Whether a stranger is approaching me or I am approaching a stranger, my priority is to recognize danger early, avoid it when I can, and, if avoidance is no longer possible, improve my position as much as circumstances reasonably allow. Is that a guarantee? No. There are no guarantees. Dealing with unjust criminal aggressors is like handling poisonous snakes. Even if you don’t become complacent or distracted, eventually the encounter can still end badly. The best bet is, as the Bible says, to avoid such men. Police can’t do that. For the rest of us, St. Paul talks about the characteristics of men we ought to avoid in 2 Timothy 3:1-5.
The late Col. John Boyd talked about doing the least expected things rather than what we might perceive as the most effective thing. The reason, at least in part, has to do with resetting their OODA Loop (i.e., their plan: Observe, Orient, Decide, Act). When an unjust criminal aggressor observes you, and whatever it is you happen to be doing, it’s a good thing if they’re asking themselves in their mind: What am I seeing? Confusion for most people causes hesitation. Causing hesitation means you’re taking time back; you’re adding milliseconds, perhaps seconds, which you can exploit to your advantage to either avoid dangerous men or, when it’s too late for that, maneuver to a better position, dominate, and win.
Watching unjust game film (i.e., the current techniques and tactics that bad guys consistently use) helps you build a better orientation. Boyd believed that orientation was the most critical part of OODA. The way I think of orientation includes things like your correct or incorrect understanding of reality (i.e., how unjust violent scenarios actually develop). Orientation includes building a trained response and repeating it until that response becomes unconscious competence requiring near-zero mental bandwidth. There is a lot more to orientation.
To dominate and win means that, to the bad guy’s eye, it appears you transitioned from observe to act, skipping the orient & decide stages. Meanwhile, he’s slowing down, and you’re speeding up. He gets reset from act back to observe, and he’s confused by the odd, awkward, chaotic behavior he’s seeing and experiencing. This is learning how to reset ol’ boys’ OODA loop. Time is the most precious commodity you either have or lack in a lethal confrontation, and transitions (i.e., fast transitions) can overwhelm your adversary.
When I was young, I remember law enforcement trainers saying, “You’ve got to ‘get inside’ his OODA loop.“ I remember thinking how cool that sounded. Yes! That’s what I’m going to do! But sadly, nobody ever explained what that meant. To ‘get inside’ your adversary’s OODA loop means to interrupt his plan (i.e., his game) by resetting it to the observe phase. Doing a least expected thing is likely to leave him momentarily confused and hesitant. We don’t want to play his game. When a violent confrontation is unavoidable, we want to apply our own unique response that he’s not expecting (i.e., think how David defeated Goliath).
Recently, an analogy came to me: a modern high-speed roller coaster.
That long climb toward the apex, with the unmistakable click-clack of anticipation, is the buildup to a violent confrontation. The coaster keeps climbing, and the tension keeps building. Then it reaches the apex. From that point forward, the ride changes dramatically. The initiative has been seized by someone, depending upon who recognized the moment, acted first, and how.
The winning response looks a lot like what happens next on a modern roller coaster: a rapid acceleration and succession of turns left, then right, then a roll. Those rapid changes are transitions. For any Jiu Jitsu practitioner, think about how you might apply that the next time you roll in a match. Every time I watch one of Mike Tyson’s early fights, I can see his odd, awkward, unexpected way of advancing to the inside position, dominating, and overwhelming his opponent.
A modern roller coaster doesn’t stop once it leaves the station. It advances until the task is complete. Once the initiative is seized, techniques and tactics (i.e., tactics are techniques strung together) and their quick transitions accelerate through a succession of twists, turns, drops, rolls, and reversals until the ride finally ends. The fighter (i.e., coaster) returns to the station.
That’s how I think about transitions in a violent confrontation. You don’t want to become predictable or static. You want to remain adaptable and continue making rapid, appropriate transitions as the circumstances change. With each transition, your adversary falls further behind, not because he has forgotten what just happened, but because things are changing faster than he can process. The result is a widening gap between his ability to observe and orient and your ability to continue adapting and acting. His OODA Loop is repeatedly reset. That is to get inside, dominate, and destroy his OODA loop.
And the ride keeps moving.
These principles apply to business as well. Apple gives us an example in 2007, when it launched a multi-touch device with no physical keyboard (i.e., departing from BlackBerry), not trying to make a better BlackBerry or Nokia, but playing its own game with the original iPhone (i.e., first generation). Apple was advancing and taking ground in unexpected ways. The principles for winning or losing are universal.
The bottom line is this: If I cannot stack the odds decisively in my favor because of the terrain or circumstances, then I’m looking to manipulate time, distance, shielding, and positioning to negate his built-in advantages. I’m not looking for a fair fight; I’m looking to change an unfavorable equation. If he’s sitting at 90/10 because circumstances favor him, my minimum objective is to move that equation to at least 50/50. That’s still not where I want to be, but 50/50 is better than 90/10 in his favor. From there, every legitimate advantage I can create matters.