Reorganisation: the Gettysburg Rules

It is notorious that reorganisations create as many problems as they solve.

When Donald Krause wrote “Sun Tzu: The Art of War for Executives”, he barely touched this key issue. Yet managers and generals share a compulsion to reorganise whenever they are faced by new challenges. This is unfortunate because history tells us that doing so is usually a mistake and frequently fatal.

History’s most studied military campaign is Gettysburg and it demonstrates precisely why reorganisation is often a disastrous way to respond to challenges.

At the outset of the campaign Bobby Lee was faced with a problem in his top team. He had just lost Thomas Jackson, one of only two men who could be trusted to manage half their operation without close oversight. The leadership culture was to blame: generals were expected to lead by example and this resulted in a high attrition rate. On the other hand, it created a meritocracy in which talented people were able to rise quickly and to inspire their teams to achieve the seemingly impossible.

Surveying his subordinates in the next tier, Lee knew that he had a good pool of talent but none were quite up to Jackson’s mark. So he reorganised. He split his army’s two big corps into three smaller ones, promoting two divisional commanders to fill the vacancies. He hoped that the newcomers, Powell Hill and Dick Ewell, would be able to handle this limited increase in their responsibilities.

The eight divisions below them were increased to nine, with three allocated to each corps.

New structure in place, Bobby Lee marched his previously victorious army to an immediate and calamitous defeat. There were many causes, not least that their opponents performed magnificently. Yet primarily the defeat was due to an unprecedented series of command failures, most of which were rooted in the new organisational structure.

So what went wrong?

Firstly, Lee accidentally snubbed his only top-rank subordinate. Perhaps because he regarded him as so dependable, Lee seems not to have noticed that one outcome of the reorganisation was that James Longstreet went from commanding half the army to having the smallest of the three corps, with eleven brigades compared to thirteen in each of the others.

Compounding this, Lee ignored Longstreet’s advice to promote his fellow Georgian, Harvey Hill, to replace Jackson. Longstreet rightly believed that Lee favoured Virginians: the war was partly about loyalty to one’s home state, which is what had driven Lee to support the Confederacy in the first place.

How many leaders today fail to shake off an old allegiance that causes them to promote people according to an outside loyalty? And how often does that demotivate existing managers, like Longstreet?

Next, Lee’s reorganisation changed the army from having six experienced divisional commanders out of eight, to fielding five inexperienced ones out of nine. The results were disastrous. Not one divisional commander shone at Gettysburg (Hood might have done but he fell at the outset; the rest either did very little, or messed up.)

There were some brilliant performances by Confederate generals: but only among the lowest tier of brigade commanders, which had not been much changed.

The artillery provides a different example. The general nominally in charge was incompetent, so Lee kept him away from the action and distributed the guns amongst the corps. This was a failure of manners as much as of reorganisation: Lee couldn’t bring himself to sack a well-connected fellow Virginian. Consequently the biggest artillery bombardment of the war was managed (unsuccessfully) by a young colonel who was out of his depth.

The most commonly cited failures relate to Powell Hill and Dick Ewell. Both had been exemplary divisional commanders but Lee promoted them to their level of incompetence. Ewell admitted this and was later shunted sideways. Hill was sick and failed to do anything, although he did later grow into the role. The result was a leadership vacuum at critical moments, with key decisions flunked or missed.

The greatest failures, however, were Lee’s own. They boil down to a failure to adapt to the new structure that he had created; and this in turn stemmed from an over-scrupulous regard for the chain of command. Lee was used to giving hints rather than definite directions, saying things like, “Press those people, if practicable.” With Jackson this had worked but Lee should have recognised that the new structure required him to take a more active role and to oversee his new appointees until they learned their business. He said that the reorganisation meant, “We must all do more”: but actually he did less.

This is exemplified by events on the second day of the battle, when Lee received only two reports and issued just one order. All day. He was positioned within plain sight of the reserves, opposite the point where that afternoon’s great attack broke down. A brigade penetrated the Federal centre and called for support. General Mahone, right in front of Lee, refused to advance his brigade even when ordered to do so by his divisional commander. Immediately behind Lee was Pender’s entire division, also inactive following the death of their commander. All Lee had to do was ride up and tell them to attack: “I’d charge hell itself for that old man”, as one Texan later famously stated. Instead Lee sat on his horse and did nothing, respecting a chain of command that had obviously broken.

When Lee said, “It is all my fault”, he was acknowledging that the reorganisation had needed him to adopt a new modus operandi. That at least is a mark of his greatness: he took responsibility for failure.

Does any of this sound familiar in terms of your own organisation? And before you say, “Yes but circumstances demand that we reorganise”, just remember one thing. The Federals appointed a new commander just before Gettysburg and he made few changes except to fill the position he had vacated. They too were faced with a great challenge. They stuck to a structure they knew: and they won.

So, is the message that reorganisations are bad? No. The message is to remember the Gettysburg rules, which are:

1. Only reorganise when essential and then change as little as possible;
2. Simplify don’t complicate and reduce rather than increase the number of managers;
3. Make sure that none of your top performers lose out by the changes;
4. Give the new structure time to settle down before putting it under stress; and
5. Recognise that you must change, too.

Lee broke all these rules, leading his army into battle before the ink was dry on the organogram. General Grant did subsequently reorganise the Federal army: but he simplified its structure, adapted to his new role and gave everyone months to adjust before sending them into the campaign that ultimately won the war.