Ben Ford on Why Military Thinking Still Matters: Command, Control, and Competing in Chaos

Why military thinking still matters in business

In this episode of Strategy Meets Reality, Mike Jones sits down with Ben Ford—Royal Marines veteran, technologist, and founder of Mission Ctrl—to explore what the military can really teach us about strategy, leadership, and execution in the business world.

This is not about war stories or hierarchy. It’s about decentralised decision-making, strategic adaptation, and why organisations need to stop chasing efficiency and start building real capacity. Ben brings his unique perspective from the front lines of both military operations and tech implementation to challenge how we think about command and control, AI, and organisational resilience.

From why most change management is broken to how businesses can learn from military doctrine without blindly copying it, this conversation goes deep into what it means to compete—and win—in uncertainty.

🔍 In this episode:

• Why you can’t manage change—you have to lead it
• The danger of over-optimising for efficiency
• How military doctrine evolved through failure and what business can learn from that
• Why planning still matters—even when everything changes
• How AI can increase human capacity if you use it right
• Building resilience through structure, not just tech

🎧 Keywords: military, technology, strategy, agility, decentralisation, leadership, adaptability, AI, command and control, organisational design

📘 Learn more about Ben’s work: https://missionctrl.dev/

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💬 Connect with host Mike Jones → https://www.linkedin.com/in/mike-h-jones/

Chapters

• 0:00 Bridging Two Worlds: Military and Tech
• 3:28 Lessons from Military to Business: Chaos vs Stability
• 8:49 Existential Threats: Procurement and Capability Development
• 14:21 Command vs Control: Rethinking Structures
• 21:59 Capacity vs Efficiency
• 30:10 The Rise of Disruptive Innovation
• 33:09 AI: Enhancing Human Capacity
• 38:45 Military Insights for Business Resilience
• 44:37 Decentralising Decision-Making
• 54:58 Final Reflections

Transcript

Ben  Ford (00:00)
the technology doesn't have to be the best if the social technology and the culture and the protocol that you overlay over it is up to the mark.

The answer to that problem is to devolve decision making down as far as you can, right? And if you don't, the leader gets overwhelmed,

Mike Jones (00:08)
Mm.

Ben  Ford (00:16)
Tactics is driven by the environment. What you find, what you learn, how you adapt, how you... It's the whole definition of fitness, right? It's how you fit to your environment.

Mike Jones (00:55)
welcome to Strategy meets Reality podcast. Today I'm joined by Ben Ford from Mission Control. Ben's background spans both military and tech worlds, two environments that seem worlds apart, but I think have more in common than you think. Great to have you on, Ben. absolute pleasure to have you on. Just for the listeners, just give us bit of context about yourself and what you've been up to recently.

Ben  Ford (01:10)
Cheers Mike, been looking forward to this so thanks for the invite.

Sure, so I'll start from the beginning I suppose to understand how I kind of bridged those two worlds or came to understand that those two worlds are linked. So I served in the Marines, Royal Marines in the early 2000s. I got very bored on a warship at some point and decided to teach myself a programming language called Python. That's kind of led me into the technology world and I've had a 15, 20 year career in tech.

Mike Jones (01:38)
He

Ben  Ford (01:48)
lots of different programming languages, lots of different types of companies. And I guess the first 10 years as a Civvy, I kind of discounted my military experience quite, you know, I thought, well, there's not really much that being a bootnet could have to do with, you know, being a nerd. And it wasn't until I started digging into kind of agility and, you know, all the kind of noise around that in the software space, I started to see some crossovers.

And then, know, books like Team of Teams, Extreme Ownership, Turn the Ship Around came out just at the time as I was starting to think that. And I started to do bit of research, came across John Boyd's work, eventually came across the concept of Mission Command. You know, that phrase, none of those books actually use that phrase. They all, you know, use their own language because they, you know, they want to build consulting careers and whatnot. But the underlying concept, as we both know, is Mission Command. And probably the last...

Mike Jones (02:18)
Mm.

Ben  Ford (02:37)
five, ten years I've been using that insight to try and bring a bit of that kind of doctrine insight, strip off all the consulting nonsense that's been added to business agility and try and bring it back to the raw material a little bit. And that's been super interesting. And now in the world of AI automation, it's probably even more relevant, if anything.

Mike Jones (02:59)
And that's what I've been admiring about your work recently, if I've seen, is a lot around how you're really utilizing AI. And it's fascinating you mentioned, none of them, in those books you mentioned, none of them talk about mission command. And rightly so, because they, not rightly so, but they obviously want to try and make their own consultancy careers. And I still get it now, I talk about mission command and intent, and I have people send me messages going, why am I ripping off David Marquette?

Ben  Ford (03:26)
Hahaha

Mike Jones (03:28)
I'm

not. It's military doctrine language I'm using. He hasn't created that, but yeah, that's always interesting. Yeah, so we're going to dive into the big question today about why do we often draw lessons for the military into the business environment when they do appear to be very different? And I always look at it go, well,

In the military, we always assume chaos, where in civilian street, in organizations, it's almost they assume stability. And that's what I want to jump into, when you hear people pull military ideas into business, what's your first reaction?

Ben  Ford (04:06)
I mean it's such a deep topic and you you and I have probably spent hours discussing this kind of you know on various different chats previously off camera. Actually I think we did record one and never got around to publishing it if I remember rightly. yeah so I mean it's a huge topic I mean obviously we've now got the we've now got the you know Colonel slash General turned business consultant and you know these

Mike Jones (04:14)
Mm.

Yeah, yeah, I remember that.

Ben  Ford (04:32)
the principles I think, know, the problem comes when people start to just try and directly transplant practices from the military into into city streets. So, you know, the orders process, for example, or debriefs and whatnot. Now, all of these practices are extremely useful. But we have to remember that the context of the military is, you know, one where the biggest difference between the military and and

civilian context is that the military has this incredibly long on-boarding process called basic training which puts everyone on the same playing field, teaches everyone this kind of communication process, the protocols, all of that stuff that just doesn't exist in civvy street. can't spend the equivalent of an MBA on every single person that you bring into your organisation in a civilian company. So that's one of the problems I see of

Mike Jones (05:18)
Yeah.

Ben  Ford (05:18)
some of

these books or maybe some of the consulting practices where it's just like, right, here's what worked for me in Afghanistan, day one, here's how we're gonna make it work in your business. mean, that's bloody nonsense, right? And I'm probably overstating it, but I don't think they actually do that. So I think it's very important to understand that the principles and the processes that have...

Mike Jones (05:29)
Yay.

Ben  Ford (05:39)
evolved in the military, have evolved through the crucible of people getting killed for hundreds of years basically. So what doesn't work to manage chaos doesn't survive. So what we end up with is this kind of core of battle tested literally principles and then what we need to do is basically have a mapping process of okay how do these principles show up in civilian contexts.

Mike Jones (05:45)
Yeah.

Ben  Ford (06:03)
And so, in Agile, you have the things like the retrospective. And I've worked in many, many organizations. This came directly from the military. think Scrum.org or Scrum.Inc, whatever it's called, started by an F4 pilot, very, very kind of military roots. And the retrospective practice that's arisen out of that kind of history.

Mike Jones (06:07)
Mm.

Ben  Ford (06:25)
I've experienced it in civilian companies where it bears absolutely no resemblance to how it works in the military and is a complete waste of people's time. It's a cargo cold basically. So there's an incredible amount of richness and value in the principles but the application of those principles I think is often misunderstood and attempted to be too direct.

Mike Jones (06:49)
Yes. I think that goes a lot to the perspective of military that we are very hierarchical and we can do all these things because they have to listen to us otherwise, you they're in trouble, which we know is not, true. Yes, it's true. The fact that we have military law, but we know that to get people to follow, you get people to, you to lead people, we can't do that because it won't last.

Um, so I think we have to build up that fundamental trust that helps us to do that. And one privilege we do have as a military, we probably spend 90 % of the time training. Yeah. And probably about 10 % fighting, which does give us that flex to be able to hone these skills where I think organizations, they struggle because they've got probably 2 % time training or availability to train people. Um, and it's thinking how, how do we help them integrate this stuff? So it's not.

it's not extra time, it's there to support and help them.

Ben  Ford (07:46)
Yeah, and the other thing to say is that we ought to have bit of humility here as well. The military doctrine that we've been talking about is at the tactical, probably sub 100 person size unit level, right? Most of the things above that in the military are just as bad as everywhere else, if not worse. Look at the procurement system. The idea of applying what works on the battlefield in Afghanistan to digital transformation of...

Mike Jones (08:00)
Mm.

Ben  Ford (08:10)
10 or 100,000 person organisations, it's absolute nonsense because you only have to look at the MOD and the procurement system in the whole Western world to realise that it's completely screwed. So we have to push back on some of this stuff that you can take, this mission command style thing which works incredibly well in a fast paced, operational, very chaotic, VUCA world.

And to think that we can somehow, you know, we've got some kind of magic bullet that's going to get us around all of the dysfunction that exists in bigger organizations, it's just not going to happen. It doesn't happen. But people pretend that it does work.

Mike Jones (08:49)
No, you see it a

lot with, like British military, some of the projects that they've tried to get in recently have been absolutely farcical. And it's the same issues that you're seeing in organizations in execution. There is, you know, too many chiefs, really. Wildly ludicrous timelines that they've done. go into...

tender to consultancies that obviously are going to go for the lowest option, lowest cost. And suddenly there's no real grip of the execution phase and you just see it all fall apart. Like you do see in most organizations as well.

Ben  Ford (09:24)
Yeah, I mean, I think it's really interesting to look at two counter examples of this. know, us in the Second World War, you know, the rise of, when I say us, I mean the UK, UK military establishment, and specifically special operations and, you know, the inception of the commandos. And then also look at Ukraine as a contemporary example. You know, both of those situations have the presence of an existential threat.

Mike Jones (09:40)
Mm.

Ben  Ford (09:49)
And without that existential threat, I don't really think you can have a procurement process that works. Until you have something breathing down your neck, that means you just have to chop out all that nonsense and go back to first principles. You know, develop a Spitfire or, you know, hire a bunch of lunatics like Govinds did in the SOE and just have them invent stuff. Or, you know, in Ukraine.

really kind of understand how to use drones and AI at scale very, quickly without all of the kind of nonsense that leads to stuff like an Ajax being what, 10 billion over budget or something like that? I mean, and the frustrating thing is that, you know, we're going a bit away from business now, but the frustrating thing is that all of these lessons were made very plain in the Millennium Challenge exercise in 2002.

Mike Jones (10:23)
Yeah, yeah.

He

Ben  Ford (10:37)
So none of this is new and I think as a result we should take a very, very critical look at the capability side, the capability development side of the Western military and we should, if someone tries to ram that down your throat as a business, especially if they're a consultancy that's been involved in that whole mess, you should tell them to take a long run off a short pier really. I was gonna say something a lot ruder there but I managed to remember something else.

Mike Jones (11:01)
Yeah. No, I've,

yeah. Yeah. No, I'll show you all your feelings and there's probably a few names I'd love to drop in there, but I best not. the, but yeah, you said like we step away for business, but I don't think we are really because there's, there's some really good things. One is that you see the challenge that you have now is not an existential crisis, but also they were looking at a future.

not futures. And so they put all their eggs in one basket and not realize the world can change pretty quickly. And the other one is what we draw parallels with Ukraine on is that rapid test, adjust, agility that you just don't see. They try to go for this perfect predictable plan that takes too long. By the time it probably comes into inception,

It's probably outdated when Ukraine, they've got a good bit of redundancy. They're trying things, they're learning quickly and they're adapting. A bit like what you're talking about at the start about agility and OODA loop. know, that's the observed sense constantly adapting to what's happening.

Ben  Ford (12:15)
Yeah, change is not something to be managed, but we've got a lot of change managers who are attempting to pretend that the world hasn't changed. It's like, that's just absolute nonsense. You only have to even look at the two words together, change management. You do not manage change. Change is something that happens to you and around you that you...

Mike Jones (12:17)
No.

Ben  Ford (12:34)
You better adapt to it at the very minimum. But if you want to actually be really high performing team, company, business, organization, whatever, you should be leading the change, right? Because then it's the ecosystem around you that's adapting to you. I mean, this is, think, one example of, you know, I've got zero admiration for President Trump as a person and as an individual, but as a...

Mike Jones (12:46)
Mmm.

Ben  Ford (13:02)
as demonstration of this concept, know, he's textbook, right? He is the way he, him and his team do things forces the whole world to adapt to their tempo and their changes in tempo. Now, I don't know whether they've done that by design or whether they're like chaos engines or what the, what the upshot is there, but that's a, it's a, it's a very good textbook example. And I think also going back to Ukraine.

Mike Jones (13:13)
Yes.

Ben  Ford (13:26)
and actually I'm seeing this a lot in AI at the moment is, you're putting your reliance on some external factor to you, which can be yanked away at the whim of a market or a president or a bad luck, you're not really building your own capability. So you're putting your success...

you're outsourcing a source of your success and therefore increasing the risk of that success not coming to fruition.

Mike Jones (13:52)
Yeah. And there's a couple of key principles that we always did by one, the viability principle that you must as an organisation be able to adapt quicker or quicker than you extend the environment of why you see this exist. And the other one about being self-regulating, self-organising. If you are reliant on other things to be self-organising, well, we can't be self-organising if we rely on something else, but...

if you, if you, if you rely on other things, it means you can't self-organize. You can't adapt quickly because you're so reliant. That's not a good place to be. And you see, Ukraine did get himself in that problem and you see a lot of organizations, they become so reliant on the third party or a supplier or a contract. And that gets yanked away or changed because they're not looking at the external environment and thinking what's happening. Then that completely.

can destroy them overnight.

Ben  Ford (14:49)
Yeah, and I think that's probably why we see a lot of US tech billionaires closing up to the government because they realise that their best route to continued survival, or not really survival when you're a billionaire, but what mean, their best route to continued success is to control the environment, regulatory capture.

Mike Jones (15:01)
Yeah

Ben  Ford (15:08)
and trying to be the one that's writing the story. That's a natural tendency. Great for them, probably not so good for everyone else. But yeah, something that happens a lot, I think.

Mike Jones (15:18)
Yeah, and that's where we look at strategy and I always, really think about what is strategy? That's always a question to ask. And I always view it in the idea of being able to respond and shape UXL environment or respond to and shape UXL environment. Cause that's what you're trying to do. But to do that, you have to be your...

orientation or your mental model to that external environment needs to be congruent as possible. It needs to be close. You can't be disconnected in any way because you've got to be looking for these signs. you mentioned Trump earlier. He's a classic one or a classic catalyst in this. He is so chaotic. It is really hard to fully understand what he's going to do next. And that then means internally, you've got to have, well, increase your agility.

Ben  Ford (16:10)
Yeah, or find a different game to play, I think we're probably gonna get into the find out stage of, know, the follow the fuck around stage, because I think China is probably way, way ahead of the West. Not even probably. China's way, way ahead of the West on this kind of whole strategic piece. I think they've got supply chains of critical minerals and metals buttoned up.

Mike Jones (16:13)
Yeah, yeah, true.

Ben  Ford (16:35)
They've got massive presence in Africa. I don't think they actually need to worry about this. They can just consider this to be a storm in a teacup. Four year cycles when they think on hundred year cycles. There is that need to adapt and respond to shifts in your immediate environment. But then there's also the real game of strategy is playing a much bigger game where you can constrain and...

Mike Jones (16:57)
Mmm.

Ben  Ford (16:59)
know, all that stuff into the long grass and just say, you know, that's the win. What do they say? Tactics without strategy, strategy without tactics, can't remember the exact quote, do remember it?

Mike Jones (17:08)
No, I can't. I know you mean that. That's going to play on my mind now.

Ben  Ford (17:11)
think tactics without

strategy is the noise before defeat or something like that.

Mike Jones (17:15)
Yeah. But you, and it's really true, but highlight another good point for businesses really, when you talk about China is that they're, they're playing a hundred years ahead and, and always organisation, they get himself in these self-constructed planning cycles of either four years or one year, which really, minimise their ability to, to have proper strategy.

and to think ahead and build those really resilient factors in place like they have.

Ben  Ford (17:47)
Yeah, and I think, we've talked about mission command, I think maybe it's also time to talk about the control aspect of command. I think you've seen my talk that I gave at NATO a few years ago, the Command and Control Center of Excellence. So the flip side of command is control, and people have this, I believe people have this all wrong. They view control as this kind of top-down.

Mike Jones (17:55)
Mm.

Yes, yeah, yeah, I like that. Yeah.

Ben  Ford (18:08)
this is how we're going to do things. Here's the strategy. Strategy flows down into operations. Operations dictates tactics. And that's not, I believe, how it works at all. Tactics is driven by the environment. What you find, what you learn, how you adapt, how you... It's the whole definition of fitness, right? It's how you fit to your environment.

Mike Jones (18:09)
Yeah.

Ben  Ford (18:28)
Right, so that must by definition be driven by the environment because the environment is the thing that has the momentum and has the change. And so, you what I said in that talk was that we've got control backwards. We need to give up control in the short. So we try loads of things. Some of them may not work. Some of them, some of them will. Always obviously trying to adhere to the, you know, maintaining the viability of the system overall.

And over time, we gain more control over our outcomes because we've got this of feedback loop. And that feedback loop goes up into strategy. In many, many organizations, maybe most kind of incumbent style enterprise organizations, that feedback loop is completely broken, completely absent.

Mike Jones (19:11)
Yeah, it's like a big concrete wall between strategy and execution. And they sort of lump over some vague vision statement of what they want. And then it's just, yeah, crack on and nothing really happens. just, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Ben  Ford (19:22)
Yeah, and you've got a bunch of change managers in the middle, like completely attenuating

the signal coming from the outside.

Mike Jones (19:29)
Yeah. And you're right. And this term command and control came from the military. And if you look out on civilian street, they see it as a bad thing. there's such command and control. I keep saying, it's not, you're looking at the wrong perspective of what that means. Command and control to us is that, I'm going to, this is my intent. I'm, as you say, give up control. I'm going to hold my intent firmly and my plans loosely. And this is what I want you to achieve.

Then you give them time to go away, to look at it, to think about how can they best achieve that? And they come back and say, do what, this is what I'm going to do. I want to do this, but I'm constrained by this. Can you release that constraint for me? Et cetera. Have that good conversation so that I'm confident as a leader that we're aligned and you can go away and execute and I'm happy. And we can have that feedback loop in so I can see how it's going. If things need to adjust, they adjust. But yeah, I think.

people think it's just, tell you how to do it and you must do it exactly how I've said to do it. Otherwise, that's wrong.

Ben  Ford (20:29)
Yeah,

yeah, you know, don't think you even need a hierarchical leadership to implement command and control. If you look at some of the best, I was on a webinar yesterday with corporate rebels who've written a lot about kind of leaderless organizations. And the myth is that, you know, to be a leaderless organization, you don't have any structure at all. That's not the case. You have a different type of structure, right? You have...

an enabling structure, actually a lot of very successful kind of flat hierarchical hierarchy less organisations actually what replaces the kind of top-down leadership is some kind of system, some kind of technical infrastructure that implements this kind of this process. So you know I believe you can have the principles of command and control without having

somebody at the top barking orders or even setting the direction. What you can have like in an insurgency or in one of these leaderless organisations is you have a shared purpose which is generally looser than, much looser than a three year vision or a five year plan or a business strategy as we commonly see them. But that looseness allows everyone to

align with it, right, because everyone has their own slightly different kind of overlap, like a very, very diffuse Venn diagram of lots and lots of different overlapping things, and the thing in the middle is this kind of nebulous purpose of the organization. So you can have the principles of command and control. There is always control in every organization, even if it looks completely chaotic.

Mike Jones (21:46)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Ben  Ford (21:59)
If there's no control within the organisation, then it's the environment. You're being pushed by the winds, you're going back and forth. And that happens, right? know, AI hoes into view. Like if you're open AI, for example, and suddenly a little tiny Chinese company called Deepseek releases a better model than you, that they've trained on, you know, a plucky attitude and a few million dollars, and they can also run it for much, cheaper than you. Sorry, your command, your locus of control.

Mike Jones (22:14)
Ha ha ha

Ben  Ford (22:26)
in that instant has just shifted outside of your boundaries, right? And you need to then work to get it back. So this idea that command always comes from the top and control is always something that you have. I mean, sometimes you don't, right? Sometimes control shifts outside of your boundaries, outside of your locus of control, and you have to kind of fight to get it back.

Mike Jones (22:31)
Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. And you're right. And you see this with, talk about flat organisations and you're right. There is some sort of structure. It's probably not traditional structure, but when you see organisations, you see the levels that are in there. They're unnecessary because one, it's again, it's like all these change manager people and all these, know, blob of things that...

think they serve a purpose, but I'd probably argue they're creating more bureaucracy, constraining people's freedom of action and actually helping them. And then also another thing we look at is decision rights. And there's no, there's no difference in decision rights from several layers. Then why do you need them? Yeah. We have those decision rights to help with coordination, relieve conflict that can't be resolved at a certain level because it's decisions that affect multiple entities.

So we just seem to get a problem like DeepSeek. So DeepSeek's come along like, God, we missed that one. Okay, how are gonna solve this problem? I know we need more policies and processes and more people. And that's what they do. They just layer on policies, processes to try and think that they can control something like that happening again. But in future, all that does is makes us more sluggish, more unlikely to be able to respond.

or even observe the changes that are happening because we're too busy feeding a machine upwards.

Ben  Ford (24:10)
Yeah, I mean, that's the classic kind of counter example of OODA, right? know, Boyd would always say, you know, your aim is to close off your enemy's OODA loop and get them to, you know, fold in upon themselves and create this, what he called the conceptual spiral. And, you know, many, many organizations are just simply doing that to themselves, right? They're not, know, what an OODA loop is essentially is a boundary around...

Mike Jones (24:17)
Mmm, yeah.

Yes.

Mmm.

Ben  Ford (24:37)
a thing that's from its environment. And anything from thermodynamics, anything that's separate from its environment is eventually going to collapse into entropy. It's going to become a steady state. This will happen to the universe eventually, but you put your cup of tea down and it starts hot and eventually it ends up room temperature if you don't drink it.

Exactly the same thing happens with organisations. If they're not continually exchanging information and energy with their environment, they collapse into this kind of steady state and they become ineffective. They collapse in upon themselves. that's what the military doctrine tells you to try and do to an enemy. Many, organisations or parts of organisations are simply doing to themselves because they don't have that feedback loop with their environment.

Mike Jones (25:20)
No,

no. And you mentioned about that loose directional purpose, not loose, but you can even look back at to ISIS. ISIS were, very clear on what they wanted. there's no ambiguity there, but they allowed, all the different entities and teams to just have the freedom of action to adapt in that, but they had very clear coherence.

Even in that sort of organization, they had very clear coherence that enabled them to adapt without losing their identity. And then that comes back to your point just then, that real challenge between organizations, that balance between how do I deliver efficiently as possible today whilst understanding what I need to change now to be viable in the future? Is that outside the future and inside and today?

How do we balance that so we're getting the adaptions? So we're adapting over time rather than just solely focused on today and then we react to the changes, which we know will always lead to suboptimal.

Ben  Ford (26:19)
Yeah, I mean, I see this all the time.

In fact, I see this as a category error being made in AI world today, So, you know, it's undeniable that AI is an enormous capacity uplift for individuals in their daily work. And so what you see in AI today is the rise of the kind of AI automation agency. And these are basically marketing and sales automations, right? There's, you know, any number of...

Mike Jones (26:26)
Hmm.

Ben  Ford (26:45)
moderately successful entrepreneurs that are then going and teaching this kind of new business model to these mostly fairly young, inexperienced operators. And these guys can come into a business, they can automate the process of finding leads and getting sales and doing cold outreach and blah blah blah. And that's the kind of main thing that people are seeing in the marketplace now. So if you're an existing business, presumably you're running your people fairly...

you know, fairly close to capacity. And then you're going to bring on one of these guys who's going to come and instantly double your leads. And it's like, okay, great. Now what? Now what? Assuming that they can actually deliver what they can do, how are you possibly going to handle double the capacity with your existing team and your existing systems and your existing processes? You're categorically not going to do that. And so, yeah, I see this a lot. You know, it's just a complete...

Mike Jones (27:26)
Yes, yeah, yeah.

Ben  Ford (27:37)
fallacy that you can just bring in some external change without changing your internal posture, systems, processes, doctrine and have everything not break in horrendous fashion. It seems obvious to me, mean it seems obvious when you say it, but they must just be very good at marketing.

Mike Jones (27:50)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, I know it does.

It does seem very obvious. But this is the thing with execution. lot of just falls apart. And I think it's because they're not really thinking about the capacity that they have. And like you said, most organizations are obsessed with efficiency and are running on absolutely full capacity, probably plus 10, 20%.

And then they bring in something new that they're gonna do, but they don't adjust the resources that they need to be able to achieve that. And they wonder why then it all just sort of implodes on itself.

Ben  Ford (28:34)
Yeah, and they're not leaving any... So in OODA loop terms, they're trying to operate completely in that kind of implicit guidance and control mode, right? So you've got your orientation, you go straight to action. It's the low energy pathway. It's the...

Mike Jones (28:47)
Mm.

Ben  Ford (28:49)
you know, the most efficient way to make money if you're in business, right? You know what you're doing. You put a hundred, you you find something that works. You put a hundred percent of your resources behind that and you just go full tilt at it. And then you're not, you're not horizon scanning. You're not observing anything new. You're not observing new stuff coming in, which means that when you finally do bring your head up and do that horizon scan, you're way off where...

Mike Jones (28:53)
Yeah.

Ben  Ford (29:13)
where the industry might be. Like if you're an incumbent, know, pretty much any industry now, if you've been doing this kind of milking the cash cow and you haven't been looking at AI or other, know, automation or anything coming on board, you know, somebody who's smart might even be somebody who's in your existing business right now who does do that.

is now going to be, okay, right, I can do exactly what they do, but I can do it for 90 % less cost, let's say. That's not outrageous, Yes, you have to invest the money into integrating that 90 % cost saving, but if you've got a route to market to something that an existing incumbent is already doing, you're basically going to say, right, my strategy is to do what they do.

Mike Jones (29:42)
No.

Ben  Ford (29:59)
but do it, I mean, let's just be super conservative, 50 % less cost, right? Suddenly, you've now got a huge amount of extra capacity to play with, right? What does Boyd say? It's a biological imperative to improve your capacity for an organization, for an organism to improve its capacity for free and independent action. margin in a business is that capacity. And if you've got, you know,

Mike Jones (30:10)
Mm-hmm.

Yes. Yeah, yeah.

Ben  Ford (30:26)
50 % more capacity than an incumbent, it doesn't matter really what the size differential is, eventually you'll catch up and overtake them. Or conversely from the point of view of the incumbent, eventually that scrappy upstart is not going to be the upstart, it's going to be the Netflix versus blockbuster story and that's going to happen a lot with AI.

Mike Jones (30:42)
Yeah.

And you do see it and I love that. it's that, what I always get from von Foerster which is you must always act in a way to increase your options. And you see it with the big cash cows or the big organizations. You just see it recently with the banking. Now you've got Revolut, Starlink, all those lot that have pretty much doing the same, but they've just chose a different way of doing it.

And then you look at the electricity or the commodities market and you've got people like Octopus Energy. Octopus Energy now is one of the largest energy providers and they've done an absolutely fantastic job. they're just showing that there are different ways of doing it. And if you do it, that increases their capacity. now I'm an Octopus Energy person. Yeah.

Ben  Ford (31:32)
Yeah, so my after

my existing energy supply went bust.

Mike Jones (31:36)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So what I like about them is that you think that they've all gone completely tech and it's soulless. It's not because I can ring up with any problem and I don't have to go to five or six different people because that one person has got the freedom of action to solve my problem there and then. And I'm like, wow, that's cool.

Ben  Ford (31:57)
And I think

this is a super important point, sorry to talk over you there, but people are also making another category over with AI, which is that AI is gonna replace people. And that's absolutely not the case. Like I use it for coding all the time, it's not replacing me, it's not replacing any of my team. What it does do is it makes us more effective, gives us more capacity. But the whole point of a service is people buy stuff from people, right?

Mike Jones (32:01)
No.

Mmm, yeah,

Ben  Ford (32:22)
Why on earth would you think you should get rid of your people when actually what AI can do is just strip away all that minutiae and bullshit and all of the noise that they used to have to do so that they can spend more time being human, right? There's a really good book on this. It's yeah, 15 years old, so probably at least 12 years before its time. It's called The Connected Company.

Mike Jones (32:36)
Mmm.

Ben  Ford (32:45)
by Dave Gray. And it's basically looking at completely flipping the traditional hierarchy of a business to put the people on the front lines, the edges of the organization in touch with the environment to completely give the power to them and build everything in service to them so that you are literally led by your customers and the service that you provide to them. And I think AI is a perfect

Mike Jones (32:45)
Okay.

Ben  Ford (33:09)
addition into that picture because now you can actually automate, you know, all of the stuff that is non-value add. Like for example, the very common workflow is, you know, a consultancy. They do a bunch of upfront research. They gather some source documents. They have an experienced consultant that would then take those source documents and construct the output. And then there's the preparation of that output into the presentation media of slides or documents or whatever.

Mike Jones (33:34)
Yeah, yeah.

Ben  Ford (33:35)
The only thing that the human needs to be involved in that now is that upfront kind of capturing and doing the kind of bit that the human needs to be in loop for. All of the rest of it can be completely automated away. You've got an example of what good looks like. You've got a way of capturing your IP of what that process is into something that's repeatable.

I build this stuff that's mission controls, bread and butter is building that. And then once you've got that kind of AI led transformation of the input data to the input, the internal kind of format, taking that internal format and automating the translation of that into an output document or deliverables is again completely, completely automatable. So.

So the consultancy of the future would look like the very experienced consultants doing that direct kind face-to-face, high-value, human-to-human part and having all the stuff in that pyramid underneath them be mostly automated away.

Mike Jones (34:41)
Yeah, yeah. And I think that, like you said, gives back capacity, which a lot of organizations don't have capacity because they're just drowning them. They don't have that ability to look up and then connect to the customers, understand what's changing, feed that back up, you all that good stuff we were talking about. My fear is, is that as soon as you create that capacity, leaders are going to go, well, we need to be efficient and they're going to cut that capacity. I think they

Ben  Ford (34:58)
Yep.

Mike Jones (35:08)
Like you said, cut the human out.

Ben  Ford (35:08)
Yeah, so this is

very, very interesting. I've actually been doing some modeling on this. I'm basically building a new offer around this kind of idea of being a digital insurgency coming in and doing this kind of capacity increase first. And you can actually model this out financially, right? If you take a company's revenue and their margins, you can model the difference between

Okay, we can strip out 50 % of costs, let's say conservatively, know, service businesses are largely, you know, the biggest cost is people's time. If we strip out all of this minutiae nonsense, we can conservatively say that we can cut 50 % of the time requirement to deliver the same output. And then what you can do is you can either say, great, I've got, you know, not double the margin, I've got, I can't remember the sums now, but you know, I've now got...

Mike Jones (35:53)
Yep.

Ben  Ford (35:54)
the same revenue business with much higher margins, my profits great, I'm going to cut 50 % of my staff, which is the thing that an idiot would do. Because what you actually have now is you've got 50 % of the staff delivering 100 % of the previous work, or sorry, 50 % of the capacity delivering 100 % of the previous work at much better margins. So what would you do instead? Instead, you would now say, okay, now, hey, AI expert.

Mike Jones (36:00)
Hmm.

Yes.

Ben  Ford (36:20)
you know, child who can build me AI automations for marketing. Now's the time. Now you can come and do it because now if you bring your revenue back up to fill that capacity that you've just increased, you're now actually 4x profit. So yes, I believe that there are many idiots that would think of this as a cost saving because they look at people as a cost center rather than people are our biggest asset, which is another lie that people tell themselves.

Mike Jones (36:23)
Yeah

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah,

yeah, yeah, they do. And that's the thing, but I think for so long, if you look at a lot of the MBAs and all that that they teach them, they teach that mindset we're talking about. all about just, they talk about strategy, but I really question a lot. I'm not seeing much beyond vision statements and, a few all superfluous words. And then it's all about just inside and...

be efficient, know, all that stuff, which when we're talking about a really complex, uncertain environment, we don't want that. You need a bit of fat in there. you have that capacity to be able to deal with those things. But also, as I've already said, if I understand my resources or what resources I need to, and that be it equipment, be it...

I know sometimes people don't like being called resources, but just in this terms, to what effects I'm trying to achieve. It gives you a better understanding of that.

Ben  Ford (37:47)
I mean look at the resource utilization of the military, right? you're going to do a company attack, you've got three troops or three platoons.

One of them's assault, one of them's fire support, and one of them's reserve, right? So you're actually using a third of your resources because you know that this shit's gonna hit the fan at some point and you need to keep something in reserve. Imagine if, yeah, you'd be back to, what is it, know, the charge of the light brigade if you were doing anything else, right? You would just be saying, oh, Craig, right, fellas. You know, typically, you know, if business ran the military, it'd be like, we're all gonna just walk over that way and get slaughtered.

Mike Jones (37:59)
Yay.

Yeah, yeah.

Assault. ⁓

Get one straight line and go, let's do it all. And you're right. that's probably a really good reflection about the military and about a third all the time of our resources reserve. And they're not, they're not just sitting there idly doing nothing. Sometimes they are. But they're ready and anticipating. So as soon as something changes, you've got that capacity to then go, right, let's deal with that without disrupting.

Ben  Ford (38:24)
Yep.

Mike Jones (38:45)
what you're trying to do, where organizations don't have that and they've, they, any bit of reserve they have, they either cut it away or they find some really good idea to fill that time. Cause God forbid they have people sitting around and then when something does happen that's unexpected or an opportunity arises that would be, would be fantastic. They can't do it without collapsing some of the stuff they're doing now.

Ben  Ford (39:12)
Yep, yep, exactly. And this is like the the biggest counter example, I guess, of, you I've seen this, you know, more than a handful of times of, you know, military guys that go and do an MBA, right? And they forget all of the stuff that they learned in the teeth of real chaos and real uncertainty and real operations. And they drink the Kool-Aid and...

I just I don't get it honestly. mean, yes, obviously there's very useful stuff you can learn in an MBA around, you know, business and metrics and things like that. you know, people who spent time in the military already know all they need to know about all the stuff that we've just been discussing, right? You can switch a different language onto it, but you're not throwing away a body of knowledge and picking up a new body of knowledge. You're just having a different set of tooling and a different set of

communication on how to talk about the same dynamic.

Mike Jones (40:04)
Yeah.

It was the same. I was the same as you. When I left, I, it was almost as like, oh, that's the military and that didn't work. So I just pushed it aside and then I realised how actually useful it is. And it's, it's not a carbon copy. I'll just throw this straight in and it works. It's just look at it and go, well, what are the underlying principles that that's trying to teach me?

And how do I then communicate that in a way that's understandable and useful for civilian organizations? And there's so much of it, we talked about OODA loop, reserves, seven questions, how we actually do planning and execution is really useful. But the most, I think the key principle about what we transfer from the military is the idea, the assumption that nothing's predictable.

life is generally gonna be chaotic. And I can plan all I want, but trust me, it will need to adapt as soon as I go to execute. And I think that's the key thing. And when you see a lot of these organizations, they're trying to measure everything. But when you then ask them, all all this measurement is for what? What outcome are you actually trying to achieve?

That's the thing that they struggle to articulate where we are very clear, this is the outcome that you want. So when the smoke clears, this is what I want to see meaningfully different. And then we work back from, we figure out the outcome first, then we work back from there.

Ben  Ford (41:32)
Yeah, and the other thing about planning, in Agile, there came to be this myth that planning is wasted because the environment is going to change. And in the military, the environment doesn't get any more changeable than a chaotic kind of counterinsurgency or military operation. But we spend inordinate amounts of time planning, even knowing that the plan won't survive first contact with the enemy. We know that. We know that every time.

But we still plan because the plan is about how you then, you know, you think through in great detail and you get things like actions on like immediate actions, things that will probably go wrong. And then you have things that, you know, could go wrong. And you have the ones that are the highest priority, probability of going wrong. have contingencies for those and you build that into your plan. you know, in, software development, particularly, you know, the planning consists of a

Mike Jones (42:04)
Yes.

Ben  Ford (42:21)
anemic 30 minute maybe an hour exercise every couple of weeks where people just really fucking bored because it's probably on a Friday afternoon and they just go through you know this cargo cult process of looking through their backlog and yeah it is a waste of time and people think it's a waste of time because actually when you do it like that it is a complete waste of time that doesn't mean that planning as a concept planning as a you know as a

Mike Jones (42:38)
Yes.

Ben  Ford (42:45)
need is a waste of time. just means that the way it kind of shows up in some of these, ironically, military-devived kind of business operating systems, yeah, very strange. ⁓

Mike Jones (42:53)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I remember, know, done vast amounts of it, but the utility of them, I remember sitting there, stupid cock in the morning, giving orders and we're going through and I've got a young, tired soldiers and I'm going, right, okay. So when we get to this point, if I know we get contacted by the enemy here, what would you do? And.

I'm not looking for a perfect answer for them. just want them to think about, if that's happening, well, we'll do this. And we keep doing that. And it comes great because when, when we're actually going to execute our plan and something goes wrong, I'm not using all my cognitive capacity to try to control every movement because the people, the team I have around me understand the situation, they understand what we're trying to achieve. They understand roughly how we're going to do this and they self-organize.

And then that thing gives me the spare capacity to be able to think, okay, now that's changed. What needs to adapt for us still to achieve our plan? I think that's the core outcome of trying to get with planning, but it never seems that way. It's like, we've got this. If we get a cyber threat here, what would we do? yeah, we'll just do this, this really simple. They don't stretch people to think about, what the...

proper contingency, would that work? Are we gonna test that?

Ben  Ford (44:12)
Yeah, think, you know what, think this, I haven't really ever thought about it in these terms before, but this might be why you end up with these kind of hierarchies in businesses, right? The answer to that problem is to devolve decision making down as far as you can, right? And if you don't, the leader gets overwhelmed,

Mike Jones (44:21)
Mm.

Ben  Ford (44:28)
right? And the answer is to decentralise the decision making as much as possible.

Mike Jones (44:29)
Yes.

Ben  Ford (44:37)
so that the coordination pressure as you move up, assuming you have a hierarchical organization or in if you don't, so that the leader in the center doesn't get overwhelmed. And the answer is, I'm getting overwhelmed. I know, I'll hire a manager for this department or that department. But that just kind of kicks the can down the road, right? The right answer would be.

Mike Jones (44:45)
Mm-hmm.

Yes, yeah, yeah.

Ben  Ford (45:00)
again to the point of are you going to grow revenue or decrease costs first. Well the modelling I've just done says you decrease costs first and then you add revenue, you get a far far better economic outcome and money in a business is just a proxy for...

information and the value that business creates and if you do the same as the military and you devolve command downwards you're increasing the capacity of the whole organisation because you've got the people on the ground that there's less coordination back and forth, less information flow internally, less noise.

Mike Jones (45:38)
Yeah. And it comes back to the book you mentioned about connected organisations or teams. If we do it the other way, where we're traditionally seeing it, where all decisions are going upwards, all co-organisations don't go in upwards, we create this apathetic, learned helplessness that now doesn't realise the importance of what they're there for. Or they may do probably because they're good people.

but they've got no freedom to do that. And they lose touch then with the external environment. You're losing so much rich feedback, so much connection to the external environment. And then you're trying to cover that by more policies, processes, which means then you're gonna get more and more of these problems, which then you're gonna, the only answer is to put more and more management in place to try and solve that where, like you said, just try to push it back, decentralize.

as much as we can.

Ben  Ford (46:33)
Yeah, I think there's two good acronyms. I'm not really sure if they're used exactly like this in the miniature. can't really remember. It's that long ago. you know, IIT and IOT. I intend to in order that, right? Because if you have a, you know, shit hit the fan moment.

Mike Jones (46:46)
Yeah.

Ben  Ford (46:51)
and all you do is throw that up to the next decision maker and presumably if they've got that learned helplessness they do the same thing. Well eventually it comes up to the top and they're like the person at the top's now got all of this kind of stuff coming up to them. If you throw it up to the top with I've got this problem.

I intend to fix it like this in order that this outcome which presumably would align with the big picture kind of vision then that person at the top can has the opportunity to just say yeah that looks good or have you considered this or that and make a small tweak but it's you you end up kind of bouncing it back at a lower level in the hierarchy so yeah I don't ever remember that being part of I don't think that's part of like the orders process but I kind of like I can't remember where I found it actually

Mike Jones (47:28)
Yeah, yeah. And you can have...

⁓

There is an order too. So you should always give the, this is what I want you to achieve in order for us to do this. And that's that higher level understanding. And that's where initiative comes in because I've given you freedom of action. You're then gonna go, well, I could do it multiple ways, but I'm gonna do it this way because if I do that, even though they've not asked for it, that will help them achieve that.

Ben  Ford (47:46)
Yeah.

Yeah.

that aligns with the commander's

Mike Jones (48:05)
Yeah, yeah,

which gives them initiative. And that's what we want in the organization. want that spare capacity we've now created because we've done all these good things. That spare capacity can be released to create initiative and to drive the organization forward in ways that we probably hadn't intended or explicitly asked for.

Ben  Ford (48:25)
Yeah. Yeah, so I can't remember it. I mean, I do remember in the orders process that, I intend to like that. That is the other part of the commander's intent. Right. This is what I'm intending to do in order that we get this outcome. I don't remember it explicitly being used as a, you know, shit hits the fan. Shits hit the fan boss. Here's what's happened. Here's how I'm intending to get around it. But I have heard

Mike Jones (48:25)
That's good.

Mm.

Yeah.

Ben  Ford (48:49)
that or something similar be used in civilian companies that are doing a decent job. think maybe David Marquet, ironically, is where I heard this in his book perhaps.

Mike Jones (48:57)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But there's some good language there, like I intend to, you my assumption is, know, often leaders in organisations due to the risk of failure don't tend to use this language, but it's good language because you're, by saying that, you're giving people almost permission to adapt. and I want people to not just do blindly what I've asked them to do. I want them to sense the external environment.

and do stuff that I've not asked because they know that it's for the betterment of the mission or the intent that we're trying to do. Where if we go to, like we're gonna achieve this exact thing, it does prevent people from adapting.

Ben  Ford (49:27)
Yep.

Yeah.

Yeah, think there's also an element of, going back to my time as a signaler, there's also an element of ritual and protocol there as well. You probably remember the same as I do, the terrible state of comms in the UK military around about the 2000s, probably still. 40 years out of date radios that struggled to communicate 20k away to a ship.

You know, so it was really, I think this is a kind of really interesting point. That's a bit of a dichotomy, right? In the military, the kit is always shit because of all of these problems that we've just talked about with procurement, right? Things take forever to come through. And, you know, as a result, we deploy with, you know, essentially rubbish that's out of date.

Mike Jones (50:15)
Mm.

Ben  Ford (50:16)
On the flip side, the social technology that's built up to manage this chaos and fill in the gaps between this rubbish kit is actually very, very good. in the signals world, you have voice procedure. You have a way of changing the way you speak and communicate. Hello, zero, this is Bravo two zero over zero send over. So you have this very.

structured way of using these terrible underlying channels so that you still get your message across. And in the civilian world, the flip side is true, right? You've got an absolute wealth of amazing technology and that's getting more and more amazing every day because you've literally got anything you want. You can just buy off the shelf for a small monthly subscription, but you don't have that corresponding...

social technology and protocol to overlay over the top of it so you still get chaos. So I think the learning from the military there is that the kit doesn't have to be the best, the technology doesn't have to be the best if the social technology and the culture and the protocol that you overlay over it is up to the mark.

Mike Jones (51:00)
Yes.

Yeah.

Yes, I totally agree with that. And with that is brevity as well. just being concise and just reporting what is needed. And I think we're quite guilty with all this great technology and, power BI boards and stuff that we just report everything and that nothing that is actually relevant for the leader and create paralysis. know Ben, it's been absolutely fascinating.

Ben  Ford (51:15)
Again, people first.

Mike Jones (51:40)
chat, we'll always do this. I think we could do this a hundred times over and still fill hours of recording. But.

Ben  Ford (51:47)
Yeah, good to get this one

finally on camera and out to the world soon, hopefully.

Mike Jones (51:53)
Exactly. But before you leave us, what one thing would you like to leave listeners to consider or think about from the podcast?

Ben  Ford (52:02)
So I think, yeah, I think it's the importance of the importance of your internal infrastructure, right? Be that your social technology or your actual technology. Like I was on a, like this podcast yesterday, webinar yesterday with Corporate Rebels and somebody said there, you know, our internal tech is our backbone, right? It's your,

lots of people hate the idea of trying to anthropomorphize a business and make it into an organism but there are principles that do apply and I think you're only as good as your internal nervous system. If your internal nervous system as a person is terrible and you keep losing balance and falling over, you're not a very effective human being and I think it's exactly the same in a business. So the lesson I take away from the military is that the

Mike Jones (52:29)
Yeah, yeah.

Ben  Ford (52:46)
the focus on building that internal connective tissue is the thing that leads to the effectiveness.

Mike Jones (52:52)
I like that. I think that I get a lot of leaders thinking around actually their own structures they put in place, actually what's useful, what isn't useful, how can they sort to help reconstruct it so that they can deal with those. And also I like that idea of the social protocols or the capital that you build up an organization and actually if you have that, that can...

deal with even the crappiest of equipment that we're used to.

Ben  Ford (53:16)
Yeah, mean

think about it, one last point, know, think about the military, you you know, a commando unit is an organisation of something like 1200 people and if you go from a period of probably two years, none of those people are the same. The commando unit's still there, still 4-2 commando.

Mike Jones (53:33)
Hmm.

Ben  Ford (53:37)
The CEO's gone, the whole senior leadership team's gone, all of the people on the ground have gone and been replaced by other similarly trained individuals, but the individuals are all different. So that's the thing that, the other thing that building your internal structure gives you is it gives you immunity to turnover and you end up kind of keeping this.

Mike Jones (53:48)
Yes.

Ben  Ford (53:58)
the value and I guess in the civilian world it be your intellectual property. You end up keeping that and you're slightly more immune to the turnover of people as well. Sorry I didn't think of that one when I first said it.

Mike Jones (54:08)
No, no,

it's right. it's that being viable, isn't it? It's being able to adapt, but still maintain your identity. I think that's really crucial. And I've not thought about it in that sense. I see a lot of organizations that lose a few critical, yeah, and they fall apart. Well, actually, how do you create it so that you could essentially swap out over time everyone, and it still remains, it's like,

Ben  Ford (54:23)
keep us in risk.

Yep.

Mike Jones (54:36)
maintains its identity. I'm gonna go reflect on that one today. Thank you, Ben. It's been an absolute pleasure having you here today. if you've enjoyed today's session, maybe other people enjoy it as well. So please feel free to share, like, and push out the podcast to your wider network. I look forward to seeing you all again soon. Thanks again, Ben. See you, bye.

Ben  Ford (54:56)
Thanks Mike, cheers mate.