That's a really good point about an opposing process. Of course, there are opposing processes in business too, but I guess not the same - multiple, not always directly or continuously opposed, vs. a single implacable enemy. Do you think OODA still applies to business, or does overcoming these differences change it into something else? Not trying to be snarky or refute what you said here. I'm genuinely curious.

Yes, the multiple adversaries and unending situation can make it difficult to apply to business. Business also has a lot of specialized operation methods that take up all the capacity for meta discussion in many organizations. In many cases this is good, e.g., most of the benefits of Boyd’s thinking as it pertains to individual sales performance are already found in good training material. In other cases, such as the cycle of SWOT analyses followed by initiative rollouts, Boyd is nearly absent. There have been some good efforts to reframe marketing as cost-efficiently understanding and anticipating market trends in order to reliably surprise the market which are closer to Boyd’s teaching of how to gain energy advantage than to the misunderstanding of OODA as outworking the problem. In short, it just depends on the business aspect and what kind of thinking is possible by the people working on it.

Edit: a simpler way to say all that might be that Boyd was too wonky for the military, so it’s even harder to apply to business. The principals can be repackaged and taught to people who don’t need to know OODA. The resentment of the people who write about OODA, in my opinion, partially comes from the knowledge that they would be unable to directly apply OODA in a real organization because they can’t teach the term without losing the full meaning. But it is possible to teach the meaning in business.