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Von Scharnhorst and Auftragstaktik

April 5, 2024
Article, Collaboration, Culture change, Management, Product development, Quintessence, Software development
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Von Scharnhorst and Auftragstaktik

Lessons for Collaborative Knowledge Work

Gerhard von Scharnhorst

Origins and History

In the aftermath of Prussia’s crushing defeat by Napoleonic forces in 1806, the military theorist Gerhard von Scharnhorst sought to reform the once-formidable Prussian army. One of his key innovations was the concept of “auftragstaktik” or “mission-type-tactics.”

Rather than dictating precise orders from a central command, auftragstaktik pushed decision-making down to lower levels. Commanders at all levels were given a general objective, the resources needed to accomplish it, and the freedom to determine how best to achieve the mission based on their own initiative and circumstances on the ground.

The philosophy empowered front-line soldiers and unlocked the full creative and adaptive potential of the force. After adopting auftragstaktik, the Prussians achieved remarkable success against Napoleon’s armies at the Battles of Leipzig and Waterloo in 1813-1815. Auftragstaktik also played a major role in the stunning Prussian victory over France in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871.

Applicability to Collaborative Knowledge Work (CKW)

While developed for military operations, the core principles of auftragstaktik hold powerful lessons for collaborative knowledge work (CKW) in the modern economy – whether in software, product development, research, or other complex team-based environments.

Like 19th century combat, these domains are rife with volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. Central planning and rigid hierarchies falter in the face of rapidly changing circumstances and information asymmetries between layers of management.

Auftragstaktik propounds:

  • Clear overarching strategic objectives (the “mission”)
  • Dispersed decision rights to those closest to the information
  • An emphasis on individual initiative within defined constraints
  • Bi-directional communication and coordination between layers

Modern Implementations

Many of today’s most innovative companies have embraced versions of auftragstaktik – if not in name, then in substance:

Spotify: The music streaming giant pioneered an organisational model of small, autonomous “squads” each with a clear mission aligned to company strategy. Squads have end-to-end responsibility for their areas and coordinate through linking elements like “tribes,” “chapters,” and other forums.

U.S.M.C. and SpecOps: Modern special operations embrace a philosophy of “centralised command, decentralised control” a.k.a. “Mission-type tactics”.  While top leaders set the operational vision, small teams on the ground have maximum leeway and support to accomplish their missions as they see fit based on circumstances.

Maximising Human Potential

At its core, auftragstaktik is about maximizing the full human potential of an organisation. By clearly broadcasting strategic intent while devolving execution to those closest to the information, it unlocks the advantages of both alignment and autonomy.

In our era of accelerating innovation and disruption, optimising for flexibility and adaptability is of paramount importance. The principles of von Scharnhorst’s 19th century military revolution may well be the philosophical lodestar for 21st century organisational success.

Further Reading

Marshall, R.W. (2013). Product Aikido [PDF] – Auftragstaktik For Software Development. Falling Blossoms. /wp-content/uploads/2013/04/productaikido041016.pdf

Random Walks Toward A Formula For Business Success

April 5, 2024
Article, Business, Capability development, Culture change, Deming
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Random Walks Toward A Formula For Business Success

The Elusive Formula

Contrary to popular belief, there IS in fact a universal recipe for organisational success – a one-size-fits-all formula that can unlock sustainable growth, profitability, and a thriving company culture. This recipe doesn’t come from the latest management fad or self-help book, but from the timeless wisdom of respected thought leaders like W. Edwards Deming, Eliyahu Goldratt, Gerhard von Scharnhorst, and Russell Ackoff.

The Proven Philosophies

For all the money companies pour into consultants, training programmes, offsites, and radical restructurings, the path to genuine enlightenment has been staring them in the face all along. Deming’s System of Profound Knowledge lays out a comprehensive framework for optimising business operations, fostering a nurturing environment, and driving continuous improvement. Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints provides a laser-focused approach to identifying and eliminating bottlenecks choking organisational performance. And Ackoff’s writings on systems thinking challenge conventional wisdom with powerful new paradigms for managing complexity.

The Meandering Quest

Instead of embracing and building upon these proven and time-tested ideas, companies continue to chase after the latest silver bullets and quick fixes peddled by consultants and pseudo-gurus. They cling stubbornly to antiquated command-and-control management models wholly unsuited to today’s volatile business environment. They pin their hopes on radical restructurings and top-down revolutions that merely treat symptoms rather than root causes.

In their frantic pursuit of enlightenment, organisations are engaging in a meandering quest – wandering aimlessly down one overhyped path after another while the real recipe for success remains gathering dust on the bookshelf. It’s the corporate equivalent of floundering through an endless maze, always feeling like the treasure is just around the next corner.

The Missed Opportunity

These philosophies contain profound truths about how to build resilient, adaptive organisations primed for success. And yet, the ultimate irony is that despite their brilliance, the teachings of Deming, Goldratt, von Scharnhorst, and Ackoff remain tragically underappreciated and underutilised in the business world.

The Hard Work of Wisdom

Make no mistake: Embracing such time-honoured ideas is hard work and requires diligence and much courage. That’s probably why we see it happen so infrequently. It’s far easier to be seduced by the newest fad or quick-fix solution that doesn’t require fundamentally challenging one’s mental models or way of operating. Genuinely internalising the teachings of Deming, Goldratt, von Scharnhorst, Ackoff and others demands humility, an insatiable curiosity, and a willingness to continually question shared assumptions and beliefs.

The Path Forward

The truth is, there is no complex maze to navigate. The path to organisational enlightenment is right there for those willing to open their eyes and embrace the teachings that have stood the test of time. Deming showed us how to nurture a thriving system centred on e.g. continuous learning and a deep theory of knowledge. Goldratt revealed the power of focused improvement efforts harnessing the latent potential within our companies. And Ackoff taught us to step back and see the bigger picture – to transcend reductionist thinking and operate with a holistic perspective.

The Roadmap to Success

Genuine organisational success doesn’t require the drunkard’s random walk of eternal struggle and second-guessing. It stems from having the courage to stop meandering up and down dead-end paths and instead follow the roadmap to enlightenment found within these profound bodies of work. Study them, internalise their lessons, and apply them diligently within the unique context of your organisation.

Rediscovering Wisdom

There is indeed a one-size-fits-all recipe for corporate greatness and human potential realised. We’ve had it all along. We just have to take a step back from the noise and rediscover the wisdom of the masters surrounding us. The path to enlightenment was never lost – we simply stopped paying attention.

Upton Sinclair’s Dictum

April 5, 2024
Article, Business, Collaboration, Culture change, Ethics, Honesty, Memeology, Organisational effectiveness, Product development, Quintessence, Software development, Teambuilding, Value
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Upton Sinclair’s Dictum

The Maxim and Its Intellectual Pedigree

For those unfamiliar with the novelist and polemicist Upton Sinclair, he is perhaps best known for his 1906 novel “The Jungle” which exposed horrific conditions in the meat-packing industry and inspired reforms like the creation of the FDA. But one of Sinclair’s most oft-quoted maxims has lived on as sage advice in fields well beyond its original context of Yellow Journalism and muckraking:

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

This pithy statement, now known as Upton Sinclair’s Dictum, echoes the perspective of the English mathematician and philosopher William Kingdon Clifford, who famously declared

“It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.”

thereby making belief an issue of morality, or ethics.

Both Upton Sinclair and William Clifford saw intellectual honesty and a commitment to following evidence over expedience as paramount moral and ethical imperatives.

The Perils of Motivated Reasoning

Sinclair’s dictum cuts to the heart of the conflict of interest that can arise when people are incentivised to ignore uncomfortable truths or turn a blind eye to unethical practices. Over a century later, it remains as relevant as ever – particularly for business leaders and managers charged with enabling collaborative knowledge work.

The Crucible of Knowledge Work

In fields like software development, product design, team coaching, and other collaborative brain (grey muscle) work, the challenges teams face are often wicked problems – complex issues with no clear right answer, where even reasonable people can disagree with each other. Successfully navigating these choppy waters requires the fearless questioning of assumptions and beliefs, a relentless commitment to empiricism over ego, and a culture where all ideas can be rigorously stress-tested rather than self-censored.

Incentives Gone Awry

And yet, how often do we see teams afflicted by an insidious form of willful blindness, where dissenting perspectives are downplayed or dismissed outright in service of binding to already-held beliefs? Perhaps it’s driven by managers’ career incentives being too tightly coupled to delivering on a specific roadmap or revenue target. Maybe it stems from product leaders’ identities being too inextricably bound up with their “billion dollar baby” and thus being emotionally invested in rationalising sunk costs. Or it could simply be the natural tendency toward the comfortable inertia of groupthink.

Embracing Intellectual Honesty

Whatever the root causes, the antidote is the same – cultivating a culture of intellectual honesty, where all the Folks That Matter™ have both the autonomy and the enthusiasm to vocalise doubts and scrutinise lchains of reasoning, assumptions and beliefs. Where no stone goes unturned in interrogating the fundamental assumptions underlying key decisions. Where Value at Risk* queries are not only tolerated but actively encouraged as a check against blind spots and biases.

Fostering this boundary-less ethos of truth-seeking is a significant challenge facing modern knowledge-work leaders. But by striving to live up to the spirit of Sinclair’s admonition, we give ourselves the best chance of circumventing the self-deceptions and rationalisations that can otherwise send initiatives careening toward ruinous failures.

Heeding History’s Warnings

Time and again, history’s cautionary tales have proved the adage that “in a battle of conviction against conventional wisdom, conventional wisdom has largely prevailed.” That’s why embracing Sinclair’s Dictum is so vital. For only by creating an environment where people can transcend their vested interests and follow the truth wherever it leads can we hope to part the veils of entrenched assumptions and beliefs.

 

*”Value at risk queries” refers to the practice of actively questioning and scrutinising decisions, plans, or initiatives to assess the potential downsides, risks, and costs if things go wrong.

The term is taken from the financial concept of “value at risk” (VaR), which is a risk measurement and management method used to estimate the potential losses an investment or portfolio could face over a given time period.

Here, “value at risk queries” means rigorously examining the value potentially put at risk by a course of action – whether that value is financial, reputational, opportunity costs, or other key metrics important to the organisation.

Some examples of value at risk queries include:

  • What is the worst-case scenario if this product fails to gain market traction?
  • Have we fully stress-tested the assumptions around customer adoption rates?
  • To what regulatory or compliance risks are we potentially exposing ourselves?
  • How much technical debt and future constraints are we incurring with this architecture?
  • Are we missing any significant blind spots in our competitive analysis?

Instead of shutting down or dismissing these tough “what if?” questions, organisations might choose to actively encourage and support value at risk queries. This helps surface potential blind spots and provides a check against overly optimistic planning or narrow frames of reference.

In essence, value at risk queries apply rigorous risk management thinking as an antidote to groupthink and comfortable consensus-building. They stress-test initiatives before making irreversible commitments.

Silos

April 3, 2024
Article, Business, Collaboration, Community, Culture change, Deming, Organisational effectiveness, Psychology, Quintessence, Systems thinking
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Silos

For anyone who has worked in organisations, whether large or small, the phenomenon of workplace “silos” is all too familiar. Silos refer to the tendency for different departments or teams to operate in isolation, with little communication or collaboration between them.

While most folks working in the tech industries are familiar with the pitfalls of organisational silos such as separate marketing, sales, and operations teams, few recognise the similarly damaging effects of silos between disciplines.

For example, often, software engineers operate in isolated codebases, data scientists in segregated modeling pipelines, and designers in siloed UI frameworks. This compartmentalisation breeds many of the same pathologies as organisational silos:

  • Lack of big-picture perspective
  • Shortfalls in creative insights into how the work works, and could work better
  • Duplicated efforts
  • Limited knowledge sharing and innovation
  • Rigid mental models resistant to change

Yet modern tech products and services require integrating numerous disciplines – systems thinking, the theory of knowledge, understanding of variation, and psychology, as well as the more usual specialsms: programming, data, design, DevOps, product management, and more. When disciplines remain cloistered, the resulting solutions are sub-optimal.

The Power of Multi-Disciplinary Collaboration

In contrast, forging multi-disciplinary collaboration unlocks a powerful union of diverse skills, perspectives and domain knowledge. As Deming highlighted in his System of Profound Knowledge, viewing problems through a wide aperture leads to deeper insights.

Some key benefits of this cross-pollination include:

  • End-to-end alignment on objectives across the value chain
  • Dynamic combination of complementary expertise areas
  • Faster issue resolution by aligning priorities holistically
  • Continuous learning and growth for all
  • Fostering an innovative, psychologically safe culture

Rather than optimising isolated components, multi-disciplinary collaboration enables the co-creation of cohesive products and experiences that delight all the Folks That Matter™.

Cultivating Multi-Disciplinarity

Of course, nurturing this multi-disciplinary ideal requires organisational support and the rethinking of ingrained assumptions and beliefs about work. Incentive structures, processes, and even physical workspaces will need redesigning.

But the potential rewards are immense for forward-looking companies – accelerated innovation cycles, more productive ways of working, and formulating solutions beyond what any individual narrow-discipline specialist could achieve alone.

In our age of relentless disruption, the greatest existential risk is insular thinking – holding too tightly to narrow disciplines as the world shifts underfoot. Multi-discipline dynamism, powered by collective knowledge and continuous learning, is the currency of sustained advantage.

For those willing to transcend boundaries and embrace profound cross-discipline pollination, the possibilities are boundless. Those clinging to compartmentalised organisational and disciplinary silos, however, face morbid irrelevance.

Deming’s SoPK

For decades, W. Edwards Deming advocated his “System of Profound Knowledge” (SoPK) as the key to transforming businesses into continuously improving, customer-focused, multi-disciplinary organisations. At its core are four interdependent principles that combine heretofore disparate disciplines:

  1. Appreciation for a System: Understanding that an organisation must be viewed as an interconnected system, not just isolated silos. Each part impacts and is impacted by others.
  2. Theory of Knowledge: Recognising that learning and innovation arise from the synthesis of diverse theories, concepts and perspectives across domains.
  3. Knowledge about Variation: Grasping that complex systems involve inherent variation that must be managed holistically, not through narrow inspection alone.
  4. Psychology: Harnessing intrinsic human motivations and driving participation, rather than extrinsic forces like punitive accountability.

In most organisations, none of these profound knowledge principles are well known, let alone deeply embraced, appreciated and systematically applied. They represent a radical departure from traditional siloed thinking.

When applied holistically, Deming’s SoPK philosophy exposes the many drawbacks of organisational disciplinary silos, including:

  • Lack of big-picture, end-to-end perspective
  • Redundancies and inefficiencies from duplicated efforts
  • Suboptimal solutions from narrow specialisations
  • Fragmented vision and strategy misalignment
  • Resistance to learning and change across boundaries

Deming’s philosophy highlights the advantages of multi-disciplinary collaboration to optimise systems holistically. Narrow specialisation alone is dysfunctional.

By shining a light on these drawbacks upfront, the importance of breaking down counterproductive disciplinary silos becomes even more stark. The vital need for collaboration, systems-thinking, applied psychology and profound cross-domain knowledge is clear across all disciplines and value chains.

By highlighting these drawbacks upfront, the importance of breaking down counterproductive silos becomes even more stark. The need for collaboration, systems-thinking, applied psychology and profound knowledge cuts across all disciplines.

The System View: Beyond Isolated Parts

Deming’s first principle stresses that an organisation may be viewed as an interconnected system, not just as separate silos or departments working in isolation. Each group’s efforts affect and are affected by other parts of the system.

Silos represent a fragmented, piecemeal view that is anathema to systems thinking. By reinforcing barriers between marketing, sales, engineering, operations and more, silos prevent the shared understanding required for optimising systems as a whole.

Knowledge Through Diverse Perspectives

According to Deming’s Theory of Knowledge, continuous learning and improvement stems from the interplay of diverse theories, concepts and perspectives. Innovation arises through making connections across different mental models and multiple disciplines.

When teams comprise members from various disciplines, their unique backgrounds and experiences foster richer exchanges of knowledge. Silos, in contrast, restrict the cross-pollination of ideas.

Understanding Variation

Deming’s view of variation exposes the fallacy of trying to eliminate every defect or failure through e.g. mass inspection. Complex systems involve inherent variation that must be managed holistically, not narrowly inspected away.

Multi-discipline teams can better grasp the dynamic variations impacting their shared objectives, drawing on complementary viewpoints to guide iterative learning.

Harnessing Psychology for e.g. Motivation

Finally, Deming emphasised the power of harnessing people’s intrinsic motivations, rather than relying on punitive accountability within silos (or communities of practice). When experts from various domains unite on meaningful projects, it cultivates broader purpose and drives discretionary effort.

By removing restrictive boundaries, multi-disciplinary collaboration enables self-actualisation while encouraging collective ownership of outcomes.

Cultivating a Learning Organisation

For many organisations obstructed by siloed thinking, embracing Deming’s Profound Knowledge is no simple task. It requires reimagining structures, processes and even physical spaces to nurture multi-disciplinary engagement.

Yet the potential rewards are immense – from accelerated cycles of innovation and organisational agility, to a workforce invigorated by joy, pride, and deeper fulfilment in their day-to-day. Deming’s wisdom reveals the collaborative imperative for thriving amidst volatility.

The greater risk lies not in disruption itself, but in calcifying into rigid, inward-looking organisational and disciplinary silos incapable of evolving. Organisations have a choice: cling to the illusion of control through silos and narrow specialisms, or embrace the profound knowledge gained by breaking boundaries.