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July 31 - October 9, 2019
However, in the back of my mind was the thought that the real hard men in the military took the soft stuff very seriously. They seemed to believe that success came from bringing the hard calculating and soft motivational sides together. They also seemed to believe that the soft stuff was more difficult than the hard stuff. They talked a lot about leadership;
Rommel had inherited an intelligent organization in which the characteristics he displayed were inculcated in every officer. He was superb at running it – but it had been created by somebody else, many decades before. And that creator was a Prussian.
Applying the principles is not a science but an art.
At a fundamental level, every problem relates to every other and exacerbates it. There is no hierarchy of cause and effect but a set of reciprocal relations within a system: every cause is also an effect and vice versa.
Scientific management was to replace the old approach entirely. This old approach dated from the pre-industrial era of tradesmen. Then, Taylor writes, managers sought to induce each workman “to use his best endeavours, his hardest work, all his traditional knowledge, his skill, his ingenuity, and his goodwill – in a word, his ‘initiative’, so as to yield the largest possible return to his employer.”3 He wanted to consign that to history.
Although it is not common to talk about these three gaps, it is common enough to confront them. It is also common enough to react in ways that make intuitive sense. Faced with a lack of knowledge, it seems logical to seek more detailed information. Faced with a problem of alignment, it feels natural to issue more detailed instructions. And faced with disappointment in the effects being achieved, it is quite understandable to impose more detailed controls. Unfortunately, these reactions do not solve the problem.
Formulate your strategy as an intent rather than a plan.
Say what you want people to achieve and, above all, tell them why. Then ask them to tell you what they are going to do as a result.
Give them boundaries which are broad enough to take decisions for themselves and act on them.
From the outside it looks very simple, its intellectual demands seem shallow, yet the real difficulty is hard to convey.7 There is a gap between appearance and reality.
through an accumulation of innumerable petty circumstances which could never be taken into account on paper, everything deteriorates and you find that you are far from achieving your goal.
The very business of getting an organization made up of individuals, no matter how disciplined, to pursue a collective goal produces friction
A linear system has two characteristics. It is proportional, in other words a small input produces a small output and a large input a large output; and it is additive, in other words the whole is the sum of the parts. A nonlinear system is neither.25 Clausewitz understood at the time that war is nonlinear, but could not conceptualize it other than by reference to friction, chance, and unpredictability.
Organizations are engaged in collective enterprises which are far more complex than individual ones. The information available is imperfect not simply because we do not know what we need to know, but because we know things that are irrelevant.
A business organization is a complex adaptive system. We need to understand it as a system in order to know where and how to intervene to change it.
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 gives rise to three gaps: the knowledge gap, the alignment gap, and the effects gap. To execute effectively, we must address all three.
In a series of essays published in the 1850s and 1860s, he reinforced the growing idea that what made the Prussian officer corps distinctive, and gave it an edge, was a willingness to show independence of mind and challenge authority.
“The King made you a staff officer because you should know when not to obey.”
He 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. His solution was not to impose more control on junior officers but to impose new intellectual disciplines on senior ones.
Specifying too much detail actually shakes confidence and creates uncertainty if things do not turn out as anticipated. 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. Far from overcoming it, a mass of instructions actually creates more friction in the form of noise, and confuses subordinates because the situation may demand one thing and the instructions say another.
In the pursuit of certainty we end up creating more uncertainty. #planing
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 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.
Understanding the context and the overall intention is what enables junior officers to take independent decisions if the specific orders issued to them become invalid because of a change in the situation.
Von Moltke’s insight is that there is no choice to make. Far from it, he demands high autonomy and high alignment at one and the same time. He breaks the compromise. He realizes quite simply that the more alignment you have, the more autonomy you can grant. The one enables the other. Instead of seeing of them as the end-points of a single line, he thinks about them as defining two dimensions,
The insight is that alignment needs to be achieved around intent, and autonomy should be granted around actions.
It was an argument between those who wanted to manage chaos by controlling how and those who wanted to exploit chaos by commanding what and why.
One of von Moltke’s acolytes, General von Schlichting, coined the phrase selbstständig denkender Gehorsam – “independent thinking obedience.” The moral and emotional basis of Auftragstaktik was not fear, but respect and trust.34
It was clear that if individuals within the organization were to tread the narrow path between the Scylla of rulebook passivity and the Charybdis of random adventurism, and so unify autonomy and alignment, they must also have a shared understanding of how to behave and what they could expect of their peers and their superiors. They needed a common operational doctrine and shared values.
Auftragstaktik is not popular with tyrants.
As it crossed both the Channel and the Atlantic, so Auftragstaktik slipped into English as “mission command.”
Adopting mission command as an operating model is not a matter of setting up some processes, but of mastering some skills, perhaps more precisely called “disciplines.” Only when those skills have been mastered can the process be adopted. Taking over the processes without building the skills is simply pouring old wine into new bottles, adopting a dead form.
Any cookbook approach is powerless to cope with the independent will, or with the unfolding situations of the real world.
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?74 The American’s question is quite legitimate, of course. The German officer would ask himself that question as well, but he would ask it only after answering his first one. The American would typically never get around to asking the first one at all. The difference in mindset is subtle; the impact is enormous.
Mission command embraces a conception of leadership which unsentimentally places human beings at its center. It crucially depends on factors which do not appear on the balance sheet of an organization: the willingness of people to accept responsibility; the readiness of their superiors to back up their decisions; the tolerance of mistakes made in good faith. Designed for an external environment which is unpredictable and hostile, it builds on an internal environment which is predictable and supportive. At its heart is a network of trust binding people together up, down, and across a hierarchy.
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Because it involves preparation, we tend to identify strategy with a plan. This is dangerous.
No plan of operations can extend with any degree of certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy’s main body.1 Only a layman could imagine that in following the course of a campaign he is watching the logical unfolding of an initial idea conceived in advance, thought out in every detail and pursued through to its conclusion.
That said, in the long run, those who enjoy good luck usually deserve it.
~Moltke
If we had unlimited resources, we would not have to worry too much about our strategy. If we were to try something and fail, we could write off our losses, gather more resources, and try again.
Rather than a plan, a strategy is a framework for decision making. It is an original choice about direction, which enables subsequent choices about action. It prepares the organization to make those choices.
The task of strategy is not completed by the initial act of setting direction.
In order to provide guidance for decision making under continually evolving circumstances, strategy can be thought of as an intent.
Complexity is the most insidious enemy of execution. If the environment is complex, the temptation is to mirror the complexity internally.
fact, it is a skill. Nobody is born with it. Unless you deliberately practice giving direction, you are unlikely to be much good at it, no matter how talented you are.
The quality of the direction coming from the very top can make an enormous difference to performance.
However, experience suggests that if one of these items is left out, clarity will be lost. Experience also suggests that the more that is added – and the greater the level of detail – the more clarity will also be lost.
Every organizational structure makes doing some things easy and doing other things difficult. If the structure makes doing some things so difficult that there is a conflict between structure and strategy, the structure will win. So if you are serious about the strategy, in the case of conflict you have to change the structure.
The bottom line is that organizational structure should make doing the most important things easy. That will inevitably make doing other things difficult. There are ways of compensating for that, but the basic trade-off must be made. No structure is perfect.
In order to close the communications loop, they need to repeat the message back up, adding the specific tasks they intend to undertake. This simple but critical step – which is as obvious in theory as it is rare in practice – is called a “backbrief.”
An important corollary of unity of effort is the emphasis on clarity and simplicity. What matters about creating alignment around a strategy is not the volume of communication, but its quality and precision. In order for something to be clear, it must first be made simple.
