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decentralized decision-making authority (“empowered execution”).
The pursuit of “efficiency”—getting the most with the least investment of energy, time, or money—was once a laudable goal, but being effective in today’s world is less a question of optimizing for a known (and relatively stable) set of variables than responsiveness to a constantly shifting environment. Adaptability, not efficiency, must become our central competency.
But ideas are cheap; plenty of armchair generals have proposals for winning wars, some of them quite clever, but only those who can actually shape and manage a force capable of doing the job ultimately succeed.
We did not draw static geographic features; we drew mutable relationships—the connections between things rather than the things themselves.
tried to locate familiar structures and patterns
diagram the relationships between members of the organization.
We killed “about 20 of Al Qaeda’s ‘number threes’ over the past decade, but everyone in a network is number three.”
Interconnectedness and the ability to transmit information instantly can endow small groups with unprecedented influence:
If we couldn’t change the environment to suit us better, we would have to change to suit it. The question was how.
At its heart, Nelson crafted an organizational culture that rewarded individual initiative and critical thinking, as opposed to simple execution of commands.
The pursuit of predictability—carefully delineated instructions, easily replicable procedures, fastidious standardization, and a tireless focus on efficiency—is foundational to the military’s struggle against the chaos always threatening to engulf combat operations.
Historically, this quest for order has produced impressive results.
but has proved increasingly inadequate at battling the networked mayhem of the twenty-first century.
military theorists have strived to reduce its practice to a set of principles.
commanders should mass the effects of overwhelming combat power at the decisive place and time.
Standardization and uniformity have enabled military leaders and planners to bring a semblance of predictability and order to the otherwise crazy environment that is war.
more, faster, with less.
Science at the time was dominated by the notion of determinism—the idea that any initial conditions has only one, inevitable outcome:
many people do things in inefficient ways, and that small inefficiencies multiplied at industrial scale reduce productivity.
Prediction is not the only way to confront threats; developing resilience, learning how to reconfigure to confront the unknown, is a much more effective way to respond to a complex environment.
In 1978 airline crews were structured as a command:
By 2009, effective airline crews were meant to function as teams—Sullenberger
The purpose of BUD/S is not to produce supersoldiers. It is to build superteams. The first step of this is constructing a strong lattice of trusting relationships.
about developing trust and the ability to adapt within a small group.
Purpose affirms trust, trust affirms purpose, and together they forge individuals into a working team.
In reality, no individual ant has the brain power to design a colony; ants have 250,000 brain cells, humans have around 100 billion.
“mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive.” A MECE breakdown takes something—say, customers—and segments it into a series of categories that do not overlap, but together cover everything.
Here, we run up against a fundamental constraint in the empathetic bandwidth of the human mind. British anthropologist Robin Dunbar theorized that the number of people an individual can actually trust usually falls between 100 and 230 (a more specific variant was popularized by Malcolm Gladwell as the “Rule of 150” in his book Outliers).
It’s a] fallacy that bigger teams are better than smaller ones because they have more resources to draw on,”
They were playing Krasnovian soccer.
how the organizations distributed information. NASA was, thanks to an approach known as “systems management,” a more effective organization.
The requirement to consult me for strikes was symptomatic of a bureaucracy that, over the years, had grown slower and more convoluted as the world around it had become faster.
Communications may have been instantaneous but decisions never were. The aggregate effects were crippling.
“do the right thing” rather than “do things right”:
why improve a product or process that no one wants or will use?
Taylor’s contemporary Henri Fayol enumerated the “five functions of management” as “planning, organizing, commanding, coordinating, and controlling.”
“USE GOOD JUDGMENT IN ALL SITUATIONS”
situational awareness of what was happening, and why—helped me do my part of the task better—not to reach in and do theirs.
“Eyes On—Hands Off”
empowered execution, which involved the decentralization of managerial authority.
systems that automatically adjust in response to disruption—“resilient” systems—which
*CDC rankings don’t include medical error as a separate cause/category of death.
diminishing marginal returns (when each additional unit adds less value than the previous one—this probably sets in after the first sandwich) and diminishing total returns (when each additional unit adds negative value—the sandwich that makes you feel worse than before eating it). For our purposes, the difference is not important: the point is that the positive attributes of labor do not always increase with scale.
*In fact, Sullivan coined the famous phrase “form follows function” in his 1896 article “The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered.”
Command by Negation,” a concept unique to naval command and control, allows a subordinate commander the freedom to operate as he or she thinks best, keeping authorities informed of decisions taken, until the senior overrides a decision. The Navy is the only service that uses the acronym UNODIR (UNless Otherwise DIRected), by which a commanding officer informs the boss of a proposed course of action, and only if the boss overrides it will it not be taken. The subordinate is informing the boss, not asking permission.
