Also, since decision can flow pretty directly from orientation, you may find these two similar enough that you want to group them as one; I’m undecided on whether to make that change to this technique “more formally” and probably need to test it with more participants to see!
I actually normally combine/conflate Observe and Orient.
I think the actual takeaway here is: any two adjacent steps can kind of blend into each other.
You might be in a microloop where you’re observing and orienting (and then maybe looking for more observations and then orienting on the new ones).
Then, when you’re eventually like “okay I have enough observations”, you may be in a loop where you’re evaluating decisions, and then looking at your confused model and trying to wrangle the information into a form that’s useful for decisionmaking, then look at your decision options again, be dissatisfied with your current ability to make-sense-of-things, and do more orienting.
Then eventually you’re in a state where you know how to think about the situation, and you pretty much know what the options are, but as you start thinking about “Acting”, your brain starts to see the consequences of each decision in near mode, which changes your guesses about which actions are best.
Then, as you start acting in earnest, each action comes with some immediate observations.
But, you can’t really move from “Observe” to “Decide” without having gone through at least a little bit of an orient step on how to classify your observations.
I actually normally combine/conflate Observe and Orient.
I think the actual takeaway here is: any two adjacent steps can kind of blend into each other.
You might be in a microloop where you’re observing and orienting (and then maybe looking for more observations and then orienting on the new ones).
Then, when you’re eventually like “okay I have enough observations”, you may be in a loop where you’re evaluating decisions, and then looking at your confused model and trying to wrangle the information into a form that’s useful for decisionmaking, then look at your decision options again, be dissatisfied with your current ability to make-sense-of-things, and do more orienting.
Then eventually you’re in a state where you know how to think about the situation, and you pretty much know what the options are, but as you start thinking about “Acting”, your brain starts to see the consequences of each decision in near mode, which changes your guesses about which actions are best.
Then, as you start acting in earnest, each action comes with some immediate observations.
But, you can’t really move from “Observe” to “Decide” without having gone through at least a little bit of an orient step on how to classify your observations.