth of data analytics in business, the OODA loop is a popular method for handling an influx of constantly emerging information. Companies can achieve better situational awareness when they implement the observe and orient steps to organize data in a way that accurately depicts the business environment. Once the data is placed in context, they can make smarter organizational decisions and actions.

Examples Of The OODA Loop

In its simplest form, the OODA loop is employed by all individuals every day when making a decision.

More complex, higher-stakes versions of the OODA loop in everyday life can be seen when creating a retirement savings plan or buying a home.

Alternatives To The OODA Loop

A few ideas that can be combined with the OODA loop include:

Plan, do, check, act (PDCA) cycle- This is a model geared towards continuous improvement that is also broken into four parts. The process starts by identifying a problem and gathering relevant data to the cause of the problem. Then, this information is used to develop and implement a solution. The results are then confirmed, or checked, before documented and used to make recommendations for further PDCA cycles.

Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) analysis– This is a framework used in business to identify and analyze any internal or external factors that could affect the success of a project.

Getting things done (GTD) method– This is a time management model that helps organizations break larger projects into smaller, actionable tasks. The GTD method is a five step process that is also sometimes referred to by the steps: collect, process, organize, plan and do. All material should be gathered, analyzed and categorized before being transforming into an action plan that is then carried out.

Objectives and Key Results– OKRs are frequently set and evaluated continuously during the project lifecycle to make sure everything gets done on time. They also act as future references to monitor how well you executed your projects.

Porter’s Five Forces– Porter’s Five Forces is a model that identifies and analyzes five competitive forces that shape every industry and helps determine an industry’s weaknesses and strengths. Five Forces analysis is frequently used to identify an industry’s structure to determine corporate strategy and in decision making. 

SOAR Analysis– This is a framework for identifying Strengths, Opportunities, Aspirations and Results. It works in any business involved in any marketplace. Unlike some other frameworks, SOAR marries up fact finding about the company and position, alongside the desires of the stakeholders to aid better decision intelligence.

Decision Intelligence and Technology

During the recent decade, we saw a proliferation of data lake or data hub technologies. In spite of substantial innovations in dealing with three V’s of big data (Volume, Variety, and Velocity), we have yet to see any noticeable impact on the decision-action capability of organizations.

That does not imply that handling and managing data is unimportant for decision intelligence, however, we can safely conclude that it need not be the first step and some crucial piece is missing in crafting a decision intelligence system. A well-designed decision intelligence system is less dependent on data as one might think, as it can help make effective decisions even with limited data and can tolerate errors and inconsistencies as well as deal with high degrees of uncertainty.

Decision making being a cognitive function, we need a deeper understanding of it, so that we can better augment and support it by intelligent automation. Without this, it will be impossible to build an effective decision intelligence system. A decision intelligence system must be built around a sound decision making framework. Human and artificial agents can then collaborate following the structure and discipline of the framework.

The purpose and scope of decision intelligence automation is to implement artificial intelligence agents operating by the directives of a decision making framework. The least a framework does is to provide a structure and discipline without which an organization is bound to stay at the lowest level of decision intelligence maturity.

Decision Intelligence Frameworks Today

Early frameworks assumed that decision-making occurs at conscious level of processing guided by rational behavior. Today’s understanding of decision-making theories is much more nuanced:-

The SEAL Decision Model- Evolved specifically for designing human-machine collaborative decision intelligence systems, this stands for sense, explore, act, and learn. Though still transformational in nature, SEAL is designed to support and augment fundamental cognitive processes of human decision making rather than imposing on people to learn unfamiliar paradigms.

On first glance, SEAL may appear similar to OODA, since four elements of OODA can be loosely mapped to elements of SEAL as follows:

Human-Machine Collaboration In Decision Intelligence

The details under these elements are different because of the intent of SEAL to achieve a man machine symbiosis by reducing cognitive burden of decision makers and due to its continuous business optimization focus by explicit incorporation of feedback loops and learning. Some of these differences are:

Unlike Observe in OODA which is focused on sensing the current situation with the reactive intent, Sense in SEAL is proactive by design and predicts future situations that qualify as opportunities early so that organizations have ample time to become ready to react.

Sense agents may reveal multiple opportunities from the same snapshot of observation, thereby, requiring branching of subsequent activity to address them concurrently. Sense in SEAL requires active collaboration among human and machine agents as neither of them on their own can handle massive amount of data and make sense out of it.

Selected alternatives (similar to OODA hypotheses) move to the Action phase where actions are actually executed either manually or via a process automation substrate.

Learning happens at multiple levels – for adaption and fine tuning of predictive models and man-machine interaction. At a macro level, it is about understanding and improving the efficacy of action alternatives executed during ACT phase.

In summary, while OODA and SEAL are similar in emphasizing that a disciplined and facts based approach to decision making is essential for sustainable success in any endeavor, SEAL provides a comprehensive framework for implementing a human-machine decision intelligence system.

Content Curated By: Dr Shoury Kuttappa

DECISION INTELLIGENCE FRAMEWORKS: THE OODA LOOP & SEAL – CHAPTER 01

All of us, without exception, would love to tame the future and tilt odds in our favor all the time. This lofty aspiration and our incessant effort toward making right choices is what sets us apart from animal species. Decision making is a basic cognitive process of human behavior. Far from perfect, our prowess for decision making stands exposed more than ever in the hyper connected and rapidly changing world we live in.

Decision Intelligence: How can it help?

There is hardly any organization today that does not aspire to power their decisions and actions with intelligence. Enough evidence exists that those who can harness their organizational intelligence and align it to desired outcomes accrue a substantial advantage.

Over the decades of automation, significant strides have been made in codifying human experiential knowledge as well as extracting hidden knowledge from transactional data footprints.

The purview of decision intelligence is to explore outcome-focused and human-in-the-loop approaches to decision automation. A decision intelligence system is a man-machine collaborative system designed to enable and mature decision-action capability in an organization. A decision intelligence system plays a dual role:

The methodical design of a decision intelligence system must hinge around a framework — a mental model of decision making. The framework not only helps in defining scope and boundary of the system but determines the extent to which the system can be useful and in what situations.

A Story

In 1961, Col.  John Boyd wrote “Aerial Attack Study”, which spoke about the best dogfighting tactics. In dogfights (close-range aerial battles), fighter pilots need to move at high speeds, avoid enemies while tracking them and keeping a contextual knowledge of objectives, terrains, fuel and other variables. His OODA loop was a concept designed for rational thinking in such chaotic situations.

He said that ambiguity will always be there. Our inability to properly make sense of our changing reality is the bigger hindrance. When circumstances change, we often fail to shift our perspective and continue to try to see the world as we feel it should be. Most important thing is to orient – be connected to reality and act accordingly.

While this concept has been used extensively in corporates, sports and of course military outfits, it can also be used just as well by individuals for critical thinking & effective decision making to beat the competition.

The OODA Loop

The OODA loop (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act) is a four-step approach to decision-making that focuses on filtering available information, putting it in context and quickly making the most appropriate decision while also understanding that changes can be made as more data becomes available.

The strategy is applicable at an individual level as well as an organizational level. It is particularly useful in scenarios where competition is involved and where the ability to react to changing circumstances faster than an opponent leads to an advantage. Many modern environments can be described as volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous, or VUCA. Surviving and winning in this type of situation rests upon making better decisions. However, improving the quality of decision-making is something most organizations fail to do.

For example, if a company continues to make choices that do not see a positive return, they are failing to learn from their experiences. The OODA loop acknowledges this habit and provides an approach help make improvements.

OODA Loop Related Terminology

Before the OODA loop can be fully understood, a few related concepts need to be introduced which will aid in understanding it better:

1. Maneuver warfare– This is a strategy used in the military that emphasizes disrupting the enemy’s decision-making skills in order to defeat them. Maneuver warfare revolves around the ideas of surprise and deception. The concept of the OODA loop was derived from the strategy of maneuver warfare.
2. Mental models– These are representations or explanations of human behavior that exist on a personal, internal level. A person can generate a mental model to understand their thought processes, decisions and consequences. Mental models are a part of the orientation step of the OODA loop.
3. Situational awareness– This is the comprehension of all environmental stimuli. It involves perceiving all components of a situation, understanding what they mean and using them to make future judgements. Achieving situational awareness is crucial for most decision-making processes, including the OODA loop.
4. Reaction time– This refers to the time that elapses between a stimulus and the response given to that stimulus. A primary goal in the OODA loop is to minimize an individual or organization’s reaction time.

How The OODA Loop Works: The Four Steps

Similar to other problem-solving methods, the OODA loop is an interactive, iterative process that entails repeating the cycle, observing and measuring results, reviewing and revising the ­­initial decision and advancing to the next step. While the process is not always simple or linear, the four separate steps involved may be explained in organizational context or individual context as follows:

1. Observe: The first step is to identify the problem or threat and gain an overall understanding of the internal and external environment. In the corporate world, this can be equated to data gathering, where all information on the situation (organizational state, competitors, market, etc.,) is collected. The key point here is to recognize that the world is complex. All data is a snapshot in time and must be treated as such. Therefore, entities must gather whatever information is available as quickly as possible in order to be prepared to make decisions based on it.
2. Orient: This involves reflecting on what has been found during observations and considering what should be done next. It requires a significant level of situational awareness and understanding to make a conscious decision. Since some decisions are unconscious, or instinctual, this step involves considering what and why decisions are made prior to choosing a course of action. When applied on an individual level, this step can be done by creating mental models or mental rehearsal drills to place information into narratives that shape judgement. In organizational applications, situational models can be created with machine learning (ML) tools to identify potential outcomes while removing any bias.
3. Decide: This phase makes suggestions towards an action or response plan, taking into consideration all the potential outcomes. This can be accomplished through meetings or discussions that are focused around creating a roadmap for the entire organization.
4. Act: This pertains to carrying out the decision and related changes that need to be made in response to the decision. This step may also include any testing that is required before officially carrying out an action.

These phases have been broken out for the purposes of explanation, but in some real world scenarios they might happen in a fraction of a second. The four steps of the OODA Loop work together in a cycle.

Success Of the OODA Loop

Factor 01

One key to the success of the OODA loop is to make it as short as possible, minimizing reaction times in high-stakes situations. In the OODA loop’s simplest form, there is only one stimulus and one response, but that is not always the case. Hick’s Law can be applied to the reaction time of an OODA loop that has more than one stimulus or response, stating that when there are multiple options available in response to a stimulus, reaction time is slowed down.

Factor 02

The ability to make decisions faster than an opponent is important, but it is not only about speed. Tempo is also critical as the ability to rapidly speed up and slow down can generate unpredictability. Being unpredictable makes it difficult for opponents to understand and orientate themselves to what will happen next. Cycling through an OODA loop with more tempo than an opponent gives an organization more control of the environment and a better chance of succeeding.

***To be continued in Chapter 02 (Uses of the OODA Loop, Examples in Business, Alternatives, Decision Intelligence and Technology, Human-Machine Collaboration In Decision Intelligence)

Content Curated By: Dr Shoury Kuttappa