I’m currently reading “The Killer Angels” by Michael Shaara. It is a wonderful piece of historical fiction based on the Battle of Gettysburg (1863) during the American Civil War; it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1975. It tells the story of the battle from the perspectives of protagonists on both the Union and Confederate sides, and it takes you vividly into the “fog of war”: Where is the enemy? How many of them are there? What are they doing, and what are they going to do next? Where are our troops? And what are they doing? What’s happening?
In the 1990s, the U.S. Army College coined the acronym, VUCA, to describe the “foggy” battlefield; corporations increasingly use the acronym to describe the borderless business environment. It stands for the descriptors: Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity.
In its Mission Command philosophy, the U.S. Army distinguishes between risk and uncertainty. Risk relates to known hazards, and they usually can be mitigated by developing controls. Uncertainty is the result of unknown or ambiguous hazards resulting from the complex and highly interactive makeup of military operations, complex human beings, and a thinking enemy. There is always the fog of war, always uncertainty. As the saying goes: No plan survives first contact with the enemy. If this is the case, how can uncertainty be at least mitigated, and what can businesses learn from the military?
The U.S. Army has two mitigation strategies:
- Information-focused solution
- Action-focused solution
Information-Focused Solution
Like it sounds, the information-focused solution centers on reducing uncertainty by more and better data collection, enhancing information-processing effectiveness, and dissemination of relevant information to the right people at the right time (and in a usable form). Business, like the military, has entered the age of big data and analytics in order to enhance shared situational awareness and decision-making.
Leadership development must factor in the accelerating trend toward big data. Not every leader needs to be a data scientist, but leaders at all levels need to understand how data will not only help them to manage the uncertainties they face, but also to extract business value (particularly in serving customers and identifying opportunities). Leaders must model data-driven thinking and decision-making while also pushing for manager training in the use of data for predictive analysis and optimization. Leaders also must be the driving force behind the creation of simple front-line tools.
Action-Focused Solution
While data shrinks the uncertainty gap, it never closes it entirely. Recognizing that uncertainty is a fact of existence, the U.S. military also implements an action-focused solution based on a 200-year-old philosophy developed in Germany (Auftragstaktik). Traditional command philosophies focused on following centralized direct and detailed orders with great precision. Given the unpredictable nature of combat, the military has shifted to decentralization, spontaneity, informality, self-discipline, and initiative. Two of the main pillars of the U.S. Mission Command approach are:
- Leader’s intent
- Subordinate’s initiative
The leader’s intent is a clear and concise statement of the desired end state, and the conditions needing to be established for its accomplishment. It seeks a unity of effort, but those on the ground are required—not just permitted—to exercise judgment when an opportunity or threat shows itself. The approach gives up direct control for immediacy and flexibility within the parameters of the leader’s intent. Trust, interactive vertical and horizontal communication (both face-to-face and virtual), shared understanding, and the drawing on abilities at all levels and locations are critical to this approach.
Businesses are faced with the challenges of unpredictable markets and competitors, and require leaders who can admit they don’t know—and can’t control—everything; leaders who can communicate a clear mission and develop and empower people to make it happen.
Contextual Understanding
There is a tension between the information-focused and action-focused solutions. As data volume and speed increases, leaders at the upper levels can be prone to believing that they know better than those on the ground. The result can be leaders handling excessive detail and falling into the trap of unhelpful micromanagement. What upper-level leaders usually lack—despite huge amounts of data—is an understanding of the local context. This contextual understanding is so critical to assessing the relevance and timeliness of the data. Even satellite images only give a partial—and sometimes misleading—viewpoint.
Leadership development today must prepare men and women for the “fog of war,” and that means extracting value from data while also recognizing its limitations. It means developing leaders who, in turn, can develop leaders at all levels who have the competence and courage to take independent action within the framework of a clear and rigorous statement of intent.
I appreciate that drawing lessons from the military might be objectionable to some, but I believe —like our leaders should—in being open to learning from anyone, anywhere, at any time. To close, let me turn to a leading tenet of the U.S. Army:
- See First
- Understand First
- Act First
- Finish Decisively
To what extent are we training and developing our leaders in information- and action-focused solutions to accomplish the above?
It would be great to hear your thoughts; please contact me at tbrake@tmaworld.com.
Terence Brake is the head of Learning & Innovation, TMA World (http://www.tmaworld.com/training-solutions/), which provides blended learning solutions for developing talent with borderless working capabilities. Brake specializes in the globalization process and organizational design, cross-cultural management, global leadership, transnational teamwork, and the borderless workplace. He has designed, developed, and delivered training programmes for numerous Fortune 500 clients in the United States, Europe, and Asia. Brake is the author of six books on international management, including “Where in the World Is My Team?” (Wiley, 2009) and e-book “The Borderless Workplace.”
