Work to Code - Standard Operating Procedures: QMN013

Martial Mental Models: The Quartermaster, Friday, 10 May

WORK TO CODE (Today’s report is a 5 minute read)

BLUF: Soldiers handle complexity across the organization, at every level, with Standard Operating Procedures. Good teams make SOPs from the bottom-up, combining training, experience, and knowledge of the environment - and then practice, practice, practice toward internalization. You can get started today handling task complexity in your own life with a few quick steps.

Brady here. In his 2009 book Checklist Manifesto, endocrine surgeon and MacArthur Fellow Atul Gawande describes how in 1935, after a catastrophic crash of the test aircraft that became the B-17, a very simple and easy to use tool became a standard for handling complexity. The crash killed two of five crew members including the pilot, who was the Army Air Corps’ chief of flight testing. The B-17 was a more complex aircraft than most pilots had ever seen - especially with four engines instead of the usual two for bombers - and it was discovered that the crash happened when the pilot forgot to release a new locking mechanism for the elevator and rudder controls. The Army Air Corps’ solution to the problem of aircraft complexity led the B-17 to fly a total of 1.8 million more miles without a single accident. What Gawande finds amazing is that the fix wasn’t more training or simplification of systems. It was just documentation and constant review of existing processes to ensure that complex tasks were being accomplished appropriately: A checklist.

Today just about any soldier, sailor, airman or Marine you meet will be familiar with this concept, but many checklists have evolved to handle how complexity has grown in the last 80 years. By Vietnam, infantry battalion commander Mike Malone noted that your average infantry company had over 2000 sets of tasks it had to be proficient with in order to be effective - a quarter of which were larger, even more complex collective tasks. Today the checklists that govern these tasks are known as Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) and they’re the link between doctrine (or authorized practices), training, the environment (like Iraq or Afghanistan) and mission execution. They combine the knowledge gained in a classroom, wisdom gained in combat and a self-knowledge of your team. Nearly any group down to the lowest level is expected to come out of pre-mission training with a set of SOPs - essentially the defined rules by which the team will do all its tasks. They often look like modifications of doctrine made to fit the real world.

SOPs are particularly important for the Green Beret Operational Detachment-Alpha (ODA) - simply because there’s more than one way to skin a cat. Every team member will come into his job with different training and experiences - and those experiences are valuable to a team. But those experiences can vary significantly from doctrine and might not fit a new setting - and thus they have to be turned into practices that reflect the operational environment. An example would be a team that’s training for operations in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Existing Army-wide training for Mounted React to Contact today usually reflects most peoples’ experiences in Iraq or Afghanistan - where wide open spaces, generally good visibility and fields of fire, and comparative ease of movement off-road allow for certain kinds of vehicles and specific practices if attacked. But in the Congo the dense jungle reduces that visibility and freedom of maneuver significantly - and different kinds of vehicles are available and more effective. So the team has to take what they know, what they have already learned in school, and what they can learn from other groups who’ve worked there, and then practice their method. Once they’ve determined what they’ll do based on practice, the team will make the SOP law, and continue to practice and review as they go. The benefit here is that if done right, the team can now execute their collective action very quickly, because they’ve all internalized the SOP. It becomes second nature.

SOPs in the civilian world are not always so common or hold as important a role as they do in the US military - but a few really stand out. Tom Sachs and Van Neistat have come up with a fantastic organizational SOP in Ten Bullets. Their establishment of practices (knolling, cleaning, fines) for the orderly running of their studio not only covers specific common practices but the underlying concepts that demand conformity rather than creativity in day-to-day activity. Their medium and message with a YouTube video also seems to fit their style and approach.

Oregon small business owner Sam Carpenter seems to have completely reengineered the design, assembly and practice of using SOPs in his continually-updated book Work The System (you can get a free PDF of the book in exchange for your contact info here). In it he describes how he nearly lost his mind trying to manage a call center business until he realized he could codify nearly every work process and ensure every employee not only followed his SOPs, but continuously update them based on their own findings and create new ones. Today he preaches the gospel of SOPs as Systems Thinking to business leaders around the world while keeping his call centers humming on autopilot with SOPs.

You can start making SOPs today for yourself to get familiar. I wrote a blog post (7 min) about how you can create SOPs in your personal life to make repeated but somewhat complex tasks easier for yourself, and I included a lot of links to additional information if you want to dig deep. Making SOPs for a group of course can add a lot more time to the process, but it’s good to start somewhere.

LUNATICS/ASYLUMS, REDUX: Don’t Let Students Run the University - When did college students start presuming to know more than their professors? A searing thought-piece from Tom Nichols, still flying the battered standard of expertise in the Campaign against Established Knowledge and righteously addressing the phenomena as a ‘disease of affluence.’ “This is not activism so much as it is preening would-be totalitarianism,” Nichols writes. “If college is to become something more than a collection of trade schools on one end and a group of overpriced coffeehouses on the other, Americans have to think about how we got here and how to restore some sanity to the crucial enterprise of higher education.” Bravo, sir. Bravo. (KSA)

RECKONING SOCIAL MEDIA: The Big Tech Threat (6 min) “My thesis is that the evidence strongly suggests there is something deeply troubling, maybe even deeply wrong, with the entire social media economy. My thesis is that it does not represent a source of strength for America’s tomorrow, but is rather a source of peril. Consider for a moment the basic business model of the dominant social media platforms. You are familiar with them. You might think of it as akin to financial arbitrage. Maybe we’ll call it attention arbitrage. Users’ attention is bought by tech giants and then immediately sold to advertisers for the highest price. Now arbitrage opportunities, as those of you familiar with markets know, are supposed to close. The market eventually determines that something is off. So how is it that this attention arbitrage in the social media market is preserved and renewed over and over again? That’s where things get really scary, because it’s preserved by hijacking users’ neural circuitry to prevent rational decision-making about what to click and how to spend time. Or, to simplify that a little bit, it’s preserved through addiction.” (BJM)

FRIDAY QUOTE: “Creative thought has often counted for more than courage; for more, even, than gifted leadership. It is a romantic habit to ascribe to a flash of inspiration in battle what more truly has been due to seeds long sown, to the previous development of some new military practice by the victors, or to avoidable decay in the military practice of the losers.” Basil H. Liddell Hart, Why Don’t We Learn From History, p22 (BJM)

Remarks Complete. Nothing Follows.

KS Anthony (KSA) & Brady Moore (BJM)