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

by Stephen Bungay

What is not simple cannot be made clear.

The steps required to achieve alignment in the context of friction have been famously and memorable enumerated by the Austrian psychologist Konrad Lorenz. Drawing on his observations about what is needed to make people change, we might modify them for an organization as the following:

Experience suggests that understanding the immediate intention one level up is not enough to give full alignment if things change, and that understanding the intention three levels up is of little additional help. Two levels up is like Goldilocks’ porridge: it is just right. It puts people in the position of being able to answer the question: “What would my boss want me to do if they were here now and knew what I know?”

He created a unified operating model by working on the minds of his generals, allowing them to absorb a common doctrine based on principles rather than rules.

He knew that punishing one case of misjudgment would kill off every attempt to foster initiative in the officer corps for years to come.

Otherwise, as one general wrote, “you will extinguish a hundred positive initiatives in order to prevent one error, and thereby lose a tremendous amount of energy.”14

What really matters is not the performance of the individual stars but the performance of the collective. Most organizations could improve that performance significantly if they could unlock the potential of their existing people, whether or not they are unusually talented.

Fear is not a word commonly used in management literature and it may sound overly dramatic. In reality, there is a lot of it about and it is often a reason why people decide to play safe, and do as little as possible.

Experience suggests that managers who have the courage to let go are often surprised by just how much their subordinates are capable of achieving when given good direction. It exploits and develops human potential. Making a start is simply a matter of having faith that the potential is there. It is remarkable how seldom that faith is disappointed.

This in turn suggests that if an organization wants to encourage such behavior, the most important thing it can do is to identify and stop doing whatever is currently inhibiting it. To put it bluntly, it should get off people’s backs.

The other is that financial markets like predictability. They like strategies to be plans, and everything to go according to them. Deviation is seen as a “failure to deliver.” Although this is intuitively plausible and comfortingly macho, it is about 150 years out of date and unrealistic.

In the language of business, “command and control” has come to mean “micromanagement” with an authoritarian bent. In military thinking it is the means of setting direction and achieving specific outcomes.54 Authoritarian micromanagement is just one – particularly bad – way of doing it.

To exercise command is to articulate an intention to achieve a desired outcome and align a system to behave in such a way that the outcome can be expected to be achieved. To exercise control is to monitor the actual effects resulting from the behavior, assess the information, and report on the system’s performance with respect to the desired outcome. It is then the function of command to decide what to do: to adjust the behavior of the system, take some other action outside the system, or indeed to abandon the original intention and change the desired outcome.

But in fact they are complex adaptive systems trying to survive and prosper in a fitness landscape full of diverse organisms with different agendas in which their interaction produces unpredictable first-, second-, and third-order effects.

Fifty years before the Battle of the Somme, von Moltke had realized that thinking in terms of strategy and tactics was not going to work. He was the first to conceptualize a third level situated between strategy and tactics which he called “operations”

Only von Moltke had realized that he needed – and could get – alignment and autonomy, efficiency and effectiveness.

NATO defines command as “the authority invested in an individual for the direction, coordination and control of military forces.”16

Business literature used to be about management, is now all about leadership, and has never mentioned command. This is an unsatisfactory situation for both domains, for officers and executives alike need to understand and practice all three.

Executives who master the disciplines of formulating and giving good direction can explain to people what they have to achieve and why, and so make them ready to act. By mastering management they can put people into a position in which they are able to act. And by leading them effectively they can sustain people’s willingness to carry on until the job is done.

Leading-edge business thinker Philip Evans has pointed out that organizations like Linux and Toyota are self-organizing networks in which the overall intent is shared without being laid down. Linux has no single leader. Self-organizing networks have all the characteristics we have observed to be cornerstones of directed opportunism: a lot of people taking independent decisions on the basis of a shared intent and high mutual trust. The strong connection between the top and bottom of a hierarchy created by a briefing cascade is replaced by a strong network with widely dispersed knowledge and myriad dense interconnections.

Most people, sometimes in their lives, stumble across truth. And most jump up, brush themselves off, and hurry on about their business as if nothing had happened.

Here, then, is a summary of the argument of this book in the form of 10 GBOs: 1 We are finite beings with limited knowledge and independent wills. 2 The business environment is unpredictable and uncertain, so we should expect the unexpected and should not plan beyond the circumstances we can foresee. 3 Within the constraints of our limited knowledge we should strive to identify the essentials of a situation and make choices about what it is most important to achieve. 4 To allow people to take effective action, we must make sure they understand what they are to achieve and why. 5 They should then explain what they are going to do as a result, define the implied tasks, and check back with us. 6 They should then assign the tasks they have defined to individuals who are accountable for achieving them, and specify boundaries within which they are free to act. 7 Everyone must have the skills and resources to do what is needed and the space to take independent decisions and actions when the unexpected occurs, as it will. 8 As the situation changes, everyone should be expected to adapt their actions according to their best judgment in order to achieve the intended outcomes. 9 People will only show the level of initiative required if they believe that the organization will support them. 10 What has not been made simple cannot be made clear and what is not clear will not get done.