The Art of Action: How Leaders Close the Gaps between Plans, Actions, and Results

by Stephen Bungay

Prussian. QUICK RECAP Before we do so, let us review the argument so far. Clausewitz observed that armies find executing strategy difficult and developed the concept of friction to explain why. Friction manifests itself when human beings with independent wills try to achieve a collective purpose in a fast-changing, complex environment where the future is fundamentally unpredictable. Friction is a universal phenomenon ultimately grounded in the basic fact of human finitude. Its universality means that it applies in some degree to all organizational life, including business. It also means that we can never completely escape it. Our finite nature means that we have limited knowledge, due to things we could know but happen not to (because we do not have perfect information) and things we could not know even in principle (such as unpredictable future events). It also means that we are independent agents. When we engage in a collective enterprise we therefore face the problem of communicating with each other and aligning our individual wills. While we cannot become God, we can deal with the more tractable implications of our finitude. The first step is to recognize it. Internal friction is exacerbated by the fact that in business as in war, we are operating in a nonlinear, semi-chaotic environment in which our endeavors will collide and possibly clash with the actions of other independent wills (customers, suppliers, competitors, regulators, lobbyists, and so on). The internal a...