Counter Ambush Neuroscience Session 4: Decision Making Process

The decision-making process needs to be based on recognition. Traditionally, inside of our world, the training community, over the last couple of decades, people have referred to the decision-making process as the OODA loop. O-O-D-A. This was a concept developed by a colonel in the Air Force that has been applied to everything from executive decision-making for multinational companies to originally fighter pilots dealing with stimuli that appeared in their environment, to full theater-wide battle planning for the Marine Corps, and it's filtered all the way down to the way we talk about how the bad guy is going to deal with what we do during a fight, an interpersonal attack where we want to interrupt this O-O-D-A cycle, called OODA loop sometimes, this cycle, we wanna interrupt that. So we've gone from a relatively straightforward understanding of how a fighter pilot deals with seeing a plane out in the sky out of his canopy to changing intuitive, and sometimes instinctive, reactions and responses in the middle of the split second of having punched somebody in the face when they were trying to choke us.

And I think we start to get really lost in the weeds if we use this same terminology. The terminology has been observe, orient, decide, act. And decide is really the trick, because decide implies an analytical, cognitive, aware process. Notice that recognition isn't really in here anywhere. Now when Boyd himself spoke on these topics, he certainly accounted for learned material and the power of recognition.

But when we oversimplify this into the OODA loop, and we just throw it out there, and we don't really analyze what we're talking about and understand how it affects our training, there can be a huge misunderstanding here, and there can be the impression left that you should be relying on analytical, cognitive, aware decision-making, or the perception that the bad guy is, when neither of those things are really healthy for a good counter-ambush, worst case scenario, prepare to defend yourself when you weren't ready to in a anticipation way model. We wanna be in that model. We need to get away from this. Because while, yes, observation, we take in information, right? That doesn't have to be a I choose to look over here.

That could be the gust of wind, the air change that hits my back when someone walks by and I realize somebody was behind me a lot closer than I thought they were when I was in the mall. Who's done that? You're sitting there, you're looking at your, like, I don't know, which cheese am I gonna buy, I don't know. What shirt am I gonna, I'm looking at, and, all of a sudden, you realize somebody was very close to you, just a change in air pressure behind you, somebody walks by really fast. No harm, no threat, but a stimulus, a natural stimuli that elicits a natural response.

That's not cognitive. That's not awareness. That's not my back's to the wall and I will be aware of every person in my environment at all times. That's just I was looking at a shirt, or at the grocery store looking for food, and I became aware because of an observation. And then I oriented, I focused on it.

I stopped worrying about cheddar or Gouda, and I started worrying about who was that guy that was right next to me. I oriented towards that. When you're in the ice cream shop, like, chocolate or vanilla, and some guy comes in and shoots somebody, you're probably not still deciding while you defend yourself. Yeah, chocolate sounds good. I'm not focused on that anymore.

Boyd would, in his original concept, you're gonna be thinking about the weather. The fighter pilot's on patrol thinking about the weather. Oh, it's supposed to be windy when I land. That's gonna be a pain in the ass. And then in comes the stimulus, right, the observation of, hey, there's another plane in the sky.

You're not worried about the weather right there. You re like, is that a good guy or a bad guy plane. Orient towards that, focus on that. This is where, for the trained person, warrior expert theory, this is where recognition would kick in. I know what to do, I recognize that silhouette.

I have learned something about that shape of that plane. I make a decision, I take an action. Well, what's that sound a lot like? How 'bout the long path? I make an observation, the information comes in, I focus on it, I process it cognitively, I decide to take an action, and I have my hands do something.

That's the long path. We can't count on the long path, and we don't wanna think about our training in terms of the long path. What we're looking for is this, and this is the evolution of the way we think about decision-making in a fight and complex skill execution, learned responses. There's an observation, we observe. Whether we do that on purpose or not doesn't matter.

The information comes in, the loud gunshot. We weren't scanning for gunshots, but the loud noise came in, an observation is made. This is one of the pieces that's missing from this other model. There's a reaction, the natural, instinctive reaction happens. It's going to happen.

The natural, instinctive reaction happens. At this point, there's two things that can take place. Hopefully, we recognize what to do because of our prior practice, study, research, exposure, and we respond appropriately and efficiently. Observe, react, recognize, respond. ORRR.

We don't have the the OODA loop anymore, we have O and three Rs, the ORRR loop. That's what we're looking for. Observation, a reaction, recognition, and an appropriate response. That's warrior expert theory. That's the well-trained person in the counter-ambush model that has tied the learned stimulus to the learned response and just executes intuitively.

What we see quite often, historically, is that there isn't recognition. There wasn't a good, solid counter-ambush training model that took advantage of an understanding of the way the brain works, the way stimulus response patterns work, sophisticated training models that require the processing of information just prior to the execution of the skill set or even during the execution of the skill set, training models that don't give people a high level of anticipation of what's gonna happen. What we see is there's an observation, there's a reaction, and then there's an improvisation, the ORI loop. Quite often, good guys win. Watch the videos.

People do things that they were never trained to do. People do things that are completely incongruent with their training. Most obvious one in our world, in gun world, is, I have just recently, actually last night, about 10 clock last night, I saw a response to an internet exchange that was going on with a friend of mine, guy I respect a lot, guy I've known in the industry, worked with in the industry in a couple different ways, who's from a generation before me of firearms instructors. I have put out a challenge for over a decade now, I wanna see one surveillance camera video or police dash camera video with someone responding to an ambush, being caught off guard and needing to defend themselves with a gun and responding in this position, standing up straight, elbow bent, bladed off, shooting in what traditionally has been called the Weaver shooting position, show me one. Crickets.

Haven't seen one. Over a decade of asking for anybody who's still teaching this, and believe it or not, there are still people teaching this in defensive shooting world, show me one video. Even if I saw one video now, one out of the hundreds, if not thousands, of defensive shooting videos I've seen, it's an anomaly, but at least we can say there was one. Well, how many hours, how many tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands and millions of rounds have been fired by people in law enforcement, military, and personal defense training environments doing this, and yet, competition environments doing this for decades, and yet, crickets, zero examples of it ever being used. That's weird.

And this guy, he was defending it. "Oh, our experiences are different. I've known many students to use this successfully." 'Kay, show me a video. You're a professional law enforcement officer, you've been a law enforcement officer for over 20 years. You've trained thousands of law enforcement officers.

You've trained tens of thousands of people over that time. Show me one video. The response I got, "Well, we're pals, we'll agree to disagree," on the internet, he coulda googled it. He coulda posted a link, except that video doesn't exist. So what we see is an observation, so police officers, they're carrying over here, observation, reaction, shooting, or shooting, or shooting, an improvisation.

We don't see this, but they got a 97% in their last qualification course doing this, but we don't see it, because it's completely incongruent with the context of the environment, because what they were training in was a very choreographed, controlled environment with a 100% level of anticipation of what they were gonna need to do, and they found themselves in a dynamic critical incident, surprised, chaotic, and threatened. And they also, not only was it out of context, but also the things they were learning to do, this is completely non-intuitive. It doesn't work well with what the body does naturally. The body wants to orient towards the threat and lower its center of gravity. And the gun, the physics of the gun, the gun wants us to be fully extended, supporting with bodyweight and with our arm structure, our skeletal structure, that frame remaining still in space while the slide moves back and forth so the gun stays.

So there's nothing intuitive about this position. It's very mechanical, it's very choreographed. It works for target shooting, but it doesn't work in the moment. So what do we see? We see people improvise.

And what do I teach? I teach stuff that looks a lot more like the improvisation than the old mechanical model, so that the intuitive skill development of fully extended, lowered center of gravity, squared off shooting position, that intuitive skill development, works with the context of our training environment. People recognize what it is they're dealing with and they respond appropriately. So sometimes the training model is heavily influenced by what people do without training or in spite of bad training. And we see what they do, and we go to a training model that helps people tie the learned stimuli to the learned response, and we get ORRR, the evolution of intuitive decision-making based on everything we know about the science of the brain, the way the body and the brain integrate, the neuroscience of training in general, of learning in general, of human skill execution, human decision-making, and that's the scientific basis of the counter-ambush training model.