Observation time

We frequently hear cited the “observer effect” in research discussions. This is the idea that you cannot observe something without changing it. Why is that?

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Well, among other reasons, it just takes a discrete amount of time to observe something and turn that observation into usable information. If most folks take about 2/10 of a second to make the simplest of observation-reactions, by the time you have observed it, it has changed.

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In the case of a human taking one step at a reasonable average speed of about 3 feet/sec then during the 2/10 sec that it takes just to see them moving and realize you’ve seen it, the moving center of mass has moved greater than 7 inches. If the observer is in motion too, the change could be as much as 14 inches in 2/10 of a second.

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This has some dramatic implications for self-defense:

• By intelligently synchronizing your motion with that of the opponent, you can cut the chaos and imprecision in the system by as much as half (e.g. from 14 inches to 7 inches in our example above). A 2X increase in precision is a big deal!


• If you don’t move as he crosses ma-ai then he’ll be greater than 7 inches closer than you thought by the time you see him coming – and that’s just observation-orientation time. It takes much more time to plan a response and get your body into motion.


• If you see an opening, it’s already too late to attack it because by the time you get there everything will be at least 7 inches different than it was when you made your plan. There’s a famous story (maybe apocryphal) that Joe Lewis retired when he realized he was seeing openings before he hit them because that’s when he knew he was getting too slow. He was still at the top of his game, but it freaked him out too much to realize that he’d never actually seen an opening before – he just hit where the opening was going to be.

Intelligence, instinct, and efficiency

I have written in previous articles about the necessity of making use of reflex, instinct, and natural motion in self defense. The idea is that you have to be able to act effectively and decisively within the amount of time that the opponent needs to observe, orient, decide, and act (the OODA loop). The common approach to achieving this in martial arts is to build upon defensive instincts or low-level generalized habituated responses. But on the other hand, Chris Marshall recently noted the need for a higher-level of intelligence in conflicts and less animal instinct. With our recent interest in more creative, perhaps non-violent resolution of conflict, it seems like Chris’ call for a more highly evolved intelligence in combat may be a good thing.
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This brings up the pragmatic question, how is it possible to develop greater intelligence in combat but still stay within the attacker’s OODA loop? What exactly do you have to do to get the faster intelligence that Chris says we need? Well, really we can’t. From my understanding of the neuromuscular machine I don’t really think that you can make the brain/spine/muscle machine work faster than it already does. There is hardwired into us about a ¾ second delay (if not more) in the OODA loop.
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But we can make it SEEM like we are speeding up the higher brain functions by making ourselves a little more efficient in our motions and strategies.
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Example: Assuming that you see the attacker coming when they are at least outside of touching distance (about 3 feet), if the attacker has to move 3 feet to hit you and you only have to move 18 inches to evade him, then you are effectively about twice as fast as him (plus or minus a negligible amount). A speed differential of 2X is huge! This effectively gives the defender a really large reserve capacity to do things to help the situation. What can you do with this spare capacity? Wait longer to act, move slower and more precisely, watch for more precise timing windows, etc… Think - use your best weapon – your mind! You can use this reserve potential to act on a level higher than instinct.
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But – in order to achieve this reserve potential you have to diligently practice and you have to be ruthless in your self-evaluation of the efficiency of your own motion. Choose the things that happen most often during a conflict (e.g. footwork) and practice them relentlessly, looking for minute improvements in efficiency. Are there places in your footwork when you have to lean one way to move another way? Do you sometimes find that you have to shift a foot before you can move the direction you need to? Are you bending your knees (i.e. loading up some energy) so that you can jump out of the way fast? Do you take such large steps that your center falls and rises more than you can take up in the bend of your knees?
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Little things like this eat up your spare reserve of potential for intelligent action, leaving you at the mercy of instinct or habituated response, which is better than nothing, but still not all that you can be.

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Check out the following video of Gozo Shioda doing amazing things. Look how late he waits to move and what small motions he makes. This is what I'm talking about. Efficiency in motion leads to a great reserve that one can use to great effect.

"I would never punch that way"

One of the most common arguments against the viability of aikido training methods has got to be, “But I would never punch that way.” Folks want to know how aikido deals with short, efficient lead jabs and jab-cross combinations and why we don’t train against quick jab or jab-cross attacks.
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In order to make any attack, the attacker has to step to within arm’s reach. Saying, “I’d never punch that way,” assumes that the attacker is in good control of his momentum and balance and movement at the end of that step. When you are practicing kihon in karate, or shadow boxing, or some other solo striking form, that’s pretty easy to assume. There’s really no reason to expect that you shouldn’t be able to control your own body at the end of the attack step. But when your target moves during the middle of your step, when someone bumps into you during that step, when there is the possibility that the target might hurt you back, all your body dynamics change. You are not in complete control at the end of the attacking step.
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As an experiment, try stepping two feet forward and hitting a moving speed bag – hard – however you like – lunge punch, lead jab, hook, whatever. You just have to hit hard. Try this several times and unless you are really masterful, you’ll miss or hit improperly pretty often. Can you control your body just like you’d like when that happens or is your balance and momentum and timing at least a little off?
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A funny thing happens when something interrupts an attack step. The attacker seizes up for just a moment while he regains his balance and figures out a good appropriate next move. In this situation, the defender has caused the attacker to reset to the beginning of his OODA loop and now he has to observe his situation, orient to what is going on, and decide on an action, before he can act. The funny thing is, people tend to become cataleptic to some degree when they are reset to the beginning of the loop. They literally freeze in place almost catatonic for an instant.
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An instant is a long time to someone who expects it and knows when it is going to happen…

High-resolution jiu-jitsu and low-resolution judo

Martial arts randori or shiai or sparring is to a large degree a pattern recognition problem. You have to find the right opportunity to apply the tactics and techniques that your strategies and principles suggest will help your situation. This is the Observe-Orient-Decide part of the OODA loop - finding the pattern in the chaos of combat.

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Techniques are just named reference positions, labels that are placed on commonly-occurring motions just to have a shorthand way of talking about that type of motion or situation. Part of the pattern recognition problem involves the number of techniques in the system from which you have to choose, the number of categories you have to recognize.

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This is similar to the problem of resolution in a computer monitor. The greater the resolution, the greater the scan time required to keep all those pixels refreshed and lit up. In the olden days (10 years ago or so) this problem was solved by moving the gun farther back from the inside of the screen so that shorter gun motions described a wider arc on the screen. The problem was this led to much larger (deeper, heavier) monitors. It took a while to develop the technology to make fast, hi-res, flat panels.

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In the same way, you can increase the resolution of your martial art by labelling more and more of the motions that you find in randori/sparring/shiai. For example, the escape from the mount (tateshiho) in judo or BJJ. If you do some randori for a while you can probably come up with a dozen or more decent ways to get out of tateshiho. Keep doing randori and each of those dozen will recur at least once. So there you have it – recurring motion! Let’s name it and call it a technique and teach it as part of a high-resolution syllabus. Problem is, it takes time to learn a technique and it takes time to scan thru those techniques during a fight to choose the right one. Thus leading to a larger (deeper, heavier) jiujitsu.

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What you need in your martial arts system is sufficiently high resolution with minimal scan time. Technical resolution has to be great enough to solve many of the likely problems you will encounter but it needs to be small enough to minimize scan time. Scan time has to be minimized and your system has to be relatively light so that it is not too hard to pick up (to teach and learn).

Strategy and tactics in the OODA loop

Are you one of the many folks who are at least a little bit confused about the difference between strategy and tactics? Well, the OODA loop provides a pretty good framework to put these issues into perspective.
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First a review of OODA: OODA stands for Observe-Orient-Decide-Act. The idea is that in order to do some action, you basically have to observe your conditions, orient yourself to your situation, decide how to act, then act. The orientation and the decision typically take most people the most time but every so often you come across a martial artist who seems to be able to process through this OODA loop much faster than others. How do they do it?

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They do it through Strategy. Strategy is a broad, general, big-picture plan of how to behave in a conflict in order to achieve a goal. Great martial artists are able to strategically shift some part of their orientation and decision time so that their general behaviors are pre-programmed and tied to specific observations. For instance, in aikido we spend much of our time training and refining a reflex to step off the line of attack anytime anyone passes within arm’s reach.

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Strategy takes place before the OODA loop starts in order to reduce Orientation and Decision time.

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Tactics take place within the OODA loop. The actions that you take based on oriented decisions are tactical.

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You have to have tactics, but tactical action is limited. When your situation becomes unique or chaotic then you are unable to act tactically and stay inside your opponent’s OODA loop. You have to start thinking and working strategically.

SMART Goals

In a previous article I wrote about re-thinking your goals whenever you find techniques are not working for you. When this happens, you are likely thinking wrongly about how to approach the techniques. Specifically, you may be trying to accomplish the wrong goals. Instead of trying harder physically, re-think your goals.

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The overall goal in aikido is about self-defense. This does not mean beating someone else up, rather surviving violence intact. As Mike Denton puts it…

Aikido is not about 'winning' or finishing your opponent off, but rather about being able to disengage from a chaotic and violent situation as quickly and safely as possible.

With that overall objective in mind, it is possible to define better performance goals. An acronym that is used in business and personal coaching is SMART.

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A SMART goal is Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time-bound.

• Specific – what exactly would be an acceptable outcome to you? What do you not really care about? Your flexibility or slack in the way you do the techniques exists among the things that you don’t really care about. You can’t sacrifice tactically if that means you don’t accomplish the essential outcomes but you can sacrifice tactically in the areas in which you don’t really care about the outcome.
• Measurable – how can you tell if you have achieved your goal? Is your measure objective or subjective?
• Attainable – Your essential goals must be things that are within your power to control. Something that is possible to practice safely.
• Realistic – Your essential goals must be things that are within the realm of normal physics and biomechanics. It is smarter to base your essential goals on the natural rather than super-natural (regardless of what you believe about the super-natural). Your goal should promote tactics that reliably generalize to most of the population of potential attackers. Your goal should be based on probabilities instead of possibilities.
• Time-Bound – You have to be able to execute tactics to move you toward your goals within real time. This means that your goals should promote tactics that make use of natural motion and gross motor skills within the opponent’s OODA loop.

Example: Kotegaeshi as a big fall. If tori gets the idea that in order to succeed at kotegaeshi, uke has to take a big fall that looks just like the instructor’s model, this is not SMART. It is not specific because you don’t know how big a fall uke has to take for tori to be a success. It is not measurable because you never know if the fall you just saw uke take was big enough. It is not attainable because it is not within tori’s power to control how uke reacts to the throw. It is not realistic because it is totally outside our experience to think that you can throw something as heavy as a person with that type of motion, and it is not time-bound because it often requires relatively precise leverage on the wrist and you are forced to plant your feet to exert into the throw – stopping your motion and taking you out of uke’s OODA loop.

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So, kotegaeshi as a big throw is a recipe for frustration. Without a compliant, skilled uke tori will never make that throw match his ideal of it.

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So, how do you make a SMART goal for kotegaeshi…

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Specific: tori should remain safe throughout the whole motion and uke should end up in a condition of unbalance with his arm turning outward in a gaeshi motion. Uke might fall down because of this but tori doesn’t really care if or how. Measurable: did tori get hit? is uke’s balance broken (this is a tough one to measure objectively)? Is uke’s arm turning outward? Attainable: staying safe, getting kuzushi, and holding uke’s wrist twisted are within tori’s ability to a great extent. These actions are largely related to things tori does as opposed to how uke acts or reacts. Realistic: it doesn’t take supernatural thinking to expect uke to stay safe, get an offbalance, and hold uke’s arm. Timebound: now, instead of exerting hard to throw uke thru the air, tori can relax and keep moving, acting to stay within uke’s ooda loop. These goals can be accomplished with natural, gross motor tactics.

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So, defining kotegaeshi as “tori safe, uke offbalance, holding uke’s wrist turned out” is SMARTer than defining it as some subjectively large fall out of a wrist-twist.

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The moral of the story is the same as in the previous post, “The mind drives the body. The body obeys the mind. Change your mind and you will change your performance.”

OODA and aikido

For a while, particularly since the seminar I taught in Starkville last Saturday, I've been talking and writing about metsuke (proper use of eye contact) during a conflict. It turns out that there is a model and a terminology that has already been in use for years dealing with some of what I've been talking about. It's called the OODA loop. OODA is an acronym for Observe-Orient-Decide-Act, the theory being that all actions are based on decisions which are predicated on observations that are filtered through our individual mental models (orientation). It turns out that the orient and decide stages usually take up the most time and you can even get stuck in a feedback loop in the early part of this model such that you never get to decide and act. You freeze up.

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I wrote in a couple of recent articles about the phenomenon of proper metsuke (eye contact or gaze control) seeming to slow combat down. I talked about an example training exercise in which two partners are doing randori with one constantly shifting his gaze back and forth from the partner. The partners find that the combat seems much slower to the man that properly uses metsuke and much, much faster to the man that is shifting his gaze. In OODA terminology, with a moving opponent, every time you change your gaze angle you create a completely new observation. You start the loop over. And since the second step, orientation, takes so much time, you are restarting with a new observation before you can ever orient, much less decide and act.

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For more info on OODA, check out Chiron's series of excellent articles (especially the earlier ones) and also check out this Wikipedia artcle. OODA has a lot of varied applications to aikido and judo - not only related to eye contact.

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Even more on this topic here and here.