How Green Berets reduce confusion at work: QMN040
Martial Mental Models: The Quartermaster, Wednesday, 19 June
(Today’s report is a 7 minute read)
BLUF: Backbriefing is a military practice of a subordinate leader explaining his understanding of the plan to the higher leader (the one who had originally briefed the plan), prior to execution. It’s a critical practice for Green Berets to ensure understanding and alignment for operations, but the Father of Management Theory has a way that works in today's businesses.
Brady here. As I sat waiting outside my battalion commander’s office I felt mentally drained. My team had just finished an intensive planning session where we’d isolated ourselves for three days while we planned our operations in North Africa. Day in and day out we followed the Detachment Mission Planning Process and emerged with our concept for building a special operations force from our host nation’s airborne troops. We accounted for everything including security, training, logistics, medical needs, and 4 different ways of calling headquarters if one method failed. Now it was my responsibility to brief my battalion commander on my understanding of the mission and how we planned to carry it out. If he was satisfied with what he heard, my battalion commander would then give me authority to carry it out, and off we’d go.
“Every order which can be misunderstood will be misunderstood” - Jakob Meckel, 1877. This eternal truth about human interaction creates many problems in communicating vital information in a military orders process – problems that can and do derail operations and lead to their failure. In a military setting this can mean defeat with lives lost. In a business setting it can mean loss of market share, revenue, or profit. Both cases are important – they mean success or failure in mission accomplishment. The purpose of this post is to consider the Green Beret method of overcoming communication barriers within an organization of any kind – military or civilian.
Backbriefing is a military practice of a subordinate leader explaining his understanding of the plan to the higher leader (the one who had originally briefed the plan), prior to execution. It’s a critical practice that accomplishes three things:
- It ensures the subordinate leader understands the tasks and the larger plan
- It ensures the higher leader understands implications of the orders he just gave and gives him a chance to modify them based on feedback
- It gives the higher leader an opportunity to find and address gaps between the plans of several different subordinate leaders
Back at my battalion commander’s office at Fort Bragg I explained what we were going to do, and how we were going to do it. I received a lot of questions from the battalion commander and his staff, who'd be supporting my team. A few things were modified based on events that had just taken place and based on things we still didn't know about our operational area. And then we were given the go-ahead to carry out our operation.
Interestingly, this concept of a confirmation & modification back and forth has existed on the civilian side for at least half a century. The Manager’s Letter - recently pointed out in Stephen Bungay’s book the Art of Action – is a military-style practice that can have great effects for civilian organizations. In his book The Practice of Management first published in 1954, Peter Drucker gives a great summary of the Manager’s Letter:
Being a manager demands the assumption of a genuine responsibility. Precisely because his aims should reflect the objective needs of the business, rather than merely what the individual manager wants, he must commit himself to them with a positive act of assent. He must know and understand the ultimate business goals, what is expected of him and why, what he will be measured against and how. There must be a “meeting of minds” within the entire management of each unit. This can be achieved only when each of the contributing managers is expected to think through what the unit objectives are, is led, in others words, to participate actively and responsibly in the work of defining them. And only if his lower managers participate in this way can the higher manager know what to expect of them and can make exacting demands.
This is so important that some of the most effective managers I know go one step further. They have each of their subordinates write a “manager’s letter” twice a year. In this letter to his superior, each manager, first defines the objectives of his superior’s job and of his own job as he sees them. He then sets down the performance standards which he believes are being applied to him. Next, he lists the things he must do himself to attain these goals – and the things within his own unit he considers the major obstacles. He lists the things his superior and the company do that help him and the things that hamper him. Finally, he outlines what he proposes to do during the next year to reach his goals. If his superior accepts this statement, the “manager’s letter” becomes the charter under which the manager operates.
This device, like no other I have seen, brings out how easily the unconsidered and casual remarks of even the best boss can confuse and misdirect. One large company has used the “manager’s letter” for ten years. Yet almost every letter still lists as objectives and standards things which completely baffle the superior to whom the letter is addressed. And whenever he asks: “What is this?” he gets the answer: “Don’t you remember what you said last spring going down with me in the elevator?” The “manager’s letter” also brings out whatever inconsistencies there are in the demands made on a man by his superior and by the company. Does the superior demand both speed and high quality when he can get only one or the other? And what compromise is needed in the interest of the company? Does he demand initiative and judgment of his men but also that they check back with him before they do anything? Does he ask for their ideas and suggestions but never uses them or discusses them? Does the company expect a small engineering force to be available immediately whenever something goes wrong in the plant, and yet bend all its efforts to the completion of new designs? Does it expect a manager to maintain high standards of performance but forbid him to remove poor performers? Does it create the conditions under which people say: “I can get the work done as long as I can keep the boss from knowing what I am doing?”
These are common situations. They undermine spirit and performance. The “manager’s letter” may not prevent them. But at least it brings them out in the open, shows where compromises have to be made, objectives have to be thought through, priorities have to be established, behavior has to be changed.
The major difference between the Green Beret backbriefing process and the one Drucker describes here is time - the Green Beret method backbriefs on specific operations and the Drucker method briefs twice a year on a continuous basis. But the concept is the same- facilitate a discussion between the leader and the led about what's expected, what’s understood, and what will be carried out. The result will be better aligned actions, better use of time, and much less confusion in the workplace.
A version of this post was originally written for the Ars Ductus blog on July 15, 2017.
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Remarks Complete. Nothing Follows.
KS Anthony (KSA), Chris Papasadero (CPP) & Brady Moore (BJM)