Can a Self-Managing Company Learn From the Military?

Advocates for more innovative organizational design often criticize the dominant organizational system, the bureaucratic command and control pyramid as too slow, costly, not innovative enough, and not engaging for the employees.

Hamel and Zaninin (2016) estimated the cost of bureaucracy at $3 Trillion per year in the US alone. Imagine what the country could do with 16% of the GDP.

Imagine what else your organization could do if you got 16% of the budget back? And how much do organizations miss out because of the unrealized innovation and suboptimal use of human potential?

Oftentimes the military is used as the example of a command and control bureaucracy. The problem is that the image that many people have of the military is outdated.

Modern military leadership is far removed from the old stereotypes. As an expert for modern forms of organizing and leadership, I have been reflecting on what we can learn from modern military organizations.?

The VUCA world

Being agile and ready for the VUCA world (VUCA = Volatility Uncertainty Complexity Ambiguity) is all the rage in the business world. A world that requires new ways of working together. The people that actually came up with the concept of the VUCA world was the military, as a reaction to urban warfare and terrorism.

In his book “Teams of Teams” Gen. Stanley McChrystal describes the ways that modern military organizations adapted to a VUCA world and became much more team-based and less hierarchical (2015).

Already in 2000, Adams asked “How do we guide the development of self-organizing systems?” when discussing the implications of new organizational sciences that examine internetted, nonhierarchical versus hierarchical management models and the impact they would have on the military.?

Core Values

The military puts an enormous emphasis on core values. Core values guide the actions of people and help them make decisions. Self-managing teams can benefit from core values as a form of constraints and boundaries that guide the actions of autonomous agents.

Commander's intent

The days of just barking orders and troops blindly following them are long gone. Interestingly, many alternatives to command-and-control are also rooted in military experiments and learnings.

For example, the commander's intent is a leadership approach that provides a description and definition of what a successful mission will look like. It is a concise statement of the purpose of the operation and must be understood two levels below the level of the issuing commander. This is then a key element to help a plan maintain relevancy and applicability in a chaotic, dynamic, and resource-constrained environment (Storlie, 2010).

As an example, the commander provides a lot of autonomy by clearly communicating the goal ('secure the bridge') but leaving it open to the team or even different hierarchical layers on how the goal will be achieved, so that they can adjust to the circumstances.

Mission-Driven Teams

Similar to the commander's intent, a clear mission can be a great way for individuals and teams to self-organize and coordinate.

In the self-managed company Morning Star, every member has a personal commercial mission that they can align with the overall mission and vision of the company. The mission and vision in the context of self-managing teams are more than just a placard on the wall because they help people orient their self-management.

For example, mission-command gives permission to every level of command to interpret orders that could be disobeyed and rules that could be broken as long as the mission was successful.

Core Learnings from Modern Military Organizations

In summary, what is then some of the learnings that we can take from modern military organizations?

• Self-organize into strategic teams for agility and to better adapt, adjust and respond to any necessary changes in your external environment
• Have well-defined core values that become the guiding principles for anything developed in the organization
• The more clear the organization’s mission and vision, the easier it is for everyone in the organization to align, therefore achieving goal congruence across the different departments and teams
• Being directive rather than authoritative gives people the agility to define the set of actions they deem the most strategic and efficient to meet the real needs of the moment

To be able to implement these lessons in an organization, trust should be developed and employees treated as adults. Self-management requires practice, emotional intelligence, self-regulation, problem-solving skills, and several other soft skills that can only be developed through practice.

And if the military, a governmental organization with the mission to defend a whole nation, has reached the conclusion that self-management is the path to follow, what is stopping many other organizations out there from adopting it?

References

Adams, T. K. (2000). The real military revolution. The US Army War College Quarterly: Parameters, 30(3), 1.

Orfanus, D., De Freitas, E. P., & Eliassen, F. (2016). Self-organization as a supporting paradigm for military UAV relay networks. IEEE Communications letters, 20(4), 804-807.

Hamel, G. P. & Zanini, M. (2016). The $3 trillion prize for busting bureaucracy. The Management Lab. Retrieved from https://www.garyhamel.com/sites/default/files/uploads/three-trilliondollars.pdf

McChrystal, G. S., Collins, T., Silverman, D., & Fussell, C. (2015). Team of teams: New rules of engagement for a complex world. Penguin.

Semler, R. (2004). The seven-day weekend: Changing the way work works. Penguin.

Storlie, C. (2010). Manage uncertainty with commander’s intent. Harvard Business Review, 3.