Strategy Meets Reality Podcast
Traditional strategy is broken.
The world is complex, unpredictable, and constantly shifting—yet most strategy still relies on outdated assumptions of control, certainty, and linear plans.
Strategy Meets Reality is a podcast for leaders who know that theory alone doesn’t cut it.
Hosted by Mike Jones, organisational psychologist and systems thinker, this show features honest, unfiltered conversations with leaders, strategists, and practitioners who’ve had to live with the consequences of strategy.
We go beyond frameworks to explore what it really takes to make strategy work in the real world—where trade-offs are messy, power dynamics matter, and complexity won’t go away.
No jargon. No fluff. Just real insight into how strategy and execution actually happen.
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Strategy Meets Reality Podcast
How Mission Command Solves The Strategy–Execution Gap | Stephen Bungay
Strategy only matters if it changes what people do tomorrow. We bring Stephen Bungay, author of The Art of Action, to unpack how mission command turns intent into execution without drowning teams in detail. Instead of orders that prescribe how to act, directives clarify what to achieve and why it matters—freeing people to adapt their methods as conditions shift.
We trace the roots from Prussian Auftragstaktik to modern NATO doctrine, then translate the core ideas into the boardroom. Stephen lays out a practical framework: share the real context, state higher intent and your own intent, surface implied tasks, and set clear boundaries. The heartbeat is the backbrief: teams explain how they’ll deliver the outcome, leaders confirm alignment, and everyone moves faster with fewer escalations. Along the way, we tackle the persistence of Taylorism, why lists and slide decks masquerade as strategy, and how over‑control smothers initiative while under‑guidance invites chaos.
If you lead teams in uncertain markets, this conversation gives you tools to create high alignment and high autonomy at the same time. You’ll hear battle‑tested examples, from SOPs that help without handcuffing, to writing intent that drives real trade‑offs, to building situational awareness so people can decide well under pressure. Start small: give problems, not solutions; ask for a backbrief; reward judgement over compliance. Subscribe for more conversations on strategy that survives contact with reality, and leave a review to share where you’ll test mission command first.
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Most people do think of strategy that way.
Stephen Bungay:Developing a new strategy.
Mike Jones:Strategic blind spots when strategy meets reality, strategy, and innovation in the strategy world. Drive their strategic goals. And welcome back to Strategy Meets Reality Podcast. Welcome back to Strategy Meets Reality Podcast. I'm delighted to start and kick off season two with um fantastic guests, and I think it's the um perfect guest to start off the season two. Today I have Stephen Bungay, the author of The Art of Action. You can see this has followed me quite a lot in my military career when I first picked up this book, and it's guided me through quite a lot. So it's great to have you on today, Stephen. Well, thank you very much.
Stephen Bungay:Um that book came out in uh 2010, but I've been doing a lot of this and that before that. I I first joined went into business by joining the Boston Consulting Group in 1981. And they were then a strategy boutique. And so I learned about strategy, and really about nothing else. And they had the attitude at the time that execution or implementation, as it was called, was all rather boring, and the the client should get up with that. You know, we we we produced these fancy strategies that were sitting on the shelf and so on. And after a little while, we began to realize that maybe that wasn't entirely true. And uh things began to change internally. I was I became a member of something called the organization practice group, which was about change, really, producing organizational change. Um regarded a bit odd at the time, but it's become terribly mainstream now. And uh things progressed until I had, I suppose, got a little bit bored with it by the end of the 90s and left in order to set up by myself. I had also in the meantime written a couple of books of military history, which is really just a hobby at the time. But it was when I was writing the second book about the Battle of Alamaine that I came across something rather interesting, which I call the Rommel problem. I'll come back to the second. I'd also discovered uh that my clients were more and more concerned with the problem of turning strategy into action and not with what the strategy was itself. They had a lot of clever people of their own who would come up with fancy strategies, but how do you make it actually work? And this seemed to be an almost intractable problem, which is where we come back to Rommel. Now the Rommel problem, which was faced by the Eighth Army in uh North Africa, was that in some peculiar way, he, being an extraordinary military genius, was able to turn up in the desert and within about a week had turned forty-five thousand uh normally rigid, uh procedure-oriented Germans and fifty-five thousand totally incompetent Italians under his command into fast-moving, improvisatory individuals full of initiative who were running rings around the Eighth Army. And uh, they found this very difficult to explain. Uh, there are various rather silly explanations to come up with I won't bore you with at the moment. But anyway, I got interested to say why. Obviously, one bloke doesn't do this. And I discovered that in fact Rommel was a practitioner of a what I can say is a concept of leadership and an organizational process, which he had not invented, but was in fact deeply rooted in the German army of 1942 and goes back well, well, well before then, to the middle of the 19th century and the Prussian army, which encouraged individual initiative on the part of officers, with a word doing nothing is worse than doing something. And they did this because they had suffered a disaster at the hands of the polyon at Yinna and 1807. They thought that's not going to happen again. The problem being that their officers were just passive, they were sitting there waiting for orders while the French were running all over them. And this was so they encouraged individual initiative, but found that they had a problem in that they were losing control. Or they couldn't establish control by issuing detailed orders again, or you get rid of all the initiative and they need the initiative. So my hero, Field Marshal Helmut von Moltke, a very unlikely looking chap to be a military leader, right?
Mike Jones:So he's he's he's my hero too. I think many people who have watched his pre uh podcast will know I've mentioned him probably every episode.
Stephen Bungay:Yeah, uh absolutely he's famous for no plans to fires for contact with the enemy. Anyway, he managed to win the two major wars of the 19th century, first against Austria-Hungary in 1966 and against France in 1870, both in about six weeks, the original Blitzkrieg. And he encouraged individual initiative, but he said, now we are going to give orders in a very different way. In fact, it's so different that we're not going to call them orders anymore. We're going to call them a directives. And an order tells you what to do and how, and a directive tells you what to achieve and a why. And the German word for a thing you have to achieve and why is Auftrag. A task is an Aufgabe. You give children Hals Aufgarben, that's their homework. You don't give them Hals Aufträge. Um and Auftrag is usually used in the military today in the English-speaking world as mission.
Mike Jones:Yes.
Stephen Bungay:So here we can see the original term Auftrags tactic, German, which was then embedded not only in the Prussian army, the then the German army that succeeded it, and brought to quite a high pitch by the influence. And the British and Americans were sort of wondering in 1945, amongst other things, why it had taken the two post-war superpowers plus the British Army four years to defeat Germany. And worked out that this was one of the reasons the Germans were fighting smarter, nothing else, and encouraging individual initiative. And they started learning from German generals who've been on the Eastern Front and adopted it as mission command as opposed to order command. And you will be familiar with this of a number of people behind this, then commander of the British Army at the Rhine time, and it was introduced in sort of late 80s, and it was it was taught as doctrine. It was largely through Shrivenham that was set up, that's the Defense Academy of the UK. Yeah, yeah. Set up to do that, move NATO away from what's been described to me as a sort of a a ballet score of what happens when the Russians come through to Folta Gap. This is what you do. So this flexible response. And it is now, I believe, standard doctrine across the armed forces in NATO. Although I have to say it depends very much what particular unit you are in and who your commanding officer is to extend to it. That has always been the case. That was true in the German army as well. Anyway, I did pick this up and I thought, well, bloody hell, if the army can do it, why can't businesses do it? This is exactly what businesses need. Hence the book, which is translating half trich tactic stroke mission command into business terms. And since then I've spent most of my time helping companies actually put it into action.
Mike Jones:Yeah.
Stephen Bungay:Which is actually not as straightforward as you might think. It involves building some skills which takes effort, particularly at the beginning, but which universally pays off. I have to say, I think I haven't had a failure yet.
Mike Jones:That's good. Yeah, I'm not surprised there's so much um context there about mission command, and a few things being really true. One is about um especially the military, in my experience, I said some leaders that really embraced it and it was really good. Other leaders had a really um low tolerance for risk and then less trust. And yeah, mission command wasn't in, it was just control. But when when you when you're in that environment and mission command is in full play and you've got um initiative, you've got clear, unambiguous, um intent, you know, really saying what what I want and uh why, you can see how it works, and you can see actually it it's so much quicker and adaptable. The challenge is is always thinking about well, what what stops us won't talk about military terms, but in sense of business, but what stops businesses from applying it because it makes sense, but what where's the struggle?
Stephen Bungay:They have very different traditions. I think this suffers a great deal from the influence of macroeconomics based on mathematical models. And above all, my big bug bear. So if Malta's my hero, my nemesis is Frederick Winslow Taylor. Coincidentally, I think has been proven today to have been a complete fraud. Pig iron experiment he did. He just fudged all the numbers. Anyway, the idea is that managers do the thinking, workers do the doing. You have to separate thought and action. You can there is but one right way, and you can in principle know everything you need to know to create complete efficiency. Yes. This worked terribly well for Henry Ford in producing Model T Fords, but they were all Model T's and they were all black. So it's a great one to run an assembly line. Essentially, you're turning people into robots, and most assembly lines now are indeed run by robots, you know, the consequence. There's a few people started pointing out some time ago, like Peter Drucker, as far as long ago as 1955, there are a lot of other things that go on in their business that are not open to that sort of regimented process orientation. And where you actually need human brains, actually rather good human brains, stand on constantly and looking for new ways of doing this. How innovation takes place.
Mike Jones:Yeah.
Stephen Bungay:And um I've I've tried to sort of expunge Taylor, but it's I mean, he he's he still stalks to corridor. He's ghost. His ghost still stalks to corridor. And I think it takes a major disaster for that to change. I mean, in the all the military examples, there has been a disaster which has forced people to recognize that the environment is fast changing and unpredictable, and you have to give up control.
Mike Jones:Yeah.
Stephen Bungay:And people find, especially if they're generals, find that very, very difficult. They'd like to believe that they're in control. In fact, they're not, they can influence events, but they can't control them. Yes. Friction. Now, executives, unfortunately, are still in that sort of position, and there hasn't been a Napoleon to beat a lot of them up, which is maybe what they need.
Mike Jones:Although it's under crisis, um you would have thought with with uh COVID and all those shocks that have happened that you would have started to see it, but it's almost we had this point where um because I think I think the tailorism is so ingrained into people, and I think it it's the decades of business schools that have taught um sort of the efficiency tailorism, and it it's it's such a hard it's gonna take a real paradigm shift to get them to view a different way, and hopefully uncertainty. Yes.
Stephen Bungay:I think that's the problem, and it's this realization that you have to give up control and instead seek influence, and also this fear, fear of risk. Well, you you can imagine, you know, when von Moltke came up with all this in the middle of the 19th century, in pressure of all cloudy forces, um, he he wasn't given exactly a smooth ride over this one. I bet. And just one or two people said, you know, do that. Um and were terrified of losing control. And indeed they they had a point, because if you just have this low-level initiative, you will lose control and you'll get chaos. Um his genius is to maintain that, but maintain the autonomy, high autonomy, but to create a new system for creating alignment. So you have high alignment and high autonomy at the same time. Most people think that's a trade-off. He said, No, it's not. I can have both at the same time. And that is the techniques, the techniques behind mission command, because once you've understood your commander's intent in mission command, that is binding. You can't just wander off nilly-nilly and do what you like. If the situation changes, you're expected to change what you do, your actions, but still act in line with intent.
Mike Jones:Yes.
Stephen Bungay:If there's a need to change the intent, that's a big deal. And occurs quite rarely. But the situation's changing all the time. You adapt to it, sometimes it's problems, sometimes actually it's opportunities. People exploit opportunities. But you've always got to have that intent in mind. And creating that discipline, that alignment up and down, but not just up and down, the organization as well. So that I know that these other guys in different functions or different countries also know what I know. And if something happens, they are all good, we are all going to try to do something similar. That creates enormous cohesion and power. So you have adaptability and cohesion at the same time, and that's priceless.
Mike Jones:Yes. And we're always trying to build that because you want those teams to be self-organizing, adapting, but you don't want them to have conflict. So we that's right about that that coordination that needs to go go across so that they can act that way. But there's a real good point that you made earlier, which I think fractures this, and it's the sense that, and I suppose it highlights your point from tailorism that you know the leaders do the thinking and people do the doing. You separate the two, and you see this as separated in the strategy and execution. People have in modern day, well not modern days, but in organizations separate the two. So you've got this strategy, and I can argue it's actually strategy, and then suddenly they just throw some stuff over the wall and expect people to pick it up and run with it, but they're just completely disconnected, which then doesn't really give people initiative or ability to adapt.
Stephen Bungay:No, that's uh that separation of thinking and doing is deadly. I've uh sentence in the book is that strategy and execution become a distinction without a difference and that your strategy is not being completed until the people right at the bottom have got it and are doing things differently. What tends to happen is that everyone sort of thinks, oh well strategy it's the board, it's exco or something. And they come up with this strategy, usually having been ripped off by McKinsey or PCG or some other buggers. Very true. And then uh the CEO goes around on a sort of roadshow and exhausts himself for three months, giving a slide presentation about the strategy, and everyone goes, I'll go back to work and think, oh, that's interesting. I wonder what he wants me to do. And it's not clear at all. And what is this so so you create a gap. The top, they all know this is the strategy, and the bottom, busy running operations. Well, maybe I wonder what it's got to do with me. And you've got to fill in the layers in between. It's no good the CEO can tell you till he's blue in the face about whatever the hell it is at his level. What people tend to do is make the mistake of demanding that he or some other people go into more detail. Uh there was a strategy's not clear. I don't know. Well, I mean you can go on forever and ever going into detail. Actually, what they mean is not I lack detail, but I do not know how to make a choice if it is forced upon me. I'm unable to make trade-offs because a strategy, one thing a strategy should do is to say, we're going to do this and not that. And so this year we're going for revenue growth, um, not margin. So grow revenue, whatever. Next year we're going to go for margin development, and you can keep growth flat or whatever it is, right? Whatever the trade-off is, it must be clear. This is a service business, not a product business. The important people are our installers, not the general public, because they make the decisions, the purchasing decisions. It's stuff like that. So it can be a very simple thing, but executives are prone to be beset by lists, just like everybody else. Lists.
Mike Jones:Yes.
Stephen Bungay:Objectives and I don't know, the balance scorecards, and don't get me on guard. Yeah. And all this sort of crap. And you can't lists are a useful way of going shopping, but they're not a useful way of getting strategy. You've got to think about what the higher intent is. And think to yourself, okay, I'm in this situation, this unexpected situation. I've got a choice to make. Which way should I go? And if the strategy is clear, it'll give you the answer. And in order to make it clear, it has to come not just from the top, but the next level down has to think about so what are the implications for you know marketing? What are the implications for production? And then the next level, okay, what are the implications for marketing in Asia Pacific and so on? And then I get down to I'm responsible, I'm the country manager for Thailand. Okay, so what you know, I got this big client who's making a lot of fuss, but I've also got this thing about developing new technology. And if I take people off to deal with the client, I can't do the technology. What am I gonna do? Yeah, if the strategy's clear, there's an answer, and if not, there's just confusion and confusion. Paralysis first and then confusion.
Mike Jones:I think that's that's dangerous, isn't it? Paralysis, because you know, as we recognise, and Rommel recognise and vomit, that you know, you could do nothing, but the the world around you, the environment is still going to move. It's gonna move. So it it's yeah, it's regardless of what you do, but the the more then you allow it to move into paralysis, the more then you're you're forced to react to circumstances forced upon you rather than creating opportunities or seizing opportunities. And and I think there still persists with this disconnection between thinking and doing, and in in mission command, the power is in the interpretation, like structured into mission command. That I will give you my intent, I'm gonna allow you to go away, interpret what you mean. Is um I think Klauswitz talked about it in the the friction and the misinformation transfer. Um, and actually, we're gonna make sure that we are aligned, and then that gives you the understanding, and then gives you what you need to be able to adapt to your yeah, your context.
Stephen Bungay:So, what you've just said, it reminds me of a a model I use in the book to transition from Klausowitz, who explains the problem friction, which is has been summarized as you know, shit happens all the time, right? Everything when everything goes wrong, it's gone normal. Right. And I've had a little molecule, three gaps. So Klausowitz's first gap is the knowledge gap. You never know as much as you'd like to know. So you've somehow got to make a judgment call on the basis of what you do know and grasping the essential point, and then you've got a communication issue. You have to pass that on and make sure that the next level down has got it. And the only way to do that is to have a discussion with them, ask them to go away, think about it, and then come back and tell you what they're gonna do as a result. So you brief them, and that is then followed by a back briefing. They brief you back, yeah. Very simple thing. And you have to complete that loop. Communication is a loop, it's not a line coming from the top. And then there we are, you've got it. Okay, off you go. Uh, send me an email when you're done. No, no. And you have to have agreed that is, in fact, what I wanted you to do, and you're going to do it. And so now you can off you go. And when you go off, you have the intention. Will give you a set of boundaries, an area of freedom within which you are free to act. In fact, you are expected to act if the situation changes, but it's also obviously an area of freedom has a has boundaries and you mustn't overstep them. So that's how you get the cohesion and the adaptability at the same time. But this is some people are very scared by that. Yeah. I'm amazed actually in business organizations how people will spend hundreds and hundreds of thousands hiring, you know, really high-powered, brilliant people and then treat them like idiots. Yeah. They can't trust them.
Mike Jones:No, and it's also there's that also the structural point around that they like you said, there's boundaries and constraints, you put it, there's you know clear roles, but when these are unclear, they'll then obviously spend more money on internal communications teams to try and to communicate the intent that should be in the role of the leader to be able to communicate, not some you know, massive internal team that will dumb down things for you and uh produce masses of PowerPoints and memos and then videos or see all this crap.
Stephen Bungay:Um what matters to most people is what their immediate boss sponsor to do. And that's right. If this I hesitate to call it a cascade, but it's it's kind of like a cascade, I prefer to think of it as an act of translation or unpacking the meaning, the implied meaning of commander's intent to the Exco's intent and my functional heads intent to my regional heads intent sector to me. And I get it from the guy above. Yeah. One of the clever things the military have done, I've said you have to think two levels up. So I get everybody saying, okay, so what's my boss want? And sometimes I don't know, sometimes they want, and what's my bosses want and what want, and they usually have absolutely no idea. I think uh if you don't that then suggest to them what they might want, what you think they ought to want, and let them correct you, which helps a little bit more thinking.
Mike Jones:Yeah, I think this comes to your point earlier around that loop, so the back brief in the loop, and then the linear it's not linear, it's a loop, which is completely right. One that that never exists, and two, that's where that high I don't like using the term cascade either, but that comes sort of the the dogma in people and leaders' heads that I well I've told them they should tell the next one and the next one, but really what we're thinking about is the fractal nature of an organization, yeah. But you know, there's there's fractal layers and making sure that the interpretation is happening at the fractal level to ensure that communication and intent is interpreted and understood.
Stephen Bungay:Yes, yes. I've think to myself if we can do it, well, can't businesses do it. I remember um seeing a clip once, I think from an embedded journalist of some squaddy, I think it was a corporal, somewhere in Iraq. I don't know. He was squatting behind a wall, and you could hear the bullets pinging off the wall. He said, Well, what are we gonna do? What are we gonna do? He says, Well, command intent is to secure the village by nightfall. Um pretty damn sure there's a sniper in that house over there, so we're gonna take him out, move around, and then see what we can do. But uh the important thing is to stick to the commander's intent. The commander, of course, didn't know about the sniper, and bitter or anything else. That's his job, that's the corporal's job. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And his squad isn't, so he quickly gets, you know, you guys, Charlie, went around that way, that and that way, covering fire, and you know, all that stuff, and that's it in action. He doesn't sit there thinking.
Mike Jones:No. But this is where you said earlier, and it is completely right about the they've got the freedom of action and they're expected to own that freedom. Yes. But I think there's to your point about treating people like idiots, is that I find too often that people start to impose or leaders start to impose in people's freedoms. Yes. They don't allow them to have that freedom because they've already started to define how, so in your situation, the soldier, even though he can bl blatantly see that there's a sniper there and he needs to deal with that first, someone else that's not in the context, doesn't understand that information, is telling them, No, no, I want you to go, I want you to go straight on. I want you to do this now. Yeah. And I think that's the that's the challenge that you've got to enable people to have that freedom.
Stephen Bungay:This is really all about people. And I come across two problems with people. One is the senior people who can't give up control. And sometimes they really want to, and they don't know that they're not. Uh, example I'd like to use sort of theoretical example, I suppose, is we've got across the river, build a bridge. If they go, why do we need to build a bridge? Maybe if we we made us some boats, maybe if we look a bit further up, the river's actually quite shallow and we can ford across. We don't need any of this crap at all. But but the temptation of the senior guy is that I've thought of a solution. Build a bridge. And so he doesn't say work out how to get across the river, which is what he ought to say. He gives them his solution instead of giving them the problem. And that's quite tricky, actually. That can creep up on you um unbeknownst. So that's the you know, some of these, some of some of these people are real control freaks. You can tell they're a mile off. The the trouble is the people who really want to do it who don't realise they're not doing it. The other problems from the bottom up, because a lot of people in the population at large are terrified of the idea of having responsibility for an outcome they don't fully control. They want to follow due process, and if it all goes wrong, it's not their fault. Now, mostly, I say with the greatest respect, people like that join the civil service, which is where that's exactly what's needed. These are the procedures, you know. So, you know, this is how to fit in your tax form, and this is what was that etc, etc. Um, however, some of them do creep into businesses. Yeah. And they're fine at a certain level. I mean, in some businesses, I don't know, like insurance businesses, you need a lot of people like that. Right? That's fine. But if they rise up the ranks, uh they become a problem. And they won't tell you, but in fact, they're terrified of mission command. And they really want someone to tell them exactly what to do. Yeah. And you brought so that they feel safe. Safe.
Mike Jones:And you brought a really good point with the creeping into solutions. I see it all the time, and I correct clients all the time and say, okay, but right, you've got all this stuff, but what is it you want them to achieve? Don't tell me how. Let's let's let's reword this into what actually is the end state that you want to achieve, not how you're going to get there. And that's a real challenge for people to separate the two and have that open. And I think you're completely right with the procedure. I would say if it if it's predictable and you know that it no matter what happens, that this thing will just repeat itself and is predictable, you know, have the best process in the world and fill your boots. Majority of the time, the things we do aren't predictable, they're not they're not going to be predictable. So why waste the energy trying to recreate a process when you don't need to just give some principles?
Stephen Bungay:Yeah. Is that because you you raised the point of SOP's standard operating procedure? Wolka was also hot on those. They are very valuable as long as they are your slaves. And they're terrible if they become your masters. So I know it's a good idea. Tend to creep to be told by Royal Marines. Corporal former roadblock. And the word roadblock means something. It's got a kick in it, there's a machine gun there, something. Everybody, no, the corporal, the privates know what a roadblock is. So nobody has to supervise them. You don't get an officer involved, and he knows that they know and they'll do it. Um, but what you then do with your roadblocks, or or what happens if um, I don't know, a load of bad guys suddenly turn up on your right flank unexpectedly. There's no SAP for that. Yeah, yeah. And so you need them both. And so you've got to distinguish this sort of low level, this tactical level, from this era of freedom above strategy on on top. But yeah, yeah, people tend not to do that. It's remarkable how much common sense is not common practice.
Mike Jones:No, and you brought up a really good um point earlier on, way earlier, when you talk about that idea of giving them the intent and then going away to understand it. I remember in you know, when I was leading troops or when I was being led as a soldier, we we spent a good bit of time, which doesn't happen in organization, which where we go, this is this is the intent, and we we go through planning. We're not trying to create the perfect plan, we just go through planning. And I remember we would go through there and go, right, um, you know, Private Jones, what happens if we get a casualty here? And now to me, there is an SOP in the sense of there is a way that we deal with casualties at that point, but there is also a layer that is slightly different because we're on a certain different phase, so I have to use my interpretation of common sense around well, I know I need to do these things because they are useful and standard, but also that I need to think, well, we probably should take the casualty to this point because that seems like it's the most safest option, and there's that exactly that point you're talking about. There is that underlying bit that helps me with the cognitive task of it, but then that leaves me space to think about well, what's different here and how do I need to adapt it?
Stephen Bungay:It doesn't happen because he'd be quite rigorous about how they go through that. I I remember talking to um a Real Marines major who was in Iran. He said one night he suddenly got uh a call and he was told to take his company and occupy a village that was about ten kilometers away. And so he said, I I literally sat down on a tank turret with a fag packet and wrote down command intent and thought thought it through for about ten minutes. He had half an hour that he got his guys in and they discussed it for ten minutes because you you can imagine at night, right? So there's engineers using one road, and there's a the guy the how much of this thing where it's got to be and um then they left in third, and he was a that's a third to third third, so it's a third, a third for my guys think, and then action really pulling it through at that micro level. And they did take the village, oh well so he told me without an account.
Mike Jones:Yeah, yeah. That's the that's the thing. I've always said that what I found most difficult transitioning from military into civilian world is that I've always grown up because I joined the army as a you know 17-year-old boy, I I grew up assuming that everything will be chaos. Yeah, and then thus I adapt where I find the basic assumption. Yes, that's the basic assumption, everything's gonna be chaos. No, as von Mockter famously said, no planifies contact with the enemy, and then you come into the civilian world business, and it's not, and I try to distinguish when I say this, I don't I'm not saying it's civilians, it's the people, it's the structure, the structure doctrine that's been brought in that views the world as stable and predictable, and we need to produce these reports and these powerpoints and all this stuff because that's what we should do.
Stephen Bungay:And if the world is stable and predictable, then all you need is compliance. That's generally what you get. And I remember talking to a friend of mine who was in the Royal Navy submarines for 20 years. Um his first assignment was to go to the Falklands and get bombed. Um anyway, he spied that and said, I think that may be why I decided to go on submarines after that in light surfish. Yeah, but then we use a medic, actually. And I asked him once, he said, what's the biggest difference? He was working in a pharmaceutical company, which is where I met him. What's the biggest difference between the civilian and military life? He said, I'm astonished how compliant civilians are.
Mike Jones:Yeah.
Stephen Bungay:He said, if you're, you know, a mile or two below the Antarctic and someone with an extra fly for this seed tells you to do something that you think is a bit stupid, you do enough asked some tough questions. Yeah, yeah. I think the submariners have actually do have this rather maverick culture, actually. Again, you know, there are a lot of cultural things that come down to different units and different parts of the army, the navy and the air force and so on. Uh the Air Force finds it hardest, I think, because it's learning how to fly a fast jet is all about procedures and checks. Yeah, yeah. And if you don't do that, you die fairly soon. Whereas I think in if you take, I don't know, the parrots, they know the first thing that's gonna happen to them is they they're gonna jump out of a plane at night and hit the ground to break a leg and not know where the fuck they are. And yet they've got it or where their mates are. And yet they've got to do something and they've got two hours to do it, you know. And that's always been the case. And they've always talked about airborne initiative right back in the Second World War, when the British Army was very much all the command, only after law. So there have always been these exceptions, and there still are.
Mike Jones:We we well, we we do have the thing where you know lawful command, you know, we don't have to we have to bear anything that's not a lawful command, and in the doctrine of mission command, it says there to um you know, you can you you challenge, and I've done it before in my career, you challenge um or or seek clarity around certain orders that we've we've been given. Yes, and are you sure you want me to do that and not do this? Um, and it's always for the for the betterment of the intent. But I find the a sort of perspective of the military is that I think they see the guards in their red tunics and their their bearskins on the parade, like with position, doing exactly what they're told. And I I think they assume that that's the military rather than what we are actually, is a very adaptable organization.
Stephen Bungay:Yeah, it's a big difference between operations and non-operations, which is actually uh for people I've talked to, it can be quite hard to manage, though. When I'm in barrels, I need permission to roll up my sleeves, and then we go on off, and it's mission command. And um I think an advantage that business has is that there is no distinction. They're always on operations. Not these sort of and and they don't go off have to go off and trade, they're doing it all the time. So they ought to find it easier because there's constant practice. Yeah. I found that they, you know, once once people have got it, it takes a little while for people to get it. They really go off, and and um I uh do is with Py Creative people that sort of R D. Very, very clever people. I mean, scientists, you know, with double PhDs and price and those ones. They still have to work very hard to get this. And and you get these really abstruse conversations about what the intent really is and what it really should be. They lose me after 10 minutes, of course, and then the acronyms creep in. Um, but you know, they come out really refreshed. You know, it and or indeed, it's a good job we talked about that because I was gonna do this, and you thought I was gonna do that. And in six months' time, we'd have been indeed doo-doo. Um, because we thought we were clear the traps is I've I'm absolutely clear, you're absolutely clear, but we're clear about completely different things. Yeah, yeah. Clarity complexity. I mean because we never talked about it. No, and so I use this phrase common shared understanding as as the sort of touchstone of clarity of intent. Right up and down, but and and and across the organisation as well.
Mike Jones:We you see it, we're quite lazy. I I see all the time when I'm working with executives, they'll they'll say something and um they'll go, everyone understand, and everyone's like, Yeah, I understand. But they do understand from their perspective, it doesn't mean that they are they have a sh, like you said, a common shared understanding of what's been yeah, common. And that's the that's the gap. So then we just go, Well, I well, they know. So when they go off and do something that's different to what I expected, then I start to think that they're at fault. Yeah. And I put more controls in place.
Stephen Bungay:Yes, yeah, yeah. So when this when the three gaps open up, they're hideous wide mouths, and people fall into them. The response is normally to tighten up control.
Mike Jones:Yeah.
Stephen Bungay:Seek more information, give more detailed instructions, and uh have review meetings every two weeks instead of every month. And of course, this paralyzes the organ, it makes everything worse and focuses it inward instead of outward achieving the outcomes you you really want. Yeah, I mean it's uh it's a fascinating topic, and uh, I suppose something of a legacy. But the problem in business is that our legacy is Taylor, and then you've got to root the bugger out, really. Yes. And that's I agree. But I I think one of the the great things about Mission Command is that it gives people an alternative. I think Taylor Taylor is has been around for so long because well, what else are you supposed to do?
Mike Jones:Yeah, well, I suppose that comes from our now.
Stephen Bungay:We know that there's no excuse anymore. Now we know what we've got the alternative.
Mike Jones:I think it was it was useful to a point of industrial revolution when it was all about factory lines and efficiency. Yeah, well, but that but that's a particular context, but we're still trying to take that context and apply it in modern businesses. You still see efficiency. It it doesn't take long to hang around when someone's had Deloitte or KPMG or something in there, and you know, their alternative straight away to any problem is to let's let's reduce numbers and it's all about cost. But there's no that that comes that internal look where they we get problems, we come internalized. We don't look outwards, we're not looking at the terrain to see see where the advantage is, where we need to position ourselves, what does that mean? Do we have the capabilities for that? Um and I think that's where we really do need to think about adapting about you know how how do we understand mission command? How do you make it relevant? Uh, and what does that mean to our modern practice?
Stephen Bungay:I had an interesting spirit service um doing this with executives. So I I take them through the strategy briefing, so it's five questions basically. And the first question is what's the context? And then what's the higher intent, what's my intent? What are the tasks I want my people to carry out, and then what are the boundary conditions? And they produced drafts and and I spent that talking through them, and uh months I spent about 40 minutes out of an hour talking to her about the context, what was going on in the business environment she was operating in, and also internally and so on. And then we covered the other bits, which actually flowed out quite easily once that was clear. Anyway, so a little while later, we were all having sort of feedback about how things had gone with their people. And she said, Well, I had a a bit of a learning experience. I said, I was getting a bit frustrated, frankly, in my conversation with Stephen, because he was going on and on and on about the bloody context, which I sort of know, that's my daily life. And what I wanted to do was to get my people busy. Question four. What are the implied tasks? Okay. You do that, you do that, you do that. Yes, bing, drop. And when I talked to my people, I discovered what she called an almost unquenchable thirst for context. They had no idea what was going on in the world around them. Yeah, which is my daily reality. And I realized so they're down there, not that far below her, right? Down there, you you're not. There's just stuff you're doing all the time. Yeah, doing stuff. Again, we're getting taylor creeping back in, you see, surreptitiously, the These guys are forced to not think, as it were. They're forced to do. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They expect them to do stuff. And a a a problem that executives had as they move up more, is that they actually they're paid more and more for thinking. And less and less for doing. And and if they think hard enough, the doing bit that other people need to do becomes kind of obvious. And she said that was a bit of a bit of a revelation for me and has changed the way I lead people now.
Mike Jones:Well, it's just I often challenge uh teams. I see it all the time. You know, I I I get sort of fed up with these um so-called strategy days that people say, or they or we took our team away for strategy J and they're they're changing ripping tires on an F1 car or you know, go and go ape. And you're like, that's fine if you if you want to build familiarity and a an experience that when they go back to the office they can talk about as sort of a bonding thing. But if you want something useful, you need to you need to spend time because that we don't, because we just in business is go and do stuff. We need to sit back and understand the context we're operating in. Understand I you call it context, I call it situation, it's the same semantic, but you must understand the situation you're operating in. So what what are the risks? What what's the internal factors, what the external factors? All these things, because you may understand them or you may think you understand them, but your team definitely won't. Yeah.
Stephen Bungay:So one core concept used by all the military is situational awareness. And I noticed that that is hardly part of business vocabulary. But it is, in fact, just as critical. If you look at the really big corporate disasters of the last 20 years, can back further, some colleagues of mine analyzed this actually. The biggest single cause of disaster is senior people getting the context wrong, thinking one thing's happening when another thing is happening. And and quite often with very good, you know, reasons, you know, Kodak, yeah, this new digital film where there's very low quality, and our customers like high quality of this sort of lot of investment, it's really not worth it. And it wasn't stupid, it was just totally wrong. Ughi got it right, and and that's the big and you know, we know where they are now or not, as the yeah. So really, if you really want to spoil your day and everybody else's day, get the context wrong.
Mike Jones:Yeah. Well, this is the thing where we talk about John Boyd talks about his orientation, and it's it's this point, is that what you view as the context limits what you'll see, and it's not until you sit back and you you challenge those assumptions and you you're really challenging your perception of of the context and what it is, then you can especially if you do it with your team, because um you're seeing from different perspectives, so you're gonna see a little bit more. If you don't, and you just assume, then you're then locked into looking for things only to confirm your belief, and you limit what's possible, you limit what you can see, and if you can't see it, you're gonna miss it.
Stephen Bungay:Um and it's quite interesting, again, uh just a general observation for experience. People write things down in this question one, and I sort of read it, mm-hmm. I wonder what's going on here. And uh what I tend to do is say, okay, so I've I've read what you've written here. Now, let's put this on one side for a second. Tell me what's going on in your business. And they are almost invariably far more eloquent. And I I just sort of follow up, why is that? So there is more competition coming in. So what's drawing the competitors in? Why the why are they getting into this? You've been telling me how difficult it all is. What is it? It doesn't quite make sense. Well, even though and and and you go round and round, and then you end up with something so much richer than what was originally on the page. It's curious how I know stuff sort of stays in people's brains and goes round and round. And it's this discipline of writing a briefing or writing a statement of intent is really helpful because it involves getting it out of here onto a page and then stepping back and looking at it and thinking, mmm, that's not quite right actually, and then having to explain it to your people and having them comment on it. That's terribly fruitful. And it's um it means you don't carry this burden of worry around. Oh, there's this and there's that going on, there's that going to other. Well, let's sort it, let's structure it, let's sort it out.
Mike Jones:I like the the sort of rule and discipline with a good intent, is that you know someone should be able to pick it up and understand what you you want without any further amplifying information, which I think yeah, which I think's great, because I was witness to a strategy just after just when we started back because the first week of January, and they showed me it, and wow, this thing was a monster, absolute monster. It was, I think, a hundred and something pages long, and it was dense. And I was just like, Yeah, no one's gonna understand this, or at least remember anything pertinent to them in this point. Yeah, it was just too much. But we're used to that.
Stephen Bungay:Sounds like it was probably a plan on say you do this, you do that, it all happens, and then that will happen. I would probably call it more wishful thinking, but I'm afraid that's what they usually are.
Mike Jones:Yeah. The it's been fascinating to discover, and and I always say to people if you if you want to sort of understand Mission Command from a business perspective or a way that makes sense to business, I always say go find, go, go get your book. Um that's pretty kind of yeah. No, that was my intention. That was my intention in writing it. Yeah, it's it's definitely there. So when you if if you were to think now about what would you like people to think about from this this podcast, would you like to go away and think about from this podcast?
Stephen Bungay:Or do um doing this is harder than you think. But it's it's not impossible, it just involves uh learning how to give good direction, for example, which you might have thought was a basic thing taught in every business school. I can't think of a business school that does think that, as a matter of fact. All sorts of other laddie dar stuff, but there we are. But keep at it, keep persevering. You'll find it it gets easier, things will click into place bit by bit. I tell people when they're trying to write a good intent, it'll take three goes at least to get a good one. The first one's to brain dump and just just let it come out. Don't try and fiddle around with it. The second one is structuring. This is what really matters. This is not it's on the list, but it's down there. And the third thing is refinement. And uh if you if you try and practice that, you will find that your life gets easier and your people get more productive. If you want to make a start, just give it really simple. And the next time you meet one of your direct reports, don't tell them what you want them to do. Tell them what's going on and what you think their role is, and therefore what you'd like them to achieve, and ask them to go away and think about it and come and tell you. And you'll be amazed at what difference that makes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Even that.
Mike Jones:Really dead simple. I always say there's one thing that I could take and if I could just inject into business, mission command would be that thing, especially business in a volatile, really uncertain environments. This is what this is what they need. And one thing I love about it is it's not it's not a fad. It wasn't invented yesterday. It was it's been tried and tested for centuries.
Stephen Bungay:It's been tested, it's developed in practice, which is a set of practices. And uh well, I can only end by agreeing with you wholeheartedly. That's what people need.
Mike Jones:Yeah, they are.
Stephen Bungay:Thank you very much, Ephraim.
Mike Jones:No, no, it's absolutely a pleasure to have you on. I've really enjoyed this episode, and to just get your perspective and your especially your deep um understanding of the history but also the context to apply, it's been fantastic. And if if listeners liked it, please um subscribe and share to your audience because no doubt there's a lot of people out there that the principles of mission command will be life changing, not to them, but also to their businesses. So, thank you very much, Stephen. Thank you for coming, and I'll thank you. Take care, everyone. Bye.