Good execution is deeply tedious
The British Army is not very good at executing.
Sure, we brassed up some druggies in Op BARRAS, and fought PIRA to a draw in Op BANNER, but let’s be honest: in both Op TELIC and Op HERRICK, our most recent enterprises, we failed. The lads fought like lions, as they always do, and we had pockets of success, but ultimately we got bounced out of both Iraq and Afghanistan. And if our strategic objective was to maintain the strength of our relationship with the Americans, we failed there too (though of course we haven’t been helped by the worst president in living memory).
If it’s any consolation, the success rate in the civilian world is no better. Employees at three out of five companies rate their organisation as weak at execution. Mergers and acquisitions fail more than 60% of the time. Of major software implementations, nearly two thirds cost more and over 90% take longer than expected.
And let’s not even get into government, of which the military is widely regarded as the most effective part, because it’s basically a write off.
In the shadows of the big headline initiatives we face a daily struggle against entropy: our systems are more and more complex, and they take more and more effort to keep them stable, current and useful.
Meanwhile, our leaders — who are responsible for navigating us through this increasingly VUCA world — seem to have developed ADD. We could charitably call them “smart creatives”, in the Google terminology, who are clever but easily bored. They have tons of ideas, which sometimes converge but often just spiral off into confusion or out of sight. They think a decision is the same thing as action, that policy is the same as an outcome … until the next progress review, or O group, or board meeting, at which point they realise they need some more policies, because they don’t have any actions or outcomes to show for their tenure. They love an exciting debate but as soon as it comes to the details they starting tapping away on their smartphone.
There is clearly a connection here. We celebrate good outcomes but often do not appreciate all the work that has enabled them. We worship trigger pullers and superstar leaders but often fail to give adequate recognition to the patient professionals working behind the scenes, or — perhaps more importantly — to the mindset that enables that work to happen. Worst of all, we tell ourselves stories about how we were stabbed in the back by ignorant, self-serving politicians, but fail to really understand why we failed to execute well with the resources we did have.
The stark reality is that good execution is tedious. It might start with a good idea but it ends with boring, disciplined, focused action over a long time. It is making the trains run on time. It is Eisenhower, not Patton.
It is not a single light-bulb insight, it is a strategy patiently developed and iterated over years.
It is not one speech, it is twenty face-to-face conversations.
It is rigorous prioritising — killing the zombie ops, projects and activities that are not helping but that never seem to die — even if that sometimes means micromanaging.
It is applying systems thinking* — looking at the whole, and all of its parts, and how they support or limit each other.
And it is not process for process’s sake, or for controlling people — it is process clearly in support of the strategy.
When we invaded Iraq, smart people said fixing that country would take ten years. What we needed was one Op TELIC, spread over a decade, with a clear overarching strategy and a series of commanders that showed outstanding leadership, but also — and counter-intuitively — good followership, and an engineer’s mindset.
Followership (more on which here) is not a concept that is often discussed, but all army officers learn its value at Sandhurst, where command appointments are rotated constantly, and in five hours you can go from a rifleman, to a section commander, to a platoon commander, and back again. Cadets succeed as leaders when they have pulled out all the stops as followers; it is a powerful lesson in serving to lead.
Good followership enables the engineer’s mindset: if you have really taken on board the strategy, and not tried to reinvent the wheel or do your own thing (and even if you disagree, “you can only tell ‘em twice”), then you can focus on the boring work of putting all the right cogs into the machine, and making sure they are running smoothly. People who do this work well do exist. They are not dashing amateurs tearing around the AO with their hair on fire. They are not brilliant strategists devising grand schemes. They are patient, meticulous, and enjoy finishing things. And they are not traditionally celebrated as heroes in the army.**
In Iraq, what we needed was one Op TELIC, staffed with finishers grinding good execution out within the right strategic framework.
What we got was thirteen Op TELICs, each with a distinctive leader and strategy, some of which were brilliant, and some of which were not. The impact of this fragmentation has been documented elsewhere, in High Command and Losing Small Wars, for instance.
Contrast this with Op BANNER.*** The British Army knew it had to win in Northern Ireland, and it invested for a long struggle. It balanced six-month and two-year tours, all under the rubric of a permanent brigade headquarters. It built local security forces from scratch. For the duration of that forty-year operation, thousands of patient professionals built the physical infrastructure, the networks, the processes and the knowledge to be successful. SF may have garnered the headlines, but the game-changing execution was the work behind the scenes.
Compare this to intelligence in the recent conflicts. For years, taking over an AO meant getting a stack of intelligence briefing slides. But slides are just collateral from doing business as usual. Handing these over is just lazy. Game-changing execution would be handing over a fully loaded Palantir database. But that takes years of tedious work by analysts glued to their computers. That in turn takes a leader willing to put manpower and money behind it, and browbeat her operators into feeding int to the analysts, and spend enough time understanding the work to make sure it’s done properly. There’s no way around it: it’s just tedious.****
It is hard to overstate how much energy this takes. Leadership is lonely and exhausting at the best of times, but when you are methodically grinding out good execution it is much, much worse because it requires so much mental energy. Gone are the motivations of distinctive ops and rapid fame, replaced by endless drudgery and no closure. Gone is the old standby of bulldozing subordinates into compliance, replaced with long hours spent understanding and managing the myriad problems they identify, but need help to solve (only a fool says “don’t bring me problems, just bring solutions”).
Of course we need incisive commanders, and brilliant strategists (and we could certainly have done with a few more of the latter over the last fifteen years). But good execution is deeply tedious, and requires legions of people who slowly and methodically drive to a conclusion, sometimes over years. It may be too much to ask that the system rewards these people, but at the very least our ass-kicking commanders need to understand the nature of the challenge, and then resource, recognise, and back up our patient professionals.
* Consider Peter Senge’s laws of the fifth discipline:
1. Today’s problems come from yesterday’s solutions.
2. The harder you push, the harder the system pushes back.
3. Things get better before they get worse.
4. The easy way out usually leads back in.
5. The cure can be worse than the disease.
6. Faster is slower.
7. Cause and effect are not closely related in time and space.
8. Small changes can produce big results, but the areas of highest leverage are often the least obvious .
9. You can have your cake and eat it too, but not at once.
10. Dividing an elephant in half does not make two smaller elephants (it makes a mess).
11. There is no blame — relationships and systems are the solution.
** Consider as a possible parallel the difference between architects and engineers:
Graphic courtesy of the New School of Architecture.
*** Did anyone serve on Op BANNER XXIII? Or was it just Op TELIC and Op HERRICK that adopted this counter-productive Groundhog Day nomenclature?
****As an example, Slow Burn is fascinating account of how a CIA handler built an immense human intelligence network in Vietnam, over seven years, using shoe leather and index cards.
