I was pleased to have Don Vandergriff on the Acquistion Talk podcast. Don is a prolific educator of military training and strategy, and he has a new book out, Adopting Mission Command. During the episode, we discuss how modern organizations have been built around notions scientific management developed by people like Frederick Winslow Taylor. These methods are great for well-defined problems which can be broken down into sequential steps and optimized. It led to an education system that values checklist procedures and creating interchangeable workers for an assembly line.
For many years Don has been at the forefront of pushing military training to go beyond Taylorism. He looks to the wisdom of German methods of mission command, or auftragstaktik, that flourished toward the late 19th and first half of the 20th centuries. The basic idea is to determine commanders’ intent and empower subordinates to interpret the intent or even redirect orders depending on fast changing circumstances. This requires a type of training that produces critical thinkers and decisive decision-makers rather than training that emphasizes process without regard for context.
During the episode, we discuss outcomes based training and education, the impact of centralization and hierarchy, how to learn from mistakes, the role of moral courage, why mission command is a two-way street, how difficult it is to write a good intent, and much more. The principles discussed by Don are applicable to defense acquisition as well. Both military operations and acquisition are highly uncertain environments with fast changing information. Building a positive culture based on trust can vastly improve effectiveness by delegating responsibility within the scope of commander’s intent — rather than detailing a laundry list of parameters to be measured by.
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One of the problems we find in systems of political-economy is that having good institutions like markets and liberal democracy does not mean there will be progress. First, there needs to be a culture change — but certainly changing institutions is part of that culture change. And so we have a chicken-or-the-egg problem between institutions and culture.
Similarly, when an organization tries to adopt mission command, there first needs to be a basis for trust. But where is trust cultivated? Not in a system where individuals are trained to recognize and execute standard procedures. Instead, mission command must be infused in training where individuals are given responsibility to make decisions, and allowed to reflect upon those decisions in light of a number of standards and procedures. Here is Don on developing leaders:
But before you can effectively do mission command you got to establish trust, without trust there’s no mission command. Before you establish trust you have to develop your people…
The strain of responsibility is incredible. You’re making life or death decisions. You’re making decisions for your country at all levels. So they [the Germans] focused of strength of character. That meant that they started developing a system of learning in the late 1850s that focused on development of character and decision making, which took a bunch of tools and recombined them, but it all focused on your ability to make decisions, justify your decision, and then stick with it or change based on the situation… The Germans had a term for changing the mission based on a changing situation. No other nation does. Again, the focus was on the strength of character, the joy of responsibility in making a decision, the moral courage to do it.
In the defense acquisition world, we have some words for changing the mission, but they are often loaded terms synonymous with poor management. They include “reprogramming” – which is when budget gets reallocated from what congress approved into a different program line item, and “rebaselining” – which is when an approved program has one or more of its cost/schedule/technical-performance parameters changed. Reprogramming is looked upon suspiciously, and is capped at relatively low levels. Rebaselining is a centrally managed situation which reflects poorly on the program manager.
For decades we’ve heard about creating program requirements in terms of broad performance parameters rather than detailed technical specifications. But in most cases it seems that the program is over specified rather than outlining the intent of the program and providing latitude to the lower-levels to figure out how it will be done. The F-4 Phantom II requirements were written on two pages, while less than a decade later the C-5A solicitation came out to 1,500 pages, receiving in return 250,000 pages from 5 bidders.
A similar problem seems to pervade military operations, as Don relates:
The Army is great at preaching mission command all the time. But all the systems work against it. And in an auftragstaktik environment, there are several opportunities to learn through mistakes. We don’t have that. We have zero defects… [Having seen others get punished, people] start sacrificing creativity for security. That’s what our systems do. In the open preach adaptability, mission command, outcomes, intangibles, but in reality we promote the opposite of those.
The zero-defect mentality is especially problematic when people are trained to follow procedures, and then all of a sudden they reach a position where they are expected to take responsibility and innovate. They don’t have experience taking charge of lesser decisions and reflecting upon their actions. Air Force acquisition executive Will Roper said something very similar in his assessment of the acquisition workforce. Also, the rewards to successful innovation are not nearly so great as to compensate for punishment of getting it wrong, even if it was based on sound judgment and ethics (e.g., see prospect theory). Here is what Don finds as the source of these multifaceted problems:
You have to redefine the hierarchy. We don’t do that. The Germans did in World War II… We have great doctrine written between 1982 and 1987, closest to maneuver warfare we’ve ever gotten. But we still didn’t redefine the hierarchy or personnel system, which was based on the industrial age. So you have conflicts. You want initiative? What you want agility? There’s the acronym agility, initiative, depth, and synchronization. Of course John Boyd said that synchronization did away with the other three. The only thing you synchronize is watches. When you synchronize, you make everybody mechanical. It goes back to the industrial age.
Here’s another good related part:
I keep trying to get the Army to change command and control to command and influence. In maneuver warfare it’s command and influence, not command and control. I want to get away from control. I want to get to where I influence what needs to be done. You have to address what your hierarchy does. Your hierarchy is – I’ve got someone above me that’s more experienced than me. They earned that spot I don’t have a problem with that. [But] instead of a boss they become a mentor. They move from controllers to harmonizers, to mentors and facilitators.
I’d like to thank Don for joining me on Acquisition Talk. Be sure to check out all of Don’s books on Amazon. Here is a good selection of articles and videos, as well as a good article on “The U.S. Army Culture is French!” Be sure to check out his three excellent episodes on the POGO podcast, two of which are with the estimable Bruce Gudmundsson: “Tactical Decision Games,” “Military Personnel Reform,” and “Mission Command.” Don also recommends a book from Martin Samuels, “Piercing the Fog of War.”
You’ll find a nice chart from Don below outlining the differences between mission command and detailed command:
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