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Misinterpretation of Command and Control

Till a year ago, I used to think of command & control as micro-management. Last year I heard Mary Poppendieck give a different perspective about it in her keynote(pdf). That’s when I realized that Command & Control means quite opposite of micro-management.

We all know Command and Control comes from US Army. During wars, the Commanders would direct (command) the troops on ground about the next move (goal/mission). And then the staff (troops) on ground would figure out the best strategy to achieve the mission. This is very different from micro-management.

Once the Commanders gives the commands, there is no way s/he can control the situation on ground. Tactical decisions are made by the staff on the war field and strategic decisions are made by Commanders and others outside the war fields, based on their knowledge about situation on the ground.

(no plan survives contact with the real enemy).

The heart of mission command:
Commanders should issue only the most essential orders. These provide general instructions outlining the principal objective and specific missions. Tactical details are left to subordinates.

“The advantage which a commander thinks he can attain through continued personal intervention is largely illusory.”

http://www.dtic.mil/dticasd/sbir/sbir043/a30a.pdf

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 21st, 2009 at 9:32 pm and is filed under Agile. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

John Stoneham

A great book to get an understanding of how the military uses this sort of command, and how it survives (or doesn't survive) contact with the enemy, is Tom Clancy's non-fiction work Into The Storm: A Study In Command, which is a detailed look at Fred Franks' work in Desert Storm commanding VII Corps and also his time at TRADOC.

Kalpesh

I guess command & control makes a lot more sense when there is a vision laid out by top guys & guys who are in execution are dedicated to that goal (in a larger sense). Smaller details are left to people & it is required to make sure that they meet the desired small goals which will lead to bigger goals.

e.g. block the border on west, do an air strike, topple the basic infrastructure, infiltrate the government with spies.

Those are smaller goals which lead to a larger goal of a country's military.

The style of organization (military) is different than a manufacturing org (such as Toyota). In case of military, a soldier doesn't have a full-circle view of things. In case of Toyota, it is workers who are much closer to the components, design etc when compared to top management.

Joel has written about different style of management, I guess.

Tobias Mayer

This understanding of Command and Control may be true in the army, but in the corporate world the term has become synonymous with a style of management where the manager attempts to both instruct the workers and then attempt to control how they do their work. So terms aside, it is this style of management that Agilists are railing against.

“The advantage which a commander thinks he can attain through continued personal intervention is largely illusory. By engaging in it he assumes a task that really belongs to others, whose effectiveness he thus destroys."

This I completely agree with, and there is certainly much we can learn from the art of war, but any attempt to redeem the term "command and control" from its sad corner in the nether regions of appallingly bad corporate management is ultimately futile.

D. André Dhondt

So are you saying that 'command and control' is a desirable management technique? Would the Toyota Development System, described below, be an example?
When developing the Toyota Prius, the goal was to make a family car that could get 50mpg (the 'command'). The engineering teams auto-organized around this goal, working with different types of engines... and reconvened on a regular basis to share what they'd learned (the 'control'). Ultimately they built a hybrid engine, and successfully deployed a new car in 15 months.
Even if this is what you're saying, I think that 'command and control' is a misleading title. In the same presentation, Poppendieck uses the term 'mission control' to describe this management style as well. I think that is a little better, but still prone to miscommunication.

Agile India.

Misinterpretation of Command and Control