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.

OODA Loop Core rule: For reversible moves under time pressure, act on ~70% confidence, then immediately re observe. Cycle faster than the situation compounds; a late perfect plan loses to a fast loop. 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. Procedure 1. Observe (time boxed): gather the cheapest high signal state now — metrics, logs, alerts, recent deploys/config, and feedback from the last action. Cap the window; do not collect forever. 2. Orient: match observations to a pattern and form ≥2 candidate explanations. Update or discard the mental model when data contradicts it; refuse single hypothesis lock. 3. Decide: pick one reversible action that tests the leading hypothesis. State confidence (~70% threshold for reversible moves), the predicted effect, the observation you will check next, and a time box for that check. 4. Act: execute once, decisively, with a known rollback or degrade path. 5. Re observe immediately: compare outcome to prediction within the time box; feed the result into the next Observe. Loop until stable or until the next move is no longer reversible enough for this skill. 6. Stop condition: exit the loop when the system is stable, the remaining work is static analysis, or the next step requires irreversible commitment — then switch method. Output A cycle record (repeat per loop): 1. Observed — current signals and what changed since last cycle. 2. Orientation — ≥2 hypotheses; which one leads and why. 3. Decision — action, confidence, predicted effect, next observation, time box. 4. Act + result — what ran and what the immediate re observe showed. 5. Loop status — continue / stable / escalate out of OODA. Verification Falsify/stop: if you cannot name a reversible next action and a near term observation that would refute it, stop looping and gather more evidence or escalate. If re observe never happens after act, the loop is broken — fix that before another action. Over application guard: do not OODA static design work, irreversible launches, or cases where a single cheap localization check ends the uncertainty. Do not wait for 100% confidence on reversible mitigations under active incident pressure.

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