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Toward Better Design-Related Decision Making: A Proposal of an Advanced OODA Loop

Part of: Innovation Engineering

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 July 2019

Mattia Vettorello ,
Boris Eisenbart  and
Charlie Ranscombe

Abstract

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To be successful in innovation, organisations need to be dynamically adaptable to novel situations to avoid getting ‘left behind’. Yet, they face vast uncertainties stemming from unforeseeable technological shifts or future user and market behaviour, making strategic decision-making on innovation an extremely difficult task. Decision-makers thus increasingly try to control or shape the future, rather than foresee it. This includes thinking ahead and generating potential pathways that will make an innovation viable. This captures the essence of designerly ways of thinking in reasoning toward ‘what might be’. Extant literature has been reviewed that discusses alternative strategies how this future-oriented thinking can be applied to become better at selecting novel ideas for development. We observe parallels between divergent thinking, abductive reasoning, analogising and lateral thinking suggested by different authors in this process. The paper continues to propose how these key mechanisms can be embedded within an existing framework for decision-making under uncertainty, the ‘OODA Loop’, which has seen increasing uptake in such decision-making scenarios.

Keywords

Strategic Decision MakingFuture Oriented ThinkingDecision makingUncertaintyInnovation
Type
Article
Information
Proceedings of the Design Society: International Conference on Engineering Design , Volume 1 , Issue 1 , July 2019 , pp. 2387 - 2396
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
© The Author(s) 2019

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