Ready-Fire-Aim with Wild Bill

In Deadwood, I had a conversation with a man who went by Wild Bill. Not his real name, obviously. Deadwood does this to people. The town's history of gunslingers and gamblers gives everyone permission to adopt a slightly larger persona than they would normally carry.

Wild Bill had opinions about decision-making. Strong ones. And his central claim was simple: most people think too much before they act. The correct sequence, he argued, is not ready-aim-fire but ready-fire-aim. Act first. Adjust second. Think third.

The Case for Acting First

Wild Bill's argument was not as reckless as it sounds. He was a former contractor who had spent decades managing construction projects. His experience had taught him that in many situations, the cost of delay exceeds the cost of error.

Consider a construction site. You have a problem with the foundation. You could spend two days analyzing the problem, developing a plan, getting everyone to agree on the plan, and then executing. Or you could try an immediate fix based on experience, see if it works, and adjust from there. The second approach might waste some materials. But the first approach definitely wastes two days, and on a construction site, two days of delay can cascade into weeks.

This is the logic behind the melee move. In a fast-moving situation, the best available action executed now is often better than the optimal action executed later. The key word is "available." You are not acting randomly. You are acting on the best information you have at the moment, which might be incomplete but is not zero.

Wild Bill did not use terms like "OODA loop" but he was describing something very close to what John Boyd outlined. The OODA loop emphasizes speed of cycling through observe-orient-decide-act. The faster you cycle, the more adaptive you become. And sometimes the fastest way to observe is to act and see what happens.

When Aiming First Is Wrong

The ready-aim-fire model assumes that better information is available if you wait for it. Sometimes this is true. If you are making a decision that is expensive to reverse and you have a reliable way to gather more information, then by all means, aim carefully.

But how often are those conditions actually met? In Wild Bill's experience, less often than people think. Most decisions are cheaper to reverse than people assume. And most information-gathering takes longer than people expect. The combination means that the "aim" phase often costs more than the errors it prevents.

There is also a subtler problem. The aiming phase is not neutral. While you are gathering information and deliberating, the situation is changing. The foundation problem is getting worse. The competitor is moving. The market is shifting. By the time you have finished aiming, the target may have moved.

Lagrangian decision-making accounts for this. It considers not just where the target is now but where it will be when your action arrives. If your decision process takes a long time, you need to aim where the target is going, not where it is. And predicting where the target is going introduces its own uncertainties.

Wild Bill's shortcut was to skip the prediction entirely. Act now. See where the target actually went. Adjust. This is crude but effective in domains where the feedback is fast and the cost of error is low.

The Bias Toward Planning

Most professional cultures have a strong bias toward planning. Meetings, strategies, roadmaps, project plans. The assumption is that more planning leads to better outcomes. And for large, complex, expensive projects, this is often true.

But the planning bias can become pathological. I have seen teams spend more time planning a feature than it would take to build the feature, test it, and throw it away if it did not work. The planning was not reducing risk. It was creating the illusion of reduced risk while consuming the most valuable resource: time.

Wild Bill had a good test for this. "If the plan takes longer to make than the thing takes to do," he said, "you are doing it wrong."

This is obviously an oversimplification. Some things take a long time to do and a short time to plan, and the plan is still essential. Building a bridge requires extensive planning even though the planning is a small fraction of the construction time. But as a heuristic for everyday decisions, it has merit.

The Right Sequence for the Situation

The honest answer is that there is no single correct sequence. Ready-aim-fire is right when the cost of error is high and the cost of delay is low. Ready-fire-aim is right when the cost of delay is high and the cost of error is low. The skill is in recognizing which situation you are in.

Most people default to one sequence or the other based on personality rather than situation. Cautious people aim first regardless of context. Impulsive people fire first regardless of context. The adaptable person reads the situation and chooses.

What Wild Bill understood, even if he expressed it in cowboy idioms rather than decision theory, was that the default in most organizations is too much aiming. Not because aiming is bad, but because aiming feels productive even when it is not. A positioning move looks like progress. A meeting looks like work. A plan looks like preparation. But sometimes the most productive thing you can do is pick up a hammer and start swinging.

Related

• A Moment of Silence with John Boyd - The theorist behind the OODA loop and fast decision cycles.
• The One-Way of the Beginner - How beginners often default to one decision tempo.
• Fast and Slow Thinking Habits - The cognitive psychology behind when to think fast vs. slow.