LEADERSHIP BETWEEN ALIGNMENT AND AUTONOMY

A few thoughts on leading organisational transformation with respect for both alignment and autonomy. Inspired by the highly recommended book by Stephen Bungay, “Art of Action”. 

No Plan Survives Contact with the Enemy

Prussia and the young emperor Napoleon were at war and on the 14th of October 1806, 87,000 French soldiers clashed with 143,000 Prussian troops outside the city of Jena.

Even though the Prussians were superior in terms of number of troops, the army was hindered by a rigid system of command and a corps of officers made up of nobles in their sixties. The Prussian supreme commander himself, Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand, was 71 years old. That turned out to be fatal.

Already from the early hours, the battle was surprising – the overly confident French Marshal Michel Ney risked a hazardous solo attack on one flank and was surrounded by the enemy north of Jena. But the Prussian supreme command was too slow to exploit the situation and Marshal Jean Lannes made it through with the fifth corps to help his fellow countrymen.

Now, Napoleon exploited the Prussian passivity by putting pressure on the enemy flanks while letting his personal guard, the elite force of the army, initiate an aggressive advance towards the middle of the Prussian army. The Prussians did not react in time, and their lines broke down when their soldiers started running away.

On the same day, a bit further north near the town Auerstedt, the French General Devout managed to beat a superior Prussian force, after which the Prussian king ordered retreat. The French victory was massive and meant that the Prussian became subject to French supremacy until 1813.

The philosopher Hegel, who witnessed the battle, was a professor at the university of Jena and later described the meeting with Napoleon as seeing the "world spirit on horseback".

The defeat initiated a fundamental reformation of the Prussian military. The key figures in this reform work were, among others, Gerhard von Scharnhorst, Carl von Clausewitz and later Helmuth von Moltke, who was born in Denmark.

The mistakes at Jena led to the realisation you are limited to control very few actions when two armies collide on a battlefield. No plan survives the first contact with the enemy.

The Prussians identified three “gaps” that contribute to the friction that makes leading and managing very difficult.

The first gap is the knowledge gap, understood as the difference in what we know about the world and what the facts are. Perhaps we believe that the enemy has 10,000 tired troops and plan accordingly, but in fact he has 20,000 rigorous soldiers. Our insight into the surrounding world’s complexity is limited, especially when it comes to predicting the future.

When we try to execute the best plans, we have been able to make, based on our limited knowledge, we approach the next gulf: the alignment gap. This gap describes the difference between the planned actions and what is actually being done in an organisation. Most people will probably recognise situations from their working life where planned activities are not happening, where unplanned things happen and where planned initiatives are carried out in a completely different way than they were anticipated. There is quite a lot of play in the steering wheel when it comes to implementation.

The third and final chasm is the effect gap. It meets us with surprise what the results our actions, planned as well as unplanned, produce. Perhaps we assumed that the enemy would surrender if one of our companies started to fire at them from a hilltop, but instead they might counterattack or dig themselves in and wait for our ammunition to run out. It is very difficult during planning to predict which specific actions at the frontline are necessary to achieve the desired results.

All things considered, it is extremely difficult to lead such a complicated organisation like an army when they are facing another army on a complex battlefield. The distance between knowledge and planning to actions and results can be very, very far. How we handle and understand the three gaps depends on the leadership approach and self-story running through an organisation.

From Micromanaging to Radical Delegation

Before the battle of Jena, the Prussians regarded their military as a machine where every single soldier was a tiny, controllable component. It was a mechanical and authoritarian approach to leadership. When something was not working, the solution was to look at the details.

It was an attempt to close the knowledge gap by making very detailed analyses and plans to match the complexity of the battlefield. The more information and the more detail, the better.

The attempt to solve the alignment gap was through detailed instructions. The intent with this was to secure precise and expected implementation by issuing very specific orders, without possible misunderstanding or improvisation.

Facing the effect gap, all disappointments over lacking results were met with detailed control. Did the cannons have the correct powder load? Was the correct shooting formation used by the infantry? Were the prescribed formations used during advances in the field?

After the defeat, Clausewitz and his colleagues recognised that it is useless to try and fix the machine by going into detail. Detailed instructions and detailed control can make sense as isolated solutions, but on the whole, the initiatives did not help the organisation become better at beating the enemy on the battlefield. Instead of becoming better at handling high complexity, it only added even more complexity. 

So, they decided to do the opposite. The Prussians replaced the organisational story and created an entirely new military academy, phased out the old officers with their fancy noble titles and instituted a new pragmatic military doctrine called “Auftragstaktik”.

In facing the knowledge gap, the idea that analysis and planning can match the complexity of the world was left behind. If it is not possible to predict the future, then do not try. Old plans were replaced by a much shorter planning horizon where plans are simple working documents that are constantly being updated to reflect new knowledge.

In order to solve the alignment gap, the detailed instructions were replaced by simple orders giving local officers and non-commissioned officers complete freedom to do what they thought was most appropriate in terms of achieving the objectives. The Prussians went so far that insubordination became the officers’ duty. If, on the battlefield, they deemed something more appropriate in relation to the strategy, their duty was to ignore their orders and follow their own conviction. Without asking for permission first. 

It was a complete departure from the army’s previous no-error culture and demand for absolute obedience. A prerequisite for Prussian units to be able to operate autonomously was that everyone knew the strategy. This was a distinctive shift from previous doctrines where the strategy had been top secret and only shared in small pieces according to the need-to-know principle. Letting the strategy be known throughout the entire organisation, made it necessary for it to be specific and operational which aligned well with the solution to the knowledge gap.

With regards to the effect gap, the Prussian solution was to give a clear mandate to the officers and non-commissioned officers at the frontline to try out different possibilities in order to achieve the desired results. It is very difficult, during the general staff planning, to predict what precisely is going to work in the frontline. Therefore, the officers got extensive power – they might try bayonets or hand grenades if it was not enough to just shoot at the enemy.

It took the Prussians 40 years to reform their military and replace the dominating self-story, but the result was that they, from the mid-1800s, had the most effective military in the world since Gengis Khan and Alexander the Great. 

Under Bismarck, they defeated the other great powers on the continent and the “Auftragstaktik” doctrine later led to German platoons in the First and Second World War, platoon for platoon, being superior to the allied forces. The approach was later adapted by all other armies and in NATO it is known as Mission Command.

Autonomy and Alignment

The Prussian reforms rose out of the recognition that it is a complex, not a complicated, challenge to manage an army of thousands of individuals, each with their opinions, feelings and experiences. Leadership demands humbleness, pragmatism and the will to let go of power on the operational level. Many leaders today still lack this understanding.

The focal point of the Prussians’ learning and reflections was the relationship between autonomy and alignment. Normally, these two are considered complete opposites: command vs. freedom, control vs. trust, centralisation vs. decentralisation. This is the line of conflict that has characterised the debate in Denmark with regards to the development of the public sector. 

The Prussians concluded that an effective organisation simultaneously requires a high level of autonomy as well as alignment. We have to act independently, but in concordance.

This is made possible by creating a clear division of labour between the strategic, the tactical and the operational plan.

At the strategic level, it is all about Why and What. What are the strategic priorities and why are they necessary? This is also known as the Commander’s Intent. Here, there is a need for total clarity and alignment across the entire organisation.

On the other hand, there is complete autonomy on the operational level letting each unit define its own ‘How’ individually. The objectives are fixed, but it is up to the people in the field to decide how to contribute locally to achieve them.

The autonomy does have a limit, however, with regards to the common toolbox, also known as the tactical level. Today you would call the tactical level for standard operating procedures – the small standard solutions the entire organisation utilises in its daily work. A Prussian officer was not supposed to start developing on how to erect a howitzer or how to best advance in open terrain. The army’s basic toolset of small routines had to be respected – here was a demand for full alignment. The contents of the toolbox were based on costly experiences and meticulous training in the military academies. They were a common language and common frame of reference that could not be questioned.

Thus, the autonomy of the individual officer or non-commissioned officer was all about how he used the tactical toolbox to contribute to the common strategy in the best way.

Auftragstaktik Today

The battle at Jena took place more than 200 years ago and there are huge differences between leading a modern organisation and commanding a military force on the battlefield in the 1900s.

It is striking, however, how many of the Prussian experiences and ideas are still relevant when you look at the challenges that both public and private organisations face today. Many recognise the experience of overly complex plans that are only sporadically turned into actions which then are followed by detailed control work when the desired outcomes are absent. The mechanic understanding of organisations and leadership is still prevalent. Why have we not become wiser and moved on?

One of the reasons is that the Prussian knowledge was outmatched in the early 20th century. At the end of the 1800s and the beginning of the 1900s, the Prussian pragmatic and decentralised approach to leadership and strategy was relatively prevalent and acknowledged, also outside the military. But then a counter doctrine arrived from the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. It was the American Taylorism that under the tagline Scientific Management reintroduced the organisational machine metaphor that Prussians had thrown out in 1806.

Frederick Winslow Taylor was an engineer, and in 1911, in the book The Principles of Scientific Management, he presented a mechanical view of how to optimise the new industrial workplaces in the US, which primarily employed unskilled workers from the countryside. Taylor advocated specialisation, strict control and quality control and was not impressed by the workers’ ability to work independently. Taylor’s recommendations inspired, among others, the car manufacturer Henry Ford and they became hugely important in the US and later in Europe.

Scientific management has been very influential in Denmark as well. If you have ever come across clichés like “it is only possible to manage what you can measure” or “you get what you reward”, then you can thank Taylor for that. The approach has dominated the public sector under the name New Public Management and its influence is still massive within the Danish state administration.

I am in no way opposed to measurement, optimisation and systematisation in organisational development, but as the Prussians experienced, Taylor’s principles are not sufficient when problems are complex instead of complicated.

Guidelines for business leaders today:

1)   Define and communicate Commander’s Intent. What is the situation, what do we want to achieve and why is it important? Who is the enemy, what are we fighting for and why is it so important? It must be brief enough to be written on a piece of paper that can be sent to the frontline with a carrier pigeon. Ask the employees to repeat the task in their own words including a short presentation of how they plan to contribute to the execution (also known as back-briefing). That way you can make sure that misunderstandings are kept to a minimum.

2)   Put up few priorities that everyone can contribute to. Nearly all organisations try to do too much, too fast with too few resources. Prioritise hard and chose a few initiatives which, on the other hand, get maximum support and momentum.

3)   Allow the employees to decide how they best can contribute. They will make mistakes and do things their way, but the commitment of being involved fully makes up for your frustration of experiencing loss of control and direct power.

4)   Throw away the complicated plans and proceed by the method of trial and error. Unless you build nuclear power plants or container ships that have to sail for 40 years, then back off the long-term detailed planning and concentrate on the next important steps instead.

5)   Learn from your experience and adjust the plan continuously. Many organisations follow up on whether the plans have been adhered to, which is foolish, really. Follow up if you are getting closer to a victory and update the plan accordingly. Alongside that, you are learning from your mistakes.

6)   Utilise and respect the common tactical toolbox and make sure it is clear and well designed. If you delegate and give your colleagues freedom, they will drop all systems and tools that do not directly help them to achieve their goal. Good tools have to be helpful, not a burden.

7)   Show trust and strengthen the transparency within the organisation. It is essential that we dare to share our mistakes and what we have learnt. This requires that people feel safe and respected. A good way to begin is to start talking openly about your own failures and insecurities, and that you ask for help when there is something you are not sure about.