Our orientation establishes how we conduct ourselves in general, and becomes a posture or trajectory that influences the decisions, actions, and reactions of participants in a conflict. This posture can exert a gravitational pull on our interactions with other people, leading both towards and away from conflict.

Orientation was expanded in Boyd's model to include the idea of "implicit guidance and control". This, combined with feedback, is what creates the general mode or inclination of a person in a given moment. Previous experience combined with our analysis hopefully results in a reasoned approach to conflicts, but it can cause us to have emotional responses to conflict as well.

As new information comes in, it gets evaluated against previous experience. Additionally, it could be viewed with hopes, heritage, and traditions in mind. Analysis takes place, or maybe it gets short-circuited by emotion. There is usually some combination of emotion and reasoning that takes place, weighted more in one direction or another.

So, now we see that orientation is not simply a step in a sequential process, but a constant operating condition that is being maintained, consciously or otherwise. It is also a way of thinking that can short circuit our opponent's decision-making loop in several ways.

Your orientation surrounds you throughout the conflict, causing prepositioning to occur, mentally and physically. Someone who has a mental posture or orientation that looks for peaceful and equitable resolutions to conflicts - and doesn't allow the ego to be involved - will often be able to short-circuit attempts to escalate conflict by a potential adversary. Conversely, someone who is easily angered or stressed may have an entirely different predisposition towards conflict - perhaps they often bring it upon themselves. Orientation could include simply raising our level of awareness in places or situations that require it. Those mental orientations relate to what happens before conflict; once a fight begins, it quickly becomes about your physical orientation also.

Here are some examples of short-circuiting an opponent's decision-making loop in self-defense scenarios. In a mugging situation, perhaps you have been singled out because you are a woman alone with a purse and a large shopping bag. The mugger wants to attack as soon as you are past him, and there are not many people nearby. By being aware, directly observing the wannabe mugger, and then rapidly moving away from him towards a more populated area, you short-circuit the loop entirely and opt out of the conflict before it begins. Another way to short-circuit an attacker's loop is to strike first. Perhaps you realize you have been picked and the attack is going to happen: you are being approached and it can only mean one thing. So instead of waiting, you throw an advancing front kick to the groin, see the guy double over in pain, and you run. Since you didn't use your hands, you get to keep your shopping bag and your purse. In a very compressed time frame, it could a simple as throwing a kick to your attacker's groin following up with an eye strike. While he is either reacting to getting kicked in groin or blocking it just to catch your next strike in the eye, you have interrupted his loop and are now operating "inside" of it by taking the lead and causing the opponent to react to you instead of the other way around.

Now you see that we all go through similar thought processes in a conflict, both us and our adversaries. It helps us to avoid and survive conflict if we understand how our adversary is thinking. We can be mentally and physically prepared to interrupt or circumvent our adversaries' decision-making loops when we know what their general goal is and what the tactical needs are to meet that goal. Then we can make a decision to interrupt that process, one way or another, in a way that is available to us, expedient and most of all, safe.