OODA - "Observe, Orient, Decide, Act"
If you prioritise learning and action, you win.
This is the OODA Loop, which can be used to have the highest impact in dynamic situations. Whoever OODAs most often, wins.
It was invented and made famous by John Boyd, who trained US Air Force pilots. The OODA loop made them the most lethal in the world.
The power underlying the OODA is the ability to learn from your actions. By being quick to take in your surroundings and act repeatedly on that info, you’re creating a hyper-learning scenario.
A slower, more thoughtful competitor may find a single action of yours stupid, but what they aren’t taking into account is that for every action they take, you’re taking so many more, and learning so much more from what works and what doesn’t.
An example of the OODA loop in play is the famous experiment with a photography class: half the class was challenged to take the 10 best photos they could, and the other half was challenged to take as many photos as they could. The half tasked with taking many photos produced photos of a much higher quality.
Time and time again, caution will cause us to hesitate, and in that hesitation, we will miss opportunities others are grabbing.
We used this at Snapscan to great effect by working in 1-week cycles. Every week, we would think of places where Snapscan would get the most usage.
Restaurants seemed to be an obvious choice. You place a QR code on the bill, and customers can pay without asking the waiter for a card machine. WRONG! In reality, people didn’t go to restaurants often enough to warrant downloading a payments app.
Next, weekend markets became the focus. Before the advent of lightweight card machines like Square and Yoco, people could only spend what cash they brought, or what was available from the ATM, which would run out of cash halfway through the day. WRONG AGAIN! The pain wasn’t high enough and only a few people downloaded the app.
Finally, we focused on coffee shops. With customers visiting multiple times a day from nearby offices, we broke the barrier to downloading the app. WIN! People started downloading every day. At Deluxe Coffee in Roodehek St, where regular customers were open to new tech, had issues with the card machine, and would be able to use the app daily.
Soon, usage at nearby restaurants and markets started growing as well, with users onboarded at coffee shops now ready to use the app elsewhere.
By using the OODA loop approach, we were able to learn from our observations, reorient, and act fast enough to unlock the growth we needed to secure follow-on investment in Snapscan.