The Art of Action

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“At lede gennem hensigt, som beskrevet i denne bog, er en operativ model, der gør det muligt for en organisation at eksekvere strategi i uforudsigelige omgivelser.”

Stephen Bungay, 2021

Kort om bogen

Bogen bygger på preussisk militærhistorie og Helmuth von Moltkes ”Auftragstaktik”. Bungay oversætter dette til ”mission command” på engelsk, og til ”at lede gennem hensigt” i organisationer.

Den operative model bygger på en forståelse af friktion, dvs. erkendelse af at der findes forskellige typer modstand i komplekse systemer, og at man derfor skal undlade detaljeret planlægning.

I stedet anviser Bungay in tilgang for strategien formuleres som hensigter, der kaskaderes ned gennem organisationen. Hvert lag fortolker hensigten og giver et ”back brief” (tilbagebriefing) der afslører om opgaven er forstået, og forklarer hvordan den underordnede har tænkt sig at løse opgaven.

I denne proces sikres sammenhæng (alignment) mellem kollektiv handling i forskellige dele af organisationen, samtidig med at den enkelte har selvbestemmelse (autonomy) ift. hvordan opgaven løses, og dermed større engagement.

 

Mest relevante pointer i kontekst af transparent mødepraksis

Der findes mange guldkorn i bogen. Herunder har jeg grupperet dem i temaer ift. relevansen for transparent mødepraksis, og tilføjet en kort kommentar. Længst nede har jeg de samme temaer med en længere liste af citater.

 

Hvad er ”leading through intent”?

For mig er det centrale koncept i bogen hvordan man kan sikre både alignment og autonomi. Dette er super vigtigt i komplekse organisationer, specielt når der findes en stor grad af gensidig afhængighed, f.eks. hvis forsyningskæden er stor eller omfattende. Bungay understreger at når en leder klart kan formulere en hensigt, eller et direktiv (directive), samt eventuelle begrænsninger i løsningsrummet, så opnås dette.

“Specifying boundaries is like marking out minefields – it enables the troops to use the space between them. If they are known or even rumored to be there, but are unmarked, advances usually come to a halt.”

 

Strategi og agilitet

Når noget er uklart kan vi ønske at få større klarhed, f.eks. ved at tilvejebringe flere information og detaljer. Ofte vil tiden vi bruger på at skaffe yderligere oplysninger dog ikke være fornuftigt brugt, når vi agerer i en omskiftelig kontekst.

“Providing more detail is a natural response to a demand for clarity. But clarity and detail are not the same thing at all. The pursuit of detail actually increases noise and so makes it less clear what really matters. Details change quickly, so the more details we put in our plans the less robust they will be.”

 

Kompleksitet og organisationsstruktur

Organisationer består af mennesker. Ordet friktion bruges til at beskrive alle de ting der kan forhindre eksekvering, inklusiv de dele skyldes den menneskelige natur. Vi må forstå både mennesker og systemet de er en del af, for at kunne lave effektive interventioner i organisationen.

“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.”

 

Ledelse

At lede gennem hensigt kræver tillid, fordi den overordnede forklarer hvad hun ønsker der skal udrettes og hvorfor, men overlader ansvaret for hvordan det skal gøres til den underordnede.

“One of the greatest fears of senior people is of letting go and thereby losing direct control. In delegating authority for decision making one gives away power without giving away accountability. … It implies trusting your people. If you have been brought up to believe that leadership is about knowing how to do something better than your followers, it is difficult to see the task of leaders as enabling followers to perform their jobs better than they otherwise would, and admitting that they may know how to do those jobs better than you do. Letting go is hard to do but can bring great rewards.”

 

Pain points

Bungey tager afsæt i en lang række af sine konkrete erfaringer fra komplekse organisationer hvor den operative model havde fejlet ift. at sikre tilstrækkelig fremdrift. Ovenstående pointer er netop for at imødekomme denne slags udfordringer.

“People spent all their working days in meetings or reading emails, but still had their own work to do for at least two bosses. In the end, frustration would drive some of them simply to do something, whether it made sense or not. Real decisions were made in informal encounters in the corridors and then announced later. They were not always good ones, but at least they moved the debate on. As no one was quite certain who was responsible for what, internal hierarchy dominated.”

 

Militærhistorie

Bungay argumenterer for at von Moltke var den første til beskrive det grundlæggende problem der opstår, når en organisation bliver så stor at én person ikke kan kontrollere den.

“In 1869, von Moltke issued a document called “Guidance for large unit commanders”. It was to become seminal, laying out principles of higher command which remained unchanged for 70 years, by which time the Prussian Army had become the German Army. Some passages are echoed in the doctrine publications of US and NATO forces to the present day. It contains von Moltke’s solution to the specific problem he identified in the “Memoire”, and directly addressed the general problem posed by the greatly increased scale of modern warfare: how to direct an organization too large for a single commander to control in person. As such, it is probably the first document of modern times to define the role of the senior executive in a large corporation.”

 

Principper, videnskab og kunstart

Bungay forholder sig på et meta-niveau til hvad det kræver at skabe en effektiv organisation. Dette er meget inspirerende, specielt hans betragtning af at det er mere en kunstart end videnskab.

“The hazards of searching for universal principles behind what makes effective organizations are very great. Yet the rewards of identifying some things which at the very least are very important a lot of the time could also be great. Indeed, to positively deny that there could be any such things seems to fly in the face of evidence. 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.”

 

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Yderligere citater fra bogen

Herunder følger en længere række citater fra bogen, organiseret efter temaer og med sidehenvisning.  De kan læses som sutraer eller aforismer, dvs. korte læresætninger som kan bidrage til vigtige erkendelser om organisationer.

What is leading through intent?

• “Leading through intent, as described in this book, is an operating model which enables an organisation to execute strategy in an unpredictable environment.” s. xix
• “Don’t tell people what to do and how to do it. Instead, be as clear as you can about your intentions. 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.” s. 21
• “You cannot create perfect plans, so do not attempt to do so. Do not plant beyond the circumstances you can foresee. Instead, use the knowledge which is accessible to you to work out the outcomes you really want the organisation to achieve. Formulate your strategy as an intent rather than a plan.” s. 21
• “The whole approach assumes a high level of competence and a willingness to accept accountability for outcomes on the part of those given freedom of action.” s. xxiii
• “Specifying boundaries is like marking out minefields – it enables the troops to use the space between them. If they are known or even rumored to be there, but are unmarked, advances usually come to a halt.” s. 135
• “Most organisations have some form of matrix structure. Leading through intent requires clear roles and responsibilities and some matrix structures make accountability so diffuse that they have to be modified before progress can be made. This does not necessarily mean changing structure, but clarifying how the organisation is intended to work.” s. xx

 

 

Strategy and agility

• “Agility is the ability to adapt rapidly and without disruption to changing circumstances.” xviii
• “In order to provide guidance for decision making under continually evolving circumstances, strategy can be thought of as an intent.” s. 110
• “Strategy is essentially an intent rather than a plan, because the knowledge gap means that we cannot plan an outcome but only express the will to achieve it.” s. 110
• “No plan of operations can extend with any degree of certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy’s main body. Von Moltke” s. 92
• “Providing more detail is a natural response to a demand for clarity. But clarity and detail are not the same thing at all. The pursuit of detail actually increases noise and so makes it less clear what really matters. Details change quickly, so the more details we put in our plans the less robust they will be.” s. 49

 

Complexity and organizational structure

• “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.” s. 51
• “An organization can deal with complexity by doing many simple things, all of which are related to an overriding intent.” s. 114
• “As the strategic message is passed on, it may need to be modified and make more specific. The first thing that needs to be in place, then, is a channel of communication. This is provided by the reporting lines of the organizational structure. Sometimes the reporting lines facilitate the passing on of the message; Sometimes they make it difficult; Sometimes they make it so difficult that they block the message. When that happens the problem has to be addressed.” s. 143
• “Decision rights are appropriate if the person or group with the best knowledge and expertise in any given area is able to act in a timely manner without asking for permission.” s. 148
• “In companies with a history of central control, there is likely to be resistance from those who perceive a loss of influence or authority.” s. xxi

 

Leadership

• “One of the greatest fears of senior people is of letting go and thereby losing direct control. In delegating authority for decision making one gives away power without giving away accountability. A lot of people who do not suffer from the pathology of authoritarians find that a scary thing to do. It implies trusting your people. If you have been brought up to believe that leadership is about knowing how to do something better than your followers, it is difficult to see the task of leaders as enabling followers to perform their jobs better than they otherwise would, and admitting that they may know how to do those jobs better than you do. Letting go is hard to do but can bring great rewards.” s. 189
• “There are two dimensions to trust. One is moral – I will trust you if I am confident in your motives. In the end, people who optimize their own interests over those of the collective should depart. We can usually identify them, and a good briefing process will help to flush them into the open. The other is practical – I will trust you if I believe you are competent. Competence is a function of context. I may be quite willing to trust you to drive me to the airport, but not trust you to fly me across the Atlantic. So it is up to me to create a context in which I can trust you.” s. 190
• “It is not necessary to train everybody in the organization in order to inculcate leading through intent. The key group is upper-middle management, people running a department or unit who are senior enough to have to make strategic decisions. Typically, this is two levels below the executive board.” s. 186
• “The bedrock of morale is feeling confident that you are making a contribution to a collective purpose. Morale drops if an organization wastes people’s time.” s. 191

 

Pain points – examples

• “We see organisations operating in a complex, uncertain environment. In an attempt to cope with the complexity the organisation grows complex as well. It becomes opaque, which creates internal uncertainty to add to the uncertainty outside. Different parts of the organisation are concerned with different things and seek to do a good job by optimising them. The results clash. Faced with uncertainty, people search for more information; faced with complexity, they do more analysis. Meetings proliferate and decisions are delayed. People in the frontline become frustrated at the lack of the decisions they need someone to make to let them get on with the job, and people at the top become frustrated at the apparent lack of action, although the level of activity is high.” s. 12
• “People spent all their working days in meetings or reading emails, but still had their own work to do for at least two bosses. In the end, frustration would drive some of them simply to do something, whether it made sense or not. Real decisions were made in informal encounters in the corridors and then announced later. They were not always good ones, but at least they moved the debate on. As no one was quite certain who was responsible for what, internal hierarchy dominated.” s. 9
• “Given the large number of specialisations, the organisation was very complex. The project teams actually running the drug trials cut across a matrix of country-based sites and global functions. This rendered it difficult to make accountability clear, especially as over the long life of a drug under development the makeup of the team would change. People’s hard reporting line was to their functional line heads, who had primary responsibility for their evaluations. So the functional heads tended to have most sway over how people spend their time. All the functions had their own plans, objectives, and targets, and these ran into conflict with the projects.” s. 8
• “One senior executive responsible for a budget of $2 billion told me that the last straw was when he had been asked by a refurbishment committee to decide on the colour to paint the walls of the meeting room on the floor below. The people on the refurbishment committee either did not know what decision-making authority they had or were not prepared to use it. Few people knew what their freedoms were or where their boundaries lay. Because boundaries were so unclear, the only safe course of action was not to explore them, but to keep your head down and play safe.” s. 10
• “We should not confuse the set of symptoms with the disease. If the observed effects are systemic, then the underlying causes must also be systemic and must be understood as a whole. It is a truism that in a complex system like the human body, an observed effect, like a yellowing of the skin, may indicate a problem in an internal organ such as the liver. It is no good sending the patient to a dermatologist. We have to understand a little, at least, of how the causal system works, and then choose the point or points at which to intervene to alter the system as a whole.” s. 13
• “A high volume of activity often disguises a lack of effective action. We can mistake quantity for quality and then add to it, which merely makes things worse.” s. 14
• “If a problem is widespread and enduring, its origins are likely to be deep-seated. The solution is therefore unlikely to be a quick fix or something new to add to what we do already. It is likely to be something fundamental, which involves changing what we do already.” s. 14
• “People become demotivated and keep their attention firmly fixed on their KPIs, which become more important than what they were supposed to measure. Commitment is replaced by compliance, energy is sapped, and morale declines. The end result is a slow, expensive robot.” s. 49

 

Military history

• “In 1869, von Moltke issued a document called “Guidance for large unit commanders”. It was to become seminal, laying out principles of higher command which remained unchanged for 70 years, by which time the Prussian Army had become the German Army. Some passages are echoed in the doctrine publications of US and NATO forces to the present day. It contains von Moltke’s solution to the specific problem he identified in the “Memoire”, and directly addressed the general problem posed by the greatly increased scale of modern warfare: how to direct an organization too large for a single commander to control in person. As such, it is probably the first document of modern times to define the role of the senior executive in a large corporation.” s. 59
• “Von Moltke was the leader and teacher of a generation of German generals. In that role, he developed the army’s basic operating model, which has become known as “Auftragstaktik”. It is perhaps his most lasting legacy.” s. 58
• “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.” s. 52
• “Friction makes doing simple things difficult and difficult things impossible.” Clausewitz s. 26
• “One leading Clausewitz scholar has summarised the concept of friction as referring to the totality of “uncertainties, errors, accidents, technical difficulties, the unforeseen and the effect on decisions, morale and actions.” s. 29
• “The responsibility of every officer was to exploit their given situation to the benefit of the whole… What would my superior order me to do if he was in my position and knew what I know?” s. 71
• “Von Moltke clearly rates the value of strategy very highly, as the articulation of an “aim” which the organization’s leaders must always keep clearly in mind, and stick to whatever happens. It is not a path but a direction. A direction could be set by giving a destination or simply a compass heading.” s. 95
• “It was the original intention of the Prussian reformers, to create an intelligent organization whose performance did not depend on it being led by a genius.” s. 100
• “Von Moltke was clear that his job was not merely to develop campaign strategies and set direction on campaign, but to build an organization capable of taking decisions and acting in line with the direction he set. In fact, he spent most of his time doing this. He saw the outcome in terms of success or failure as being as much down to the organization as a whole as to his own decisions. He had humility, a quality that has only recently been noted in the business literature as a characteristic of many leaders of outstanding companies.” s. 177

 

Principles, science, and art

• “The race is not always to the swift, nor battle to the strong – but swiftness and strength shift the odds. Von Moltke” s. 238
• “The hazards of searching for universal principles behind what makes effective organizations are very great. Yet the rewards of identifying some things which at the very least are very important a lot of the time could also be great. Indeed, to positively deny that there could be any such things seems to fly in the face of evidence. 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.” s. 83
• “I had become convinced that creating great organisations and devising great strategies is not a science but an art. In science our knowledge grows and builds on the past. There is progression. The sum of scientific understanding is greater today than in the past. In contrast in art, there are peaks and troughs over time. There is no progression. Artists today are not better than Leonardo or Michelangelo.” ix
• “For an organization to act rationally and coherently on the information it possesses is infinitely more difficult than for an individual, because an organisation consists of individuals who are not only themselves finite but have independent wills with brains and desires which are not interlocked. 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. There is not only a lack but a surfeit and the surfeit becomes noise, drowning out what we need and making it even harder to detect it.” s. 39
• “The principles have a long history. Organisations which have embraced them include the Roman army and the 18th century Royal Navy. They seem to have done so quite independently of each other. Both learned from failure, concluding that if they wanted to be successful, given the uncertainties of the environment they had to operate in and the limitations of the information and communication technologies of the day, they had to find a way of reconciling unity of effort and freedom of action. They remain among the most successful military organisations in history.” xiii …. “The Prussian case is particularly interesting because they had at their disposal technologies such as the Telegraph, which could have been used to exercise tight control over large forces. In general, an increase in information processing and communication capacity leads to an increase in central control.” s. xiv

Forlag og link

Nicholas Brealey Publishing, 2021

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