The art of surviving the ‘Oh S***’ moment

How military thinking can help business: Part 2

We’ve all been there (and most of us are very much in it now). Life is good, plans have been made and we’re confidently managing the process when Murphy’s Law strikes, and things start to go very wrong. This is the time for clear, effective and rapid thinking. For the military this is an ingrained way of life and the lessons they have learnt and the processes they have created offer valuable guidance for business decision makers.

A massive outside influence like Covid 19 forces businesses to make new types of decisions very quickly. There are some business owners and leaders who will be pushed beyond their comfort or even ability to make those decisions. Military processes show how rapid and effective decision-making might be achieved.

There are two sets of possible reactions to rapid change that have the potential to be disastrous. The first is continuing to ‘fight the plan’. That is, to continue with a course of action despite evidence that the situation has changed substantially. The second is to know that things have changed but to fail to evaluate fully the extent and impact of those changes.

Times of rapid (and adverse) changes require disciplined and timely processes to help structure appropriate reactions. The US Military has a process called Rapid Decision Synchronisation Process (RDSP) to cope with this situation. This article aims to show how elements of RDSP can help deliver the clear, effective and rapid decision making that is needed. There’s stuff here you already do, there’s stuff here you know you should do but often don’t have time and there’s stuff here designed to challenge your legacy processes.

“If everything seems to be going to plan, it’s an ambush”

Common military wisdom

Work out what the hell just happened

Whether it’s a slightly mournful newscaster giving you bad news on the evening show or your sales guy telling you your top client had just pulled their business, there’s a moment when you know things have gone wrong. Or are about to go wrong. Or have been going wrong for a while, but it’s taken until now to be noticed.

This is the time to breath, pause and to start a process in your organisation. Get your planning team together, get the coffee on and go through this process together.

Step 1 – recognise and define your new situation

Facts, facts, facts – you need to put a shape on the beast and to understand what it is and how it might impact you. In reality, we all know that what you’ll have is facts, some assumptions and some random guesses. That’s OK, so long you recognise each as they happen.

But don’t overdo this. All organisations must be aware of the risk of analysis paralysis. Imperfect knowledge and the need to make assumptions underlie all business decisions. This is a fact of life. The only time that the situation becomes totally clear is after the event; when, of course, it is too late.

Compare the current situation with what you thought would happen and why (your existing mental models), and the context of your original planning and thinking (what made you come up with the original plan). The key here is to recognise the changes (variance).

To aid rapid decision making in a crisis it is vital that a business leader has a good grip of what information they are using, and how that information is used as a foundation for new planning.

Recognise and evaluate the new input data - are you evaluating the relative merits of the inputs (considering both the quality of information & the quality of source)?

Recognise what has changed and make statements relative to:

• The original business strategy and strategic thinking
• Your boss’s intentions (what they wanted and why they wanted it)
• Your current plan and objectives
• The objectives and plans of other groups in your organisation or of 3rd party partners
• Your gut feeling and experience

In 2007 I was running a recruitment advertising business in the accountancy and finance sectors. The financial crash of 2007 led to a horribly volatile situation. Every time we thought we had modelled a new reality, or that we’d made the worst-case assumptions, new evidence appeared that made a mockery of our thinking. In the end what helped us was being able to define in our thinking the impact of each assumption and each bit of evidence – it didn’t make things better, but it really made it easier to amend and amend again our plans.

Military thinking encompasses the use of assumptions but mandates particular conditions for their use. Assumptions must be:

• Likely to be proven true when the evidence does become available
• Only be used when they are necessary to continue with the planning process – only make the assumptions you need at that time
• Be clearly stated as assumptions. There must be an explicit task to continue to test them as new information becomes available – replace assumptions with facts as soon as possible
• Be used to direct further insight generation. Where assumptions are used, they create a secondary task of further research to continue to improve the input data

Be clear about what decisions you are going to make

If you’re lucky you have or are part of a good team. Everybody will be wanting to add useful thoughts. It’s helpful to define and agree what you need to decide now. Understanding the scale and impact of the decisions you are making gives a sense of proportion and priorities that helps enormously in a crisis. RDSP is a series of ongoing cycles – so those things that aren’t considered now can be put into a later cycle.

Step 2 – decide what needs to be decided

Once a leader starts to understand what has changed and what new facts or assumptions are now in play it is vital to understand and state the scale of the impact. Decide what you must make new decisions about and determine the type of decision required. Each of the following situations will require a different set of outcomes to the planning process.

• Decide whether you need to act at all - balance the risk of not acting against the risk of changing the plans you had in place.
• Recognise if the new information offers opportunities – it may not be all bad
• Recognise and define new risks that force you to act in a different way to that originally planned. In times of crisis this is, of course the most likely outcome from this phase. Understanding risks and giving them a priority will ensure that your planning focus is on the correct things.

It may seem a redundant step. But defining the scale and scope of subsequent planning and decision making is an excellent way in which to focus the thinking and helps to ensure that the leader and their management team are aligned through the next stages.

Step 3 – decide the scale of change required

Having defined what type of decision you are making it is also important to take a view of the potential scale of that decision. It is not only part of the process of leadership team alignment, but it also helps shapes who should be involved in the planning process and who needs to be kept informed of the decisions being made.

Decide the degree of change in your new decisions and who will need to know and/or be involved with the revised approach. One of the ways of doing this considers the following 3 types of change:

·      Is it just a small change in your existing plans? (execution decision: we are going to achieve the same thing in broadly the same way that we had originally planned)

In which case you probably only need to do a minor amount of collaboration and cross-checking with other teams in the organisation.

• Are we going to do it in a very different way (adjustment decision: we are going to achieve the same thing but may need completely different resources and partners)?

In which case your decisions are likely to have profound impacts on other groups – both those operating in parallel with you and those providing support services to you.

• Are we being forced into completely revising our objectives (strategic decision: our original objectives are no longer valid and/or we have been forced by circumstance into thinking in a very different way)?

In which case it is likely that you will have to ensure that the impact of your decision making is discussed at a more senior level of your organisation.

Decide something

“…come on, make a bloody decision, you may be wrong sometimes, but you’ll be right other times. If you don’t make a decision you will always be wrong”

Royal Military Academy Sandhurst instructor to hapless Officer Cadet (me)

Step 4 – decide a course of action

RDSP assumes there are previous plans in place and that you have already chosen a course of action and discarded others. Whilst the military approach has a detailed and effective process for decision making and planning which aims to create an optimal plan & outcome, RDSP is a much-abbreviated process. Your thinking here should be framed as one of the following:

• Because of variance A we are not going to do C
• Because of variance A we are going to do B instead of our original plan
• Because of variance A we are going to do B in addition to our original plan

You’ll probably end up with a combination of all of those possibilities. It can get complex very quickly, which is why creating a sense of priorities in steps 2 & 3 is so important.

The key here is to produce something that is timely and effective. Good enough now beats a perfect plan that arrives too late.

Decide on what the course of action requires in terms of:

·      Your new (or revised) objectives – given the changed situation what is it that you need to achieve?

• Your vision of what it is going to look like – it is always helpful to create a narrative that will allow you to explain your thinking to your teams
• Your new tasks – to achieve the new objectives what are the explicit and implied tasks involved?
• How you’ll use the resources you have – what role the various parts of your organisation play, how they will collaborate and their individual objectives
• Your organisational structure – do you need to re-organise your teams?
• Your role in the larger organisation (if appropriate) – are the decisions you are making going to have an impact on other groups’ plans?

At this stage you need to ask a couple of important questions:

• Does this new plan constitute enough of a change for us to have to spend time (if available) in going through a deeper insight gathering and orientation phase (see OODA How military thinking can help business: Part 1)?
• Is it still consistent with our parent organisation’s strategy and thinking or do we need to work with that organisation to ensure we understand what they want and why they want it?

Step 5 - Refine and validate your new plan.

Is your new course of action feasible, acceptable and suitable?

There are a number of different types of changes in the new course of action (it is likely that you will be faced with a combination of different changes, depending on the severity of the changed context you evaluated in Step 1). These might include some of the following:

• We may mobilise our teams in a different way to that which we had originally briefed
• Insight and new information may indicate that outside factors have substantially changed our view of the obstacles we face and have changed our understanding about barriers to success
• We may have decided that we need an entirely different set of tools to achieve the things we wish to achieve
• We may need to use our resources in a different way to that originally planned
• We may feel we need new or different resources to cope with the new challenge

The key foundation of RDSP is that it is a reactive process and your course of action is constrained by the resources and capabilities that you currently have available.

Do something

Don’t spend too much time working on the detailed nuances of your decision making. RDSP is all about creating a habit of rapid and effective action. Going through the RDSP process will make the ‘what and why’ of the decision transparent. Great leaders allow their teams to work out the ‘how’.

“I never worry about action, but only inaction.”

Winston Churchill

Step 6 – implement the plan

There’s a lot in military doctrine, process and training that talks about how to make sure that the objectives in plans are achieved. Much of this will be covered in subsequent blogs. In outline the major considerations are:

• The narrative – what the situation is, what the overall plan looks like and why you believe it can be achieved.
• Clear communications – explaining the what and why of the decision making and the objectives that have come out of the planning phases. Being clear about the objectives teams and team members are working towards, how they are expected to collaborate and what resources they can use.
• Detailed KPIs – creating concrete points of measurement and detailing both how they will be measured and what ‘good’ looks like.
• Organisational structure – defining who is responsible for what.

Summary

In military terms RDSP is the answer to the question “What should we do now boss?”. It is particularly relevant when your plan is about to go- or has just gone horribly wrong. It’s there to help leaders and managers at all levels have a clear, structured approach to coming up with a decision and a plan..

Like many military processes RDSP is designed to be used under severe pressure and helps ensure that commanders at all levels have a set of considerations that can be gone through in a orderly way. If Covid 19 is placing unusual and demanding pressures on your business you may find it helps.

Keep Calm

And do

RDSP