The Art of Action
How do you effectively guide a large organization? This book provides answers from military history.
The Art of Action: How Leaders Close the Gaps between Plans, Actions and Results
By Stephen Bungay
Nichlas Brealey, 2011
How do you effectively guide a large organization toward a particular goal?
This book offers answers from military history — in particular, the 19th Century modernization of the Prussian army under its chief of staff Helmuth von Moltke (1800–1891) and his predecessor Carl von Clausewitz, author of the influential On War.
The gist: organizations (e.g., armies) aren’t as intelligent as the sum of the people who comprise them. The organization’s structure greatly affects its effectiveness. As Bungay puts it,
unless the structure of the organization broadly reflects the structure of the tasks implied by executing the strategy, the strategy will not be executed.
Also,
if you are serious about the strategy, in the case of conflict you have to change the structure.
You’ll be familiar with this idea in UX if you’ve read Living In Information. (I wish I’d read Bungay’s book before writing LII.)
Overcoming Friction
Von Clausewitz realized armies in the battlefield encounter “friction” — real world conditions cause confusion, delays, inconveniences, etc. — that makes top-down control ineffective. There are three main gaps to be overcome:
- Knowledge gap: the delta between plans and outcomes
- Alignment gap: the delta between plans and actions
- Effects gap: the delta between actions and outcomes
You can’t overcome these gaps by brute force (i.e., even stricter hierarchical control.) Organizations are complex adaptive systems; you must intervene mindfully. Rather than dictate from the top down, you must establish levels to mediate between strategy and on-the-ground execution.
Levels of Command
Instead of granular hierarchical control, von Moltke encouraged informed independent thinking. The idea: foster cohesion while allowing for effective command and control. It manifested in three levels of command:
- The highest level comprises short and direct orders
- The next level down takes those and adds the appropriate level of detail necessary
- The lowest level, which entails execution, requires adapting the level up to condition on the ground
The approach is called “mission command” or, in the context of business, “directed opportunism.” That is, units on the ground are given leeway to execute toward a clearly specified (but not over-specified) direction.
The Role of Strategy
Strategy sets the direction — how we’ll win given the resources, capabilities, and constraints that affect us and our adversaries. It’s eminently practical and essential:
Strategy is a system of expedients. It is more than science, it is the application of knowledge to practical life, the evolution of an original guiding idea under constantly changing circumstances, the art of taking action under the pressure of the most difficult conditions.
For von Moltke, strategy was “a practical art of adapting means to ends.” (Wikipedia)
Strategy … demands a certain type of thinking. It sets direction and therefore clearly encompasses what von Moltke calls a “goal,” “aim,” or “purpose.” Let us call this element the aim. An aim can be an end-point or destination, and aiming means pointing in that direction, so it encompasses both “going west” and “getting to San Francisco.” The aim defines what the organization is trying to achieve with a view to gaining competitive advantage. How we set about achieving the aim depends on relating possible aims to the external opportunities offered by the market and our internal capabilities.
The essence of strategy is focus — choosing where we’ll put our efforts and resources. As Bungay puts it, “Strategy is about fighting the right battles, the important ones you are likely to win. Operations are about winning them.”
Operations
Von Moltke was the first to realize there’s a level needed between strategy and tactics. He called this middle management “operations,” and it’s role was to translate strategy into action.
This requires both strategic thinking and operational direction. The operations layer mediates between them, feeding information up from the field and down from the directive layer.
Clarity
Von Moltke led with directives. This requires clarity — in thinking and (especially) in communication. You won’t achieve cohesive movement if people are confused about where you’re aiming.
The true strategist is a simplifier of complexity. Not many people can consistently do it well.
It’s not enough to simplify complexity. You must also communicate directions clearly.
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.
Takeaways
Toward the end of the book, Bungay summarizes the book’s argument in ten pithy points:
- We are finite beings with limited knowledge and independent wills.
- The business environment is unpredictable and uncertain, so we should expect the unexpected and should not plan beyond the circumstances we can foresee.
- 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.
- To allow people to take effective action, we must make sure they understand what they are to achieve and why.
- They should then explain what they are going to do as a result, define the implied tasks, and check back with us.
- 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.
- 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.
- As the situation changes, everyone should be expected to adapt their actions according to their best judgment in order to achieve the intended outcomes.
- People will only show the level of initiative required if they believe that the organization will support them.
- What has not been made simple cannot be made clear and what is not clear will not get done.
I learned about The Art of Action from my friend Harry Max when we recorded episode 29 of Traction Heroes. It’s become a new favorite — one I’ll refer to (alongside Playing to Win) when working on organizational strategy.