Business leadership hinges on effective decision making. Colonel John Boyd, a renowned military fighter pilot, developed the OODA loop after studying this critical skill through the lens of aerial combat. Boyd determined that superior decisions follow a cycle of four steps: Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act—a framework now widely applied beyond military contexts.

Plenty has been written about Observe (measurement, metrics, KPIs), and also about Decide (quantification, analysis, tradeoff). But I want to talk today about Orient, which is “Where are we, relative to where we want to be?”.

What I’ve observed in my business career is people tend to skew too much in either one direction or the other: too much focus on detail, or too much focus on the synopsis with no context.

For example, let’s say you are in a business project focused on optimization of some metrics: lowering costs or whatever. And in the pursuit of that goal you hone in on some supply chain adjustments you can make that will lower those costs. Great! But what often happens is, you have to stop and think, “If I summarized my entire plan into one bullet point, what would it say?” And if the bullet point is something like, “Nationwide restaurant replaces all their organic cage-free chicken with industrial factory farm.” Is that really what you want the narrative to be? I don’t just mean PR…I mean, are you willing to sacrifice that quality in your business, and the downstream impacts that will come from it?

The alternative happens as well, though. Let’s say you hear something like, “Local business fires disabled employee!” Of course, that’s a terrible narrative view and vilifies the business. But what happens if you dive into the details and discover the employee was actually stealing from the company, and in fact the company decided to let them go and not file charges?

I can think of some other examples:

• “Restaurant refuses service to veteran” evokes outrage until you discover the veteran was heavily intoxicated and harassing other customers.
• “Police arrest woman for feeding the homeless” seems cruel until you learn she was repeatedly violating health codes despite warnings, potentially endangering the people she aimed to help.

Sometimes there’s nuance and contextual details to the situation that get lost in the high-level summarization.

The key takeaway here is simply to make sure you’ve done both. Dive into the details a bit and make sure you’ve got the context, but also take a step back and make sure you’ve thought about the “bullet-point” narrative.