“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.” — Sun Tzu

The Three Critical Factors of Understanding: Going Beyond Intuition and Assumption

The intensity of our training increased the closer we got to our scheduled deployment date. We had studied the Iraqi culture, immersed ourselves in studying the region we’d be operating in, and digested all the intelligence reports coming from that area. We were ready to go, well-prepared.

And then everything changed.

Just a few short weeks before our deployment, the leadership suddenly shifted, and with it, our assigned area of operation. Suddenly we were set to deploy to a zone far different from the one we had planned and prepared for. As a flexible organization willing to take on any mission, of course, we adapted. In the process, though, we paid a heavy price in both lives and livelihoods.

The lessons we learned the hard way solidified in my mind the importance of a leadership principle I had been taught throughout my military career; know yourself, know your opposition, and know your environment. To give your team the greatest odds of success you must know those three things as well as you can possibly know them. This principle applies to any team that operates in competitive environments; military, sports, business, government, church and many more.

1. Know yourself: In addition to knowing their own strengths and weaknesses, leaders must know their teams inside and out. Is the team’s culture healthy? What are the team’s strengths? What are its weaknesses? How do team members react under extreme pressure? Don’t just use personal observations or gut intuition to shape your understanding of the team. Leaders should tap external audiences as well as the team for their perception of the team’s culture, strengths, weaknesses, leader climate, cohesion, and performance. In many cases, leaders will confirm their own beliefs, but they will also gain new insights. With this increased understanding of the team, leaders are able to allocate resources, modify training, and make decisions that best support their team’s success.
2. Know your opposition: Your opposition must be well-defined and understood by everyone on the team. In some professions, such as the military and sports, the opposition is usually easy to define. In other professions, such as business, the opposition may be a bit vaguer. Regardless, for any team to survive it must know what they are up against. How does the opposition think? What does the opposition need in order to operate and thrive? What does the opposition seek to achieve with your team? How does the opposition’s history impact the way it behaves? Gaining the answers to these questions and others will equip leaders with the understanding necessary to “stay inside the opposition’s decision-making cycle” and disrupt it. It will also reduce the chance of surprises and increase the team’s ability to thwart the opposition’s attacks.
3. Know your environment: By environment, I mean more than climate or the geography. Sure, understanding these things about the operational environment is important. But understanding how they will impact or effect your team AND the opposition is more important. Leaders should also consider the cultural environment in which they will operate. Failed assumptions about how the people you will interact with think and make decisions could lead to disaster before you are ever met by your opposition. When playing a home game, what things might you expect from the home crowd that will impact your team? Is the center-field wall further from home plate than the one in your home stadium? Your business has been successful locally for years, but will it perform the same on the other side of the country where the culture is entirely different? Again, leaders must seek answers to these types of questions about their operating environment if they expect to make decisions that will allow their team to thrive in it.

Consider these three critical factors as legs to a stool. Remove one or weaken it and your stool is susceptible to collapse. By identifying the areas in which you need to increase your understanding, then taking the actions necessary to do so, you’ll improve your decision making ability and increase your likelihood of success.