Boyd's Process for Vacant Car Park Lots

Here in Singapore, car parks in popular shopping malls, places where a high volume of people congregate during the weekends is probably the most competitive activity there is for drivers looking for the free lot.

Tens and tens of cars patrol the alleyways looking and scanning for the free lot that does not seem exist at all. It is like a sea of cars sitting on bums, just refusing to budge until the occasional shopper decides he wants to visit another place outside this shopping mall.

For me, this is a problem that I thought hard on how to solve. One, is to totally avoid the crowd by going to other places where lesser or no-one wants to go. But however, this is not the solution to the problem at hand.

So, I remembered that I read about John Boyd and his OODA loop process. Although it may seem ridiculous to associate this elite Vietnam War fighter pilot with a Singaporean driver in a shopping mall, but I do find the situations quite similar.

In the skys over Vietnam, where it is vast emptiness of blue with only white clouds only acting as the only cover, Boyd subconsciously applied his OODA loop process to successfully engage in numerous dogfights of which he has never lost a single one.

In a quite a different context, the shopping mall car park is dimly lit, filled with a mass of cars, while competing with other adversaries for the free lot that is made available only when the departing shoppers decide to leave the mall.

So, in a nutshell, I applied this process consciously twice and managed to find a lot within five to ten minutes on a busy weekend noontime at two different shopping malls. I present the process as below:

1) Observation: the collection of data by means of the senses (through sight and see whether there are departing shopping patrons in your vicinity).

2) Orientation: the analysis and synthesis of data to form one's current mental perspective. (Determine whether the shopper is heading which direction where his car is parked).

3) Decision: the determination of a course of action based on one's current mental perspective (Decide whether you want to intercept this shopper to the car park lot that you think is where he had parked his car).

4) Action: the physical playing-out of decisions. (Drive your car immediately once your decision is made to the soon to be vacant lot).

Read the concepts that is explained by Boyd in above the links, and try it out. It worked for me!