Adaptive Leadership: Military Lessons for Navigating Change and Uncertainty Lesson #7- Focus on the Mission

My next story involves riding in The passenger seat of a beat-up Mercedes Benz tractor-trailer truck, carrying much-needed food and water supplies for my unit in Southwest Asia. For this particular mission, I was acting not as a combat medic but as a bodyguard of sorts for food supplies that needed to get to our team area. For context, It should be noted that truck drivers in this country were notorious for stealing Supplies at gunpoint and then selling them on the black market, so having someone in every truck to guard the merchandise was essential.

During the first evening of the drive, we were pounded by a tremendous thunderstorm of wind and rain. The dirt roads became quickly muddy, and after turning too sharply, our truck skidded off the road, dumping part of our water crates into a nearby ditch. After the driver and I left the car to inspect for any damage, I went down into the ditch and started to collect the fallen items and return them to the truck. At this point of the story, the driver decided to run back to The cab of his vehicle, leaving me on the side of the road, and steal the supplies. I quickly caught up with him, and after some intense, highly focused facilitation techniques using sign language (as neither of us spoke the other’s language), we reloaded the supplies on the truck. For the next two days and nights, I slept with one eye open (and a hand on my weapon) until we got to base camp. I never considered another course of action because my mission was CLEAR- to bring these supplies to our people who need them.

In your team, please ensure everyone understands the Current mission and their steps to achieve it. For example, Within a Scrum team, this communication could be accomplished during sprint planning using a Sprint goal, discussed in a retrospective, and within the Daily Scrum. If you are serving the Scrum Team as the Scrum Master, keep your team focused on the Sprint Goal (which is the overall mission for the current sprint) and align with the Product Owner to ensure that your team is working on the most value-added increments.

Finally, if there is ever a point that the mission statement needs to be changed based on new or developing information, please make sure to let your team know about these changes quickly and accurately.