The OODA loop plus 1 decision

“Questions are places in your mind where answers fit. If you haven’t asked the question, the answer has nowhere to go. It hits your mind and bounces right off. You have to want to know.” –Clayton Christensen

1. Conventional wisdom would seem to be that the higher the raise the bar, the better the candidates we will get.

2. At the same time, a common thread in DMM thinking is “Don’t prejudge the field”—or, in the parlance of my own Principles, “How can we see that far?” When we look at various people, it’s hard to imagine we would have thought they would have been effective movement catalysts. It therefore follows that the bar we set is aimed at who we might think would be effective catalysts, rather than who might actually be.

3. This can lead to the opposite extreme – take everyone. But many people can spend a long time on the field doing nothing, while either intentionally or unintentionally spinning tales of ambiguity about their fruit. (Remember the IMB study where >80% of their church planting teams had planted zero churches, and so they had to launch a global initiative to Get to 1.)

4. I suggest, instead, that we take a page from OODA loops and marry it with the idea from Rekedal’s presentation where everyone is looking for the story that resonates with them.

5. I would do this: (1) present a story that represents an opportunity that resonates with people. (2) present them with a decision they must make (e.g. attend a training, etc.). (3) present a training that incorporates a a challenge to do something with what they have learned, see who does. (4) offer a “reflection” point / event / training which essentially guides them through a debrief of what happened, and that incorporates the leading edge of this cycle repeating itself (story-decision).

6. In this way, the Beyond element would be the event that presents the initial story-decision point, and the reflective-story-decision-transition point. We might also provide the (3) training/action element, or we might “outsource” that to someone else. But by inserting ourselves at the point of giving context to why the training is important—what the decision-to-be-trained means to the person’s identity and preferences (what does making this decision say about me as a person—aspirations are adjustable), and what the results of the training & action meant for the person—we insert ourselves at the “sense-making” and “identity-making” point of the training.