Is CGS really humble enough to allow true challenge?
The chief of the General Staff (CGS), General Sir Nick Carter, is executing a pretty strong vision. He has benefited from being the chief architect of the Army 2020 policy in a prior role as deputy commander Land Forces, and now has a strong implementation mandate courtesy of its endorsement by the Strategic Defence and Security Review 2015 (SDSR). He’s particularly fortunate that the conclusion of ops TELIC and HERRICK, as well as a change in the defence planning assumptions that eliminated a brigade plus enduring overseas operation, have given him some room to play in. It’s a lot easier to renovate your house when it’s not on fire.
Being a Green Jacket, and the latest member of the Black Mafia, CGS is a very clever man. It’s hard to find fault with his vision at a high level.
But as CGS himself recognises, no one can predict the future: events regularly catch us out (e.g. Brexit, the rise of Trump and the mortgage crisis, to name a few recent ones). Even the invasion of Iraq, due to the way restrictions were placed on planning, was a bit of a shock for the army. That means the current environment — call it a VUCA world — mandates a particular mind-set. Leaders must be open minded and flexible; they need a wide and (intellectually) diverse network; they need candid advisers; and they need to think in terms of probabilities and scenarios rather than point predictions.
So far, so good: we’ve heard all this many times before.
What is not often remarked upon is that many of these so-called black swans were foreseeable: they were actually what are sometimes called “grey swans”. In the case of Brexit, the accuracy of polls was obliterated by Cameron’s re-election, and discontent with the EU was well known. Trump’s appearance was presaged by general polarisation in the US, the rise of populist politicians all over Europe, and a general dissatisfaction with the political elite, as evidenced by the Tea Party and Occupy movements. As painfully chronicled in The Big Short, not only did many people predict the mortgage crisis, and profit from it, but the experts arguing against the prospect were clearly incompetent and living in a bubble (in both senses of the word).
The point is that we’re often surprised only because we’re ignorant, we lack imagination, and we’re in thrall to narratives that are bullshit (sometimes known as “intellectual capture”).
Leaders are especially prone to this. Large organisations contain unfathomable complexity, particularly when they operate in the VUCA world. It’s not possible for senior leaders to deal with this complexity, so they simplify. A lot. They concoct a story in their head, and then build their visions, strategies and plans on top of that narrative. Sometimes they’re right, and they build great organisations, and become rich and famous. And sometimes they’re wrong, and blow up their organisations and are remembered as sociopaths. Anyone who has ever heard a senior leader speak, and walked out of the room thinking, “What fucking planet is he on?” knows exactly what I’m talking about.
Whether they’re right or wrong (and we generally don’t know which they are until the end of their tenure), most leaders really don’t like having people question their narrative. As a purely practical matter, most people don’t have access to all the information the leader does, or understand the trade-offs inherent in an issue, so leaders generally don’t find random challenges from the floor that helpful. But it’s also not nice when someone questions the assumptions that are underpinning what you hope will be the crowning achievement of your career. You don’t get to the top without confidence, and confidence leads to confirmation bias. So people who stick their hand up and say, “Sir, that’s not going to work because …” are quickly — and often secretly — labelled troublemakers.
Followers who want a career and who are not on the autism spectrum quickly learn the difference between honesty and candour: honesty means you don’t lie when you speak; candour (as defined by Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull) means you choose to speak up.
General Michael Hayden knows why candour is hard. He was director of the NSA under Bush 43 and of the CIA under both Bush and Obama. He says that the most difficult element of his job was walking into the Oval Office to tell the president that a critical piece of his narrative was factually incorrect. Needless to say, presidents don’t particularly like being told that.*
This brings us back to CGS. CGS says all the right things about a brains-based approach, maximising talent, being a learning organisation and bringing challenge at the highest levels. But all senior leaders parrot that boiler-plate language. Dig a little deeper, and you find some warning signs. For one, CGS uses first person singular pronouns — a lot. Indeed, it sounds as though there’s only one big brain powering the whole enterprise. CGS also dismisses concerns over maintaining standards in the Army because, well, maintaining standards is what the Army does (which is a close cousin of “trust us”). Actually, the Army is poor at maintaining standards, and anyone who denies that is pretty disconnected from the frontline reality. It suggests no one is candidly briefing the CGS on the pressure units are (always) under. CGS also talks about bringing in diverse points of view to challenge accepted wisdom, but the general staff project amounts to non-military external advisers. While having a diverse network is a good thing, it’s no substitute for high-quality, candid, internal advice. To prosper in the VUCA world, the first thing out of the CGS’s mouth should be his (or her) progress on creating a culture of candour and respectful dissent.
There is a real danger, then, that CGS is working in an echo chamber, characterised by over-confidence and lack of challenge (a “surfeit of vision”).
This problem would certainly not be unique to the army, although it might be most extreme there. One of the most enduring memes of recent leadership literature has been Jim Collins’s bus. Collins, who studies successful businesses for a living, has written myriad best-selling books on the topic (e.g. Good to Great, Built to Last and Great by Choice). One of the intellectual cornerstones of his work has been that the best companies in the world “get the right people onto the bus, and the wrong people off the bus”. This strikes every leader as common sense (and always frustrated me as a military leader, because we usually don’t get to choose who’s on the bus). But it’s important to capture Collins’s edict exactly: “First who, then what”. In other words, it’s not enough to get the right people onto the bus: you must then decide what to do with input from those right people. And that requires you to create a high-performing team to harness their input. And that in turn requires you to create the conditions in which candour can flourish.
Not surprisingly, Google has analysed how to do this. With a couple hundred teams at any given time, tons of quantitative data on how they’re doing, and far too much cash lying around, Google is able to do some pretty scientific research on high-performing teams (link). The company considered just about every factor imaginable, but eventually determined that what matters is “psychological safety”. Psychological safety is defined as a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking. Achieving psychological safety in turn requires two things: “equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking” (everyone gets an equal chance to talk) and “average social sensitivity” (everyone can sense how each other is feeling).
You can see the problem right away. How many commanders do you know who are careful to not speak more than others on their command team? Most of mine started every O group with a long diatribe (a surfeit of vision). Social sensitivity is certainly not a term you come across very often in the Army — and note Google says average social sensitivity. That means the social sensitivity of everyone at the table matters (I’m talking to you, LE officers).
Let us return to Jim Collins. When Collins and his team contrasted good companies with great companies, they discovered that the differentiator was humility: “The x-factor of truly great leadership is humility” (link).** Synthesising the work of Collins and Google, I submit that it is humility — true humility, not self-delusion or faux humility*** — that underpins psychological safety, that in turn enables challenge and getting to the best answer.
The British Army has given a lot of thought to battlefield leadership. It’s arguably one of the finest leadership factories in the world. But equivalently superior intellectual performance requires a different kind of leadership, one that focuses on humility and creating psychological safety.
Maybe it’s time we started celebrating that style of leadership as well.
*Hayden: “The intel guy is fact based. The policy guy [the president, in this case] is vision based. The intel guy is inherently is swimming at detail, trying to create generalised conclusions. He’s fundamentally inductive. The policy guy is trying to take his first principles, you know, the ones that got him elected, he’s trying to take those first principles and apply them to specific circumstances. He’s inherently deductive. The intel guy: the world as it is. The policy-maker: the world as we want it to be. And then finally, just because the nature of the work, the intel guy is inherently pessimistic …. The policymaker, though, inherently optimistic …. [The intel guy has] got to get into the head of the policymaker even though he knows he’s probably making that man or woman’s day worse than it otherwise would be, with every sentence he utters.”
** Collins’s research also identified other related characteristics such as willpower and a sense of service, which we can take as read for senior army officers.
*** Take Sir Frank Chapman, former CEO of BG Group, as an example of faux humility. A magazine profile of Chapman said he loved healthy debate among his top lieutenants. But when I asked one of his senior managers about this, he said that Chapman was a bully who only liked debate as long as no one disagreed with him.
