Jaimes Nel published a post this week - "From GPS to Map & Compass" - proposing what he calls the IO Loop: a model of design and innovation that replaces linear stages with recursive loops between four states (Outcomes, Possibilities, Intent, Definition). Nel's central argument is that design has become over-dependent on process to the point where design process models like oft derided Double Diamond functions as a GPS, directing teams along prescribed routes without requiring the critical judgement that would allow them to adapt when the terrain shifts. His alternative reframes design as navigation with a map and compass: the map provides shared understanding through states and loops; the compass is the designer's capacity for evaluation.
Reading Nel's post, I kept finding points of contact with arguments I have been developing through quite different theoretical routes - the Planning and Design series, the military design literature, the OODA loop tradition from my time at FOI. The convergence prompted me to articulate how these threads connect, and where the structural questions behind the practitioner experience Nel describes might be worth exploring further.
Two senses of "state"
The word "state" is doing different work in different traditions, and the difference matters. Nel uses "states" to describe modes of design activity - how designers think about what they are doing at a given moment. In the Planning and Design series, I have been developing a different sense. State spaces, in the formal sense drawn from planning theory and AI, are descriptions of a system at a moment in time: selections of variables deemed relevant, with values assigned, transitions specified, and preconditions defined. The state space is constructed, not given. Someone has to decide what variables to include, what values each variable can take, what transitions are possible. These are design decisions. They determine what can be seen, what can be reasoned about, what can be planned.
The distinction is between how designers organise their own activity and what designers must construct for that activity to have effect. Both are important; they operate at different levels. Nel's reframing addresses the first - and the shift from "stages" to "states" and from "lines" to "loops" is a genuinely useful move that makes iteration, recursion, and non-linearity legible. The formal state-space question sits beneath it: before designers can loop productively between modes of activity, someone needs to have constructed the representations - the variables, transitions, and preconditions - that make the system designable in the first place.
Why process becomes GPS
Nel's GPS diagnosis - that design process has become a substitute for critical judgement - connects to a structural question that several traditions have addressed. Dubberly's (2004) compendium How Do You Design? catalogued over one hundred design and development process models from architecture, industrial design, mechanical engineering, and software development, and found that almost all shared the same structural commitment to linearity. "Loops or circular layouts are curiously rare in design process models", he observed; the dominant representations were sequential, staged, and convergent. Dubberly also noted the epistemic risk: representing a process "may promote an illusion of linearity and mechanism - of cause and effect" that neatens what is actually messy. The GPS condition was already visible in 2004 in the sheer weight of linear models the field had produced. The question was why the field continued to produce them despite knowing better.
The analysis I developed in The Reification Gap, drawing on Hajer's (2003) concept of story-lines and Gunderson's (2020) typology of reification, suggests an answer. The problem is not that designers chose process over judgement; it is that institutional governance requires simplified, portable representations of complex work. As Hajer argues, regulation depends on the "loss of meaning" that occurs when contingent knowledge is condensed into governable form. The Double Diamond becomes a GPS not because designers are naive about complexity but because programme boards, business cases, and procurement processes need a story-line about how design operates, and the Double Diamond provides one. Kimbell's (2021) institutional logics determine how much complexity the institution can absorb; reification is the mechanism by which the excess is stripped away. The design process, once objectivated, circulates through programme governance as a thing-like property of the organisation rather than as a contingent, situated practice requiring judgement.
Dubberly (2022) identifies a complementary mechanism from within design discourse itself. The problem-solving frame, he argues, "reduces [design] to a mechanical feedback process seeking a clear, unchanging goal" when in practice "the process of designing leads to the discovery of both alternative means and alternative goals" (Dubberly, 2022, p. 6). The framing is not merely imposed by institutional governance; it is embedded in design's dominant self-description. When design presents itself as problem-solving, it offers programme governance exactly the simplified narrative Hajer's story-line analysis predicts - a linear sequence from problem to solution that can be scheduled, resourced, and reviewed. Dubberly's alternative - design as "a generative conversation having more in common with play and world-building" (Dubberly, 2022, p. 4) - aligns with Glanville's second-order cybernetics, where the conversation generates criteria rather than applying criteria specified in advance.
Cybernetic traditions and where criteria come from
The vocabulary of loops, feedback, and states that recurs across these discussions originates in the cybernetic tradition - but cybernetics is not a single tradition, and the different traditions make genuinely different ontological commitments about the relationship between observer and system.
Brehmer's (2004) Dynamic OODA loop (DOODA loop) was developed to address the limitations of Boyd's (1987) original OODA formulation. Boyd had proposed increasing the velocity of the observe-orient-decide-act cycle as a source of strategic advantage. Brehmer's core argument was that this identified only one source of delay in the command and control process: the decision time between observation and action. The cybernetic tradition - specifically first-order cybernetics, concerned with control loops, feedback regulation, and system stability in the Wiener/Ashby tradition - identified several others: dead time (the interval between initiating an action and the action starting), the time constant (the interval between action starting and effects materialising), and information delay (the interval between effects occurring and the decision-maker becoming aware of them).
Brehmer also reformulated the loop not as a sequence of activities but as a set of functions that must be achieved - sensemaking, command concept development, planning, decision, military activity - connected by logical rather than strictly temporal relations. As Brehmer noted, the arrows in the model "represent logical relations among the functions, and they should not be given too strict a temporal interpretation at the process level". At the process level, sensemaking and planning overlap; the command concept emerges through iteration rather than preceding it in neat sequence. The move from temporal stages to logical functions is structurally similar to the move from stages to states - but grounded in a formal analysis of where delays actually occur and what functions actually need to be achieved.
The work at FOI on future command and control concepts (Granåsen and Hallberg, 2021) built directly on this tradition. The C2 concept work I was involved in used the DOODA loop's functional decomposition as a framework for mapping how future capability development would need to address each function in the loop - not by making each phase faster, but by understanding the dependencies between them and the structural constraints that shaped what was achievable.
But first-order cybernetics is only one position. The second-order cybernetics of Glanville and von Foerster - which I draw on in The Compass Unpacked to characterise evaluative judgement - makes a fundamentally different move: the observer is part of the system, criteria emerge from within the conversation rather than being specified in advance, and the loop is co-constitutive rather than regulatory. Burns and Hajdukiewicz's (2017) ecological interface design, also discussed in that post, emerges from the same Risø tradition as Brehmer but makes a third kind of move: neither control nor conversation but constraint revelation - designing interfaces so that work domain constraints are directly perceptible rather than requiring inference.
These distinctions matter for design practice. The first-order tradition says evaluative criteria are specified externally; the second-order tradition says they emerge from within the conversation; the ecological tradition says they are revealed by the structure of the work domain itself. These are not interchangeable answers, and the question of where evaluative criteria come from determines what "good design judgement" actually requires. Dubberly's (2004) compendium illustrates the tension: drawing on Pangaro (2002), he introduces second-order feedback loops - "designing involves not only achieving goals but also defining them. Thus we may improve our model of designing by nesting our original feedback loop within a second feedback loop" - but the framing remains within a control paradigm, an outer loop setting goals for an inner loop. This is structurally different from Glanville's second-order cybernetics, where criteria are not set at any level but emerge from the recursive conversation itself. Dubberly also includes Maturana's (1987) criteria of validation - "scientific explanations are not valid in themselves, they are generative mechanisms accepted as valid as long as the criterion of validation in which they are embedded is fulfilled" and "explanations are not so in themselves; explanations are interpersonal relations" - which is genuinely second-order in Glanville's sense, but sits in the compendium as one model among over a hundred rather than as a fundamentally different epistemological commitment.
Speed, velocity, and the construction of the map
The military design literature suggests a framing for how these threads connect. The US Army's Counterinsurgency Field Manual (US Army and Marine Corps, 2006) distinguishes planning from design not by the skill of the practitioner but by the nature of the cognitive activity: "Planning applies established procedures to solve a largely understood problem within an accepted framework. Design inquires into the nature of a problem to conceive a framework for solving that problem". The map, in this formulation, is not a given representation of the territory but a constructed model whose dimensions, boundaries, and transitions reflect design decisions about what matters, to whom, and for what purposes. The compass is not a single evaluative capacity but - as The Compass Unpacked explores - a family of evaluative modes, each requiring different prerequisites: domain knowledge, embodied disposition, conversational engagement, ethical situation-reading, and an environment that reveals constraint structures.
This connects to a persistent concern in the forward-deployed design work I documented: the difference between speed and velocity. Speed is how fast you can build; velocity is how fast you can build the right thing. The DOODA loop's analysis of delays shows that compressing the decision cycle is insufficient if the sensemaking has not occurred, if the command concept is underdeveloped, if the information infrastructure introduces its own latencies. In a world of LLM-accelerated code generation, loops between design states may be faster, but if the state space itself has not been constructed - if nobody has done the design work of determining what states are possible, what transitions are legitimate, what constitutes a goal - then faster iteration produces faster movement in the wrong direction.
The practitioner discourse about design's future - the move from stages to states, from process adherence to evaluative judgement - is addressing a real problem. The structural traditions from military design, cybernetics, and state-space theory have been working through the same territory from the other end: what produces the GPS condition (reification), what designers must construct before iteration can be productive (state spaces), where delays and distortions actually occur (the DOODA tradition), and what evaluative capacity actually consists of (the cybernetic and ecological traditions). These are the questions I have been working through in the Planning and Design series, and Nel's post was a useful prompt to articulate how they connect.
References
Boyd, J. (1987). A Discourse on Winning and Losing. Maxwell Air Force Base, AL: Air University Library Document No. M-U 43947.
Brehmer, B. (2004). The Dynamic OODA Loop: Amalgamating Boyd's OODA Loop and the Cybernetic Approach to Command and Control. In Proceedings of the 10th International Command and Control Research and Technology Symposium.
Burns, C. M. and Hajdukiewicz, J. R. (2017). Ecological Interface Design. CRC Press.
Dubberly, H. (2004). How do you design? A compendium of models. Dubberly Design Office.
Dubberly, H. (2022). Why we should stop describing design as "problem-solving". Dubberly Design Office.
Granåsen, M. and Hallberg, N. (2021). A Future C2 Concept Designed to Guide Capability Development. In Proceedings of the 26th International Command and Control Research and Technology Symposium.
Gunderson, R. (2020). Things are the way they are: A typology of reification. Philosophy & Social Criticism, 46(7), 839-859.
Hajer, M. A. (2003). Ecological modernization: Discourse and institutional change. In J. S. Dryzek and D. Schlosberg (Eds.), Debating the Earth: The Environmental Politics Reader (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press.
Kimbell, L. (2021). Logics of Social Design. Bloomsbury.
Maturana, H. R. (1987). Everything is said by an observer. In W. I. Thompson (Ed.), Gaia: A Way of Knowing. Lindisfarne Press.
Nel, J. (2026). From GPS to Map & Compass: Introducing a 'State'-Based Model of Change. Path Ventures. https://pathventures.io/writing/from-map-to-compass-introducing-a-state-based-model-of-change
Pangaro, P. (2002). New order from old: The rise of second-order cybernetics and implications for machine intelligence. American Society for Cybernetics.
US Army and Marine Corps (2006). FM 3-24: Counterinsurgency. Department of the Army.