My K9 partner and I recently worked with a team of Officers to arrest a man who ran from a stolen car with a 10-inch hunting knife on his belt. No one was more surprised than me when he crashed through the gate into the courtyard of an apartment complex with my dog on his tail (so to speak), and the gate slammed closed—leaving me locked out. As he started punching and kicking my dog on the other side of the fence, I had a small heart attack: I better get over there before he pulls out that big ol’ knife.

Decision-making in a conflict or crisis, as described by John Boyd, revolves around four attributes that need to balance each other to be successful. They are harmony, initiative, variety, and rapidity. Harmony is that your efforts work together and compliment each other. Initiative is control of the steering wheel—your ability to drive the events, rather than react to them. Variety is about options. Rapidity is about speed, and more specifically, about time and tempo. In this scenario, the dog overwhelmed his ability to make a decision. He had a plan to get away—but we had a contingency that interrupted his plan and took back the initiative. He had another option available to him—the blade—but because I gained some initiative by using the dog, he fell behind on the action-reaction curve. He might have been able to compress his reaction time with proper training—but not this time. I took that gap in time to make things happen faster than he could respond. Time, and tempo: His environment changed faster than he was able to cope.

Our tempo and response time, having options and a plan, taking and maintaining initiative, all worked together for a good outcome. It doesn’t always work out that way, but this was one of those days we got it right. “Blitz (the dog) got inside his OODA loop,” a colleague remarked. I love that Boyd’s decision-making model has permeated its way into conversations at work. This guy probably never trained to draw that blade reactively; That doesn’t mean he hasn’t used it, or that he wouldn’t have if and when the thought occurred to him—So what other forces were at play? One is the effect of stress: Conscious, rational thoughts are thwarted by survival-oriented behaviors, often only leaving the primitive fight-flight-freeze options on the table. And then there’s that training bit. We train ourselves in a lot of ways—your habits carry a substantial burden. Develop tactics and skills around agility and adaptability over raw strength or power. Find balance in your training. Plan for contingencies. Take initiative today, for the fight tomorrow.