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thinking-ooda

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Use under time pressure when the situation is still changing and you must act before certainty — cycle Observe→Orient→Decide→Act on ~70% confidence, then re-observe.

When to use

• Incident response, outage, or ongoing degradation where state is still moving.
• Debugging a moving target (intermittent failure, live traffic shift).
• Any time-bounded decision where waiting for full certainty costs more than a reversible action.

When not to use

• The situation is static and you have time — deliberate analysis or a hypothesis differential wins.
• The next action is irreversible or high blast-radius — raise the evidence bar; 70% is not enough.
• You can cheaply localize the cause (read the failing diff, log, or metric) — test that hypothesis directly instead of looping in the dark.
• There is no time pressure and no changing environment — OODA adds churn without value.

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