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August 16 - August 20, 2018
“Obedience is a principle,” he memorably asserted, “but the man stands above the principle.”
concluded that it was vital to ensure that every level understood enough of the intentions of the higher command to enable the organization to fulfil its goal. Von Moltke did not want to put a brake on initiative, but to steer it in the right direction.
The guidance opens by emphasizing the importance of clear decisions in a context of high friction, which renders perfect planning impossible: With darkness all around you, you have to develop a feeling for what is right, often based on little more than guesswork, and issue orders in the knowledge that their execution will be hindered by all manner of random accidents and unpredictable obstacles. In this fog of uncertainty, the one thing that must be certain is your own decision… the surest way of achieving your goal is through the single-minded pursuit of simple actions.
not commanding more than is strictly necessary, nor planning beyond the circumstances you can foresee. In war, circumstances change very rapidly, and it is rare indeed for directions which cover a long period of time in a lot of detail to be fully carried out.
Going into too much detail makes a senior commander a hostage to fortune, because in a rapidly changing environment, the greater the level of detail, the less likely it is to fit the actual situation. It also creates uncertainty about what really matters.
In any case, a leader who believes that he can make a positive difference through continual personal interventions is usually deluding himself. He thereby takes over things other people are supposed to be doing, effectively dispensing with their efforts, and multiplies his own tasks to such an extent that he can no longer carry them all out.
The demands made on a senior commander are severe enough as it is. It is far more important that the person at the top retains a clear picture of the overall situation than whether some particular thing is done this way or that.
The higher the level of command, the shorter and more general the orders should be. The next level down should add whatever further specification it feels to be necessary, and the details of execution are left to verbal instructions or perhaps a word of command. This ensures that everyone retains freedom of movement and decision within the bounds of their authority.
The rule to follow is that an order should contain all, but also only, what subordinates cannot determine for themselves to achieve a particular purpose.
Mindful of the realities of communication, von Moltke advises people to repeat verbal orders and, conversely, to examine orders received with great care in order to sort the information in them into what is certain, what is probable, and what is possible. Understanding an order means grasping what is essential and taking measures which put that before anything else.
On the knowledge gap, he emphasizes the need to plan only what can be planned, the need for judgment and timely decision making based on what one can ascertain, and the acceptance of uncertainty.
Plans should be appropriate to their level: the lower the level, the more specific and detailed they should be. Each level will know less about the overall context and more about the specific situation than the level above.
On the effects gap, he encourages the use of individual initiative within boundaries and actually requires junior people to depart from the letter of their instructions if the situation demands it in order to fulfill the intent. Rather than tightening control, he suggests that as long as the intentions of the higher levels are made clear, individual initiative can be relied on to adjust actions according to the situation. The imposed discipline of controls and sanctions is replaced by the self-discipline of responsibility.
His view could be summarized as in Figure 6. This is von Moltke’s solution to the problem he identified in the 1868 Memoire. It is simple, but remarkable.
He realizes quite simply that the more alignment you have, the more autonomy you can grant.
The insight is that alignment needs to be achieved around intent, and autonomy should be granted around actions. Intent is expressed in terms of what to achieve and why. Autonomy concerns the actions taken in order to realize the intent; in other words, about what to do and how.
The result is that the organization’s performance does not depend on its being led by a military genius, because it becomes an intelligent organization. Rather than relying on exceptional – and by definition rare – individuals, this solution raises the performance of the average.
He has in effect turned strategy development and strategy execution into a distinction without a difference.
The corollary is that von Moltke did not have to wait to develop a perfect plan. He could go with one that was 70 percent right, because the organization would deal with the other 30 percent. He did not need to know everything, he simply needed to be directionally correct.
One was known as the Normaltaktiker, because they wanted to create standard specifications (Normen) for tactical procedures. They sought to establish coherence by training infantry leaders in the use of detailed methods of deployment and attack. The other school argued that no such recipes were possible. They were dubbed Auftragstaktiker, because they wanted to exercise control by specifying the mission (Auftrag) to be accomplished and leave decisions about how to do so to junior leaders on the spot.32 Anything else would drive out the spirit of initiative. Junior leaders had to be properly
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A soldier did not have the choice whether to obey, but he was left free to choose how to obey.
“Experience suggests,” he wrote, “that every order which can be misunderstood will be.”36
The intention was binding; the task was not. A German officer’s prime duty was to reason why.
It emphasized independence of thought and action, stating that “a failure to act or a delay is a more serious fault than making a mistake in the choice of means.”
Officers were to ask themselves the question: “What would my superior order me to do if he were in my position and knew what I know?” An understanding of intent was the sine qua non of independent action.
The new Chief of the General Staff, Hans von Seeckt, a veteran of the mobile war in the East, decided to turn his army of 100,000 men into an army of 100,000 officers. Training was centered on inculcating a spirit of initiative and von Schlichting’s “independent thinking obedience.” To further this and create greater levels of trust, all NCOs were trained as officers, and officers were expected to master the tasks of two ranks higher up the hierarchy and to take their place if needs be. Whereas von Moltke had restricted the use of directives to the higher levels of command, their use was now
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A contributing factor to the German defeat was Hitler’s contempt for the principles of Auftragstaktik and his attempts to reverse its practice, particularly on the Eastern Front from 1942 onward. Running through the whole conception was the principle of trust. Hitler had never trusted his generals.
Auftragstaktik is not popular with tyrants.
As one American veteran of Normandy and the Rhineland puts it: “Until you’ve fought the German army, you have never fought a real battle.”
On a man for man basis, the German ground soldier consistently inflicted casualties at about a 50% higher rate than they incurred from the opposing British and American troops under all circumstances. This was true when they were attacking and when they were defending, when they had a local numerical superiority and when, as was usually the case, they were outnumbered, when they had air superiority and when they did not, when they won and when they lost.
Once again, a crisis was required. Immediately after the war nobody bothered to examine the concept. After all, what did the winners have to learn from the losers? With the formation of NATO, the losers became allies, but very junior ones. It was in any case beginning to look as if technology would allow masterplanners to control everything, with perfect information becoming instantaneously available at the center.
The impact of Vietnam on the US military bears some comparison with the impact of Jena on the Prussians.
Today, the operational manuals of organizations like the US Marine Corps or the British Army all contain passages which could have been lifted from Truppenführung. Mission command is part of official NATO doctrine. Something like it has long been practiced by élite forces.
First, they represent one of the earliest, well-documented attempts in the modern age to create a system of what we now call “empowerment,” granting wide freedom of action to junior members of a large, complex organization.
Frederick Winslow Taylor’s slim volume, The Principles of Scientific Management, appeared in 1911. His approach to business exactly parallels von Bülow’s approach to war, although Taylor was writing, to great acclaim, 100 years later. Taylor recommended the rigorous separation of planning and execution.
The work of every workman is fully planned out by management at least one day in advance, and each man receives in most cases complete written instructions, describing in detail the task which he is to accomplish.
Scientific management worked for quite a while. It was not until the 1980s that some writers began to suggest that business organizations were more like organisms than machines and that they contained people with brains as well as hands and legs.57
Mission command is scaleable. It does not work because a bunch of creative individuals team up and do funky stuff together. There have been and continue to be plenty of those. A few manage to grow and develop a culture which preserves creativity; many do not. Their experience is not transferable to large, established organizations which cannot afford to throw everything away and start all over again.
Oil companies do not work like 20-person software houses and pharmaceutical companies do not work like biotechs. Exhorting them to learn from their smaller cousins is of limited practical help. In contrast, mission command has been made to work in organizations of hundreds of thousands of people with attendant levels of complexity.
Thirdly, neither Auftragstaktik, nor its descendant mission command, was developed as a theory, but as a set of practices which were continua...
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We are helped here by the fact that as a set of practices which are themselves taught, techniques and processes have been developed which make it easier for other organizations to adopt them. There is a method for developing plans, breaking them down, and using them to brief subordinates. There is a procedure, which the military calls “mission analysis,” to help subordinates to draw out the implications of what they have been asked to achieve. The subordinates then go through a process of “backbriefing” their superiors to check their understanding of the intent and its implications before
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These techniques create internal predictability, which helps when the environment is chaotic, and allow scaleability. They can be adopted, in barely modified form, by any organization trying to have an impact on the world outside it. Using these techniques requires skill. The military invests an enormous amount of time and effort in training.
Adopting mission command as an operating model is not a matter of setting up some processes, but of mastering some skills, perhaps...
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Anecdotally, it is generally accepted that mission command is most deeply rooted in special forces, airborne forces (who have always stressed the value of “airborne initiative”), and both the Royal Marines and the USMC.
Management is not a science but a practical art. Practicing it skillfully means applying general principles in a specific context. It helps to identify what the critical principles are.
In current American parlance, the art of the broken-field runner was the key to success. Strategy was not a lengthy action plan. It was the evolution of a central idea through continually changing circumstances.
Welch took over the approach, calling it “planful opportunism.”
The name I have chosen for mission command in business is “directed opportunism.”
People whose self-understanding is a version of Noll’s, who see themselves as functionaries, the servants of a process, or cogs in a machine, behave quite differently from those who understand themselves as independent agents bearing some responsibility for the achievement of a collective purpose and as part of a living organism.
In his comparison of the US and German armies of the 1940s, van Creveld points to the difference succinctly: A German officer, confronted by some task, would ask: worauf kommt es eigentlich an? (what is the core of the problem?). An American one, trained in the “engineering approach” to war, would inquire: what are the problem’s component parts?
