The Ability to Think like a Field Commander

The story goes that the German Military believes that all Generals can be classified into four categories based on their intellect and effort. Those that make the best field commanders in a war are the ones that are Smart and Lazy. They are the ones with a razor sharp focus on the 3 most important things in any situation with a supreme disdain for the 10 other things that do not matter or matter little. On the contrary, the Smart and Hard Working Generals make great staff officers who can devote equal energy to every problem, without an ability to prioritize. The worst of course are the Stupid and Hard Working Generals!!

This is an observation I found to be true in every organization – intellect and an ability to think clearly are not necessarily correlated. In fact very intelligent people (especially those with a lot of formal education) can be relied upon to obfuscate matters by not being able to filter the signal from the noise!

In an organizational context, a key component of thinking clearly is about filtering the signal from the noise. Therefore, it is as much about identifying and understanding the variables that drive the outcomes in any given situation as much as identifying which of those can (and should) be ignored.

Here are some observations about clear thinkers:

• They consistently cut through the noise like a knife. Their solutions consistently ignore the variables that have marginal impact in a situation. While others tend to bring up these variables along with the manner in which they impact the outcome, the clear thinkers are steadfast in ignoring them. The point about this noise is that at a theoretical level there is no denying that they impact the outcome. However, the linkages and extent of impact cannot easily be figured out or quantified. As a result it needs a degree of intuition (honed by past experience) to figure out which of those variables have a marginal impact. Take an example of cutting through the noise – a company is trying to improve customer experience. In the brainstorming session, there is a lot of discussion on what drives customer experience and how these can be improved. Training, hiring, monitoring call quality, doing a 6 sigma project to evaluate customer feedback, merging process training and quality, doing refresher training for the bottom 10% etc have been passionately discussed. And, the team comes up with a set of recommendations. However, the root cause of the situation was that this company had the wrong person as the head of the customer experience team. Everything would have got fixed if this were addressed. If this wasn’t fixed, no other fix would change the status quo. The clear thinker can spot this without the slightest difficulty. 

• While they evaluate alternate solutions to a problem, they can quickly say what is unlikely to work. They can spot an idea that looks good on paper but would fail in execution. So many incentive plans fail because they just look good on paper. However, they fail when it comes to implementation because they have ignored what it takes to implement them – gathering data, managing the complex interlocks between functions, tracking the trigger points etc. The intelligent people who do not have the ability to spot these issues are the ones who are carried away by the beauty and completeness of a solution.

I have worked with several entrepreneurs and seen many more. Every one of them (or a very large proportion of them) was a clear thinker by the above definition.

In some ways one can argue that the “Occam’s razor” is a broader manifestation of this same principle – we consider it a good principle to explain the phenomena by the simplest hypothesis possible.