The 21st century case for the chain of command

Given our growing technological sophistication and the rise in global connectivity, isn’t it time to do away with the old hierarchical command and control management processes of the past? How can such old-fashioned thinking still have a place in the speed of light Internet era where the key issue is not who is the boss, but who gets the job done? Isn’t the future all about innovation, delegation, and creativity?

As with many apparently simple questions the answer to this one is ‘yes’ and ‘no’. In many ways, and for several good reasons, the age of hierarchy is dead, but it also lives on – particularly in high risk and crisis situations. When a disaster is brewing, it is essential to know who is in charge and who makes key decisions. But in the final analysis, establishing clear lines of authority and allowing room for innovation and creative freedom, are not necessarily opposed. More follows below.

Surely someone is in charge - aren’t they?

We typically assume that someone is ultimately in charge. That is, that an individual in authority has the final say. In fact, this is not always the case. Sadly, we often only find out nobody is really in charge until there is a crisis when people, processes, policies, and practices are pushed to the limit.

In February 2009, for example, shocking bushfires swept the Australian state of Victoria. At one point in time more than 400 individual blazes were burning. In the final analysis, 173 persons had their deaths directly attributed to what became known as the Black Saturday fires. Thousands of properties were damaged or destroyed and huge swathes of forest were laid bare. A Royal Commission was set up to investigate the cause of the fires and how they were fought. A key finding was that the so-called chain of command or lines of authority across the various fire and emergency authorities was unclear. The Royal Commission report noted:

“On 7 February (the worst night of the fires) there was no single person in charge of operational planning, tasking and accountability.”

In reality, the Commission report stated, leadership roles and responsibilities were divided across the police, fire services, government Ministers and other authorities. Just who was in charge, who was responsible for taking major decisions was hard to establish. The report goes on:

?“This divided responsibility and accountability…meant that cooperation and coordination were the only viable approaches for managing the emergency on the day, since neither bushfire control agency nor anyone else had pre-eminence over the other in a statutory or practical sense.”

The next sentence is chilling:

“As a consequence, there was no cohesive and unambiguous leadership structure.”

In the midst of an overwhelming crisis, cooperation and coordination was not enough: someone had to hold ultimate authority. For the system to work key people needed to know who that person was and what the limits were to their role.

Decision-making in the pandemic

A decade on from 2009 and the world is in the midst of a global pandemic, the first of this magnitude since the Spanish Influenza struck post World War I. Key industry sectors, policies and institutions as well as health professionals, are being pushed to extremes. Once again, disconcerting cracks are appearing in decision-making and the chain of command. For example, the Royal Commission into aged care was told that it is not clear who amongst the myriad agencies and regulatory bodies holds accountability for the all-important task of pandemic preparedness in the vulnerable aged care sector. When the corona virus got into nursing homes residents died in their dozens. As is often the case in Australia, the states and territories blamed the Commonwealth while the Commonwealth blamed the states and territories. Both blamed aged care providers.

More chain of command fractures were to come. Another Royal Commission found it impossible to establish who in the Victorian government made the decision to contract private security firms to undertake hotel-based quarantine in Melbourne. This decision turned out to be disastrous as poor quarantine management procedures led to a number of infected security guards catching and spreading Covid-19 into the general community with dire health and economic effects. Neither the Premier, his highest-ranking public servant, the Health Minister, the Chief of Police nor the Chief Medical Officer admitted to making the ill-fated decision to outsource hotel quarantine. It seems the decision was assumed or just allowed to happen. As with the 2009 bushfires, the hotel quarantine royal commissioner seems to have found that "there was no cohesive and unambiguous leadership structure" in place that made, and took responsibility for, the outsourcing decision.

The 21st century management paradox

This leads us to a fascinating modern-day paradox. On the one hand, 21st century leaders and managers are constantly told to delegate to their staff, to not manage them too tightly and to encourage their creativity. On the other, in the absence of clear lines of authority and decision-making, people can and do die. Ironically, it is often only when a disaster or major stuff up occurs that the calls go out in the media and on social media to find out who was in charge and thus who should be blamed. We need to know who to blame so we can allocate swift and appropriate punishment! As a society, we want to understand the chain of command.

Command and control in the Internet age

What is the ‘chain of command’ or a ‘command and control organisation?’ One definition states that the chain of command is the official hierarchy of authority in an organisation that dictates who is in charge of whom up and down the entity.

As with the armed forces where every soldier of every rank understands who they are accountable to, in a strict command and control-based organisation all employees report to a manager. Each manager in turn reports to a more senior manager who reports to the deputy CEO who reports to the CEO. The CEO makes final decisions binding on everyone, followed by the Deputy CEO - and so on down the line. In an incorporated entity, the CEO reports to a board.

The end of hierarchically-based command and control organisations has been predicted since the 1970s – and for cogent reasons. With the exception of the Roman Catholic Church and the armed forces, large hierarchical corporations and government bureaucracies only became ubiquitous after the industrial revolution in the mid 1800s. They were perfected in the great era of manufacturing up to and post WW II. Names such as Ford, General Motors and IBM bestrode the globe backed by comprehensive command and control policy manuals and detailed accountability frameworks that stipulated not only who one reported to in the chain of command but everything from the level of hotel that managers of different ranks could stay in, to what they should wear. Even the standard IBM male corporate attire was stipulated - a neutral coloured tie, white shirt, dark suit, and black shoes. Women rarely rose above support roles of course!

As the 20th century came to an end and the industrial era morphed into the information age in the 1980s and 90s, the lumbering corporate hierarchies of the industrial age came under heavy critique. This was to be the era of entrepreneurial, knowledge-intensive start-ups - Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Facebook - rather than the corporate dinosaurs so typified by General Motors and Ford. This was the moment in time when complexity and chaos theory were liberally applied to organisational design, when butterflies flapping their wings in the Amazon jungle allegedly, or potentially, created hurricanes in Mexico!

The Internet was both the exemplar and the metaphor for the new 21st century organisations. No-one owns the Internet, and beyond technical specifications, nobody sets the rules. It is there for people to use as they like: to share information, use as a platform for new businesses, to distribute film and music content, pay bills on and even hold meetings. The Internet does not have a boss, it just works. And it worked brilliantly until it didn’t. Certain intractable problems arose. Who, for example, regulates behaviour on the Internet? Who is responsible for tracking down and banning child pornographers, Internet scammers, cross-border money laundering mafioso or horrible on-line bullies? Who or what sets the rules about ‘fake news’ or prevents foreign governments interfering in the elections of other sovereign states?

As with the Black Saturday bushfires and the corona virus, many of the new, free-wheeling entrepreneurial organisations founded in reaction to the old chain of command hierarchical corporates discovered the hard way that clear decision-making lines and a well-defined chain of command have a purpose. Knowing who approved alcohol being served to a drunk staff member at a corporate function becomes a real issue when that person dies in a car accident on the way home from work. Accounting standards still demand strict and detailed signoffs for organisation expenditure – the boss does not get to approve their own credit card spend. For better or for worse, the chain of command is making a comeback. In reality, it never left the building.

In designing better organisations, and a better society, it is important to deepen understanding or the strengths and potential weaknesses of both command and control structures and the more loosely organised approaches to coordination which are a feature of the 21st century. One way to do this is to investigate what happens when organisations and the people in them come under extreme pressure and in the process, fall apart.

Failure under pressure

We often see disasters as being caused by a single major event such as a bushfire or a new virus. In fact, some of the worst disasters are caused by a chain of smaller events through which systems and processes that normally operate in parallel or in a loosely connected way become tightly linked or coupled together. I will return to this idea and give examples at a later point.

As pressure mounts in an emerging crisis, so does stress. Under increasing stress humans become less able to deal efficiently and effectively with flows of information. The very nature of an impending disaster being that the data we are receiving from our systems and platforms does NOT fit into a conventional pattern. We are not sure what is happening nor do we know what to do in response. The human nervous system floods with adrenaline and becomes overloaded. There can be a tendency to react precipitously or to try and overly simplify the situation rather than to slow down and try to make sense of complex, difficult to comprehend signals. Interpersonal communication falters or is misunderstood under severe conditions. Hierarchies, as far as they exist, break down or become exaggerated. A junior staff member might, for example, ‘grab the wheel’ and take over the situation, or the person in charge may shout down and/or shut down dissent. As separate small failures or poor decisions become coupled together in ways that have not happened before, they are amplified and get out of control.

Catastrophe at Tenerife

Academic Karl Weick spent his life researching organisational design and trying to understand how disasters happened. One of his most interesting articles describes the tragic series of events which led to two jumbo jets colliding on the runway at Tenerife in March 1977. A total of 583 lives were lost.

Some understanding of the detail of this tragedy is essential to grasping Weick’s profound insights. What follows is a simplified version.

Due to the closure of a major European airport caused by a bomb explosion, two jumbo jets including a KLM plane were re-routed mid-flight to the smaller, less sophisticated Tenerife airport in the Canary Islands. Tenerife was not built to house two jumbos on its tight, single runway. Taxiing space was extremely limited. In addition, one of the planes did not disembark its passengers. The latter were no doubt asking the crew how long they were going to sit on the tarmac. To complicate matters, due to strict Dutch aircrew rostering laws which prohibited staff from flying excess hours in any one month, the crew of the KLM plane felt increasing pressure to get back in the air. Under Dutch law, captains had no discretion over the calculation of flying hours and could lose their license and be fined if they violated the laws.

The highly credentialled KLM captain, who had remained with his passengers on the plane, seemed to lose concentration at a certain point and made several ambiguous statements and requests to the control tower, apparently asking for permission to take off. His requests were answered in an ambiguous way from the control tower who, for some reason, did not use standard take-off and landing terminology as they should have. This created further uncertainty as to whether or not the plane was cleared for take-off. As is regular practice in the airline industry, the pilot-tower conversation was held in English which was not the pilot and aircraft controller’s first language. Under day to day circumstances this would not have been an issue but as tension mounted, language-based misunderstandings may have come into play.

Further complicating the scenario, the KLM captain was head of the airline’s flight training department, a prestigious senior role. By chance, he had recently examined and credentialled his co-pilot. The latter, perhaps as a result of the captain’s status and position in the hierarchy of pilots, seemed reluctant, when the black box tapes were examined, to criticise or disagree with the decisions of such a senior professional. He did not articulate any real concern when the captain commenced take off procedures despite the lack of certainty that he had actually been granted permission to fly. In any case, the KLM captain appeared to believe he had clearance to leave. He commenced take off procedures just as a cloud of fog came in over the tarmac obscuring the view from the cockpit. Tenerife is an island, and the airport is 2,000 feet above sea level making weather unpredictable. Nevertheless, the KLM captain pushed his thrusters to full, accelerated rapidly and collided with the other jumbo which due to confusion and poor visibility, he had not realised was parked on the tarmac in front rather than behind him. The disaster was complete, as was the horror of it all. The causes were many as are the learnings.

Tightly coupled systems

So, what does Weick mean when he talks about systems and processes potentially becoming more tightly linked in a crisis? Several examples from the Tenerife tragedy come to mind. As the minutes became hours sitting on the Tenerife tarmac, staff safety and well-being policies became entwined with the law and financial costs. KLM faced strict Dutch government legal sanctions if their crew exceeded flight hours. Pilots could be fined and lose their flying license. If the plane did not leave by a certain time a new crew would have to be flown in and hundreds of passengers would need to be put up in local hotels for at least a night.

Think too of how the process of the co-pilot’s accreditation event two months earlier became coupled to ‘in the moment’ cockpit interactions as tensions mounted. The junior, inexperienced co-pilot appeared reluctant to criticise the decisions of his captain who as Head of Flight Training had just accredited him.

Day to day management at the small Tenerife regional airport became coupled to a terrorist event elsewhere when two large planes were diverted at the same time due to a bomb explosion. This put pressure on everything at Tenerife from catering to taxiing, to aircraft parking space and control tower communications. The airport had never had to manage two jumbos on the same narrow runway at the same time. Finally, to cap it off, cockpit-control tower communication in an already pressurised environment became coupled with local weather conditions when a cloud rolled in when the KLM plane was in final lift off mode.

All these small events linked together to accelerate and multiply the possibility of a crisis.

The vexed question of hierarchy

In hindsight, and with due respect to the individuals concerned, most of whom are dead, we can still ask the question: where was the chain of command? Who held overall authority in this scenario? Was one or both of the jumbo captains in charge? Did the Tenerife control tower or airport CEO have ultimate authority? Or was it the airline CEOs who held sway? Did Dutch law override all other authority, even in Tenerife, which is part of Spain? After years of extensive investigations, the answers remain unclear.

Such questions do not only apply to a 50-year-old accident halfway around the world, they are applicable today across a broad range of scenarios. From the management of natural disasters to the oversight of complex construction projects, from hospital operating theatres to child safety, from pandemic control to environmental protection. The need to know “who is in charge” and “who makes the final decision here”, will not go away.

Its not just about disasters

It is not only in disasters that lack of clarity in the chain of command comes to the fore. The Australian Prudential Regulator, APRA, has in recent years conducted several reviews of the risk and compliance processes of our major banks, the failure of which resulted in significant and costly breaches. In reading the APRA reviews it appears that in at least one bank the key issue was a lack of clarity on who was responsible for following up, and correcting, significant breaches or failures of risk and compliance policy. Responsibility appeared to fall between the board’s risk committee, the bank’s risk professionals and executive management. There was quite broad awareness that breaches had taken place, but no assignment of ultimate responsibility for fixing the matter. As a result, some of the breaches went on for several years.

One of my take-aways from this and other analyses of disasters is a new respect for the chain of command, for clear lines of decision-making.

The best of both worlds – hierarchy with creative freedom

Daniel Barenboim, the great classical pianist, and conductor was once asked how he went about rehearsing the orchestras he performed with. His answer was interesting. He said he spent little time going over those areas of the music he was happy to leave the musicians to interpret – which to his mind, was a significant proportion of the notes they played. These are talented professionals, Barenboim argued, they know how to do their jobs without my getting in the way. He chose to allocate most of his rehearsal resources to communicating to the musicians what he did NOT want in regard to the upcoming performance. Within those boundaries, he trusted and upheld the creativity of the forces he conducted.

Clear lines of authority and accountability, and a desire to offer staff and key professionals room for creativity and devolved decision-making, are not antithetical. They should be viewed as two sides of the same coin rather than diametrically opposed. Put another way, the chain of command, and creative discretion, are both of value.

A profound understanding of how important the chain of command is in a crisis should not lead to applying excessive command and control-style processes to day to day work. Yet embedded in the processes and systems of our organisations and society as a whole must be structures and decision-making frameworks that are clear enough, and resilient enough to function effectively under immense pressure: think fires, pandemics, or financial crises. One post crisis investigator wrote:

“Emergencies are not the occasion for disputes or uncertainty about who is in charge of command, control or coordination to occur.”

Building on Barenboim’s advice, we must act to protect ourselves from what we do NOT want to happen, such as a crisis that becomes a tragedy. As a consequence, roles and authorities must be unambiguous as must the person or role that holds ultimate authority. In nearly every situation, if several individuals, a committee or more than one organisation is responsible for decision-making, fractures will appear and mistakes will be made, often with tragic consequences.

The chain of command and the license for creativity are too important to be left to chance.

Philip Pogson FAICD

October 16, 2020.

Philip has been a company director, Chair, and business owner for more than 20 years. He consults and advises on strategy and governance across a range of business sectors and also co-owns and operates a music production and promotion business.