If you are short on time, please scroll down and read “Time and Manpower.” Please come back and read the rest later. The first section is the longest, the other sections are really short.
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Intro Video
One Thing at a Time
One of the final missions at the Army’s Ranger School is an assault on an enemy compound on an island in the Gulf of Mexico called Santa Rosa. It is known as the final exam for everything that the students have learned in Ranger School. Completing the mission requires excellent planning, impeccable discipline, strong teamwork, and violence of action.
Ever since I was a little boy, I had dreamed about going to Ranger School. When I learned about this final exam on Santa Rosa Island, I felt like I was destined to be the patrol leader (PL) for the mission. When I was bored in college classes I would write mock operations orders for that exact mission and study the terrain on Google Earth. I would daydream about it on long runs and on backpacking trips through the Appellation mountains.
After years of dreaming, I found myself at Ranger School in January 2012 waking up in a patrol base the morning of the Santa Rosa mission. I was tired, sore, hungry, cold, and wet. I was ready to be done with the two months of hell that I had put myself through. We all knew that the Santa Rosa mission was that night and that we were only days away from pinning on our Ranger Tabs.
Despite feeling miserable, the only thing I could think about was being the patrol leader. I wanted it so bad! I prayed and pleaded with God to let me be the one in charge of the mission.
The Ranger Instructors (RIs) approached our patrol base carrying the list of job assignments for the day. They began calling out roster numbers. Each job was given out until only the patrol leader remained. Finally, they yelled “354, Patrol Leader!”
YES!!
I had hit the Ranger School jackpot! I was so shocked I could hardly believe it. Adrenaline immediately started coursing through my veins. I knew there was a lot to do to get ready, but I had never felt more confident about anything in my whole life. I was ready and I was focused.
Before jumping into the planning and preparation for the mission, however, the platoon had a giant albatross hanging around its neck. For the entire time we’d been in the field, our morning patrol base operations had been horrible.
There are a lot of things to do when you wake up in a patrol base. Security has to be established, hygiene has to be done, water and food have to be resupplied, batteries have to be changed over, equipment tie-downs have to be re-done, trash has to be collected, the mission has to be planned, a terrain model has to get built, and the mission has to be disseminated and rehearsed. It’s a busy time!
Every single Patrol Leader and Assistant Patrol Leader team had struggled to get these done effectively. Teams and individuals were assigned to each of these tasks, and “priorities” (we’ll come back to this horrific word shortly) had been established, but the mornings were chaos and we never got things done on time. People were running around trying to do multiple things, and it was always confusing and frustrating. We had left every single patrol base an hour or more behind schedule. I knew that if I was going to lead the greatest patrol in the history of Ranger School, which I had the full intention of doing, the patrol base operations had to get sorted out first.
After I received my briefing on the mission and the plan for the day, I returned to the patrol base to see all of the trash, resupply, and other teams begin to drone towards doing their tasks. I gave the word to my leaders to stop everything immediately. I said, “Everyone and everything stops right now. I want the entire platoon on 100% security and the squad leaders to huddle with me in the middle.” They were all confused, but they did exactly as I had ordered.
Once I had the squad leaders huddled around me I said, “check it out, we are going to do one thing at a time and go through our tasks sequentially. I don’t want a million people running around doing different tasks, one. thing. at. a. time.” One of the squad leaders retorted, “Caroe, there’s no way we’ll get everything done in time. There’s too much.” I looked at him with the confidence of a madman and said, “trust me, it will all get done.” Another squad leader asked, “do you want me to at least assemble the OPORD team so you can get to planning?1” I looked him dead in the eyes with the cockiest smile I could muster and said, "No. I got this." I told the Assistant Patrol Leader the order in which I wanted the tasks accomplished and told him he was not to violate my order of doing one thing at a time.
“check it out, we are going to do one thing at a time and go through our tasks sequentially. I don’t want a million people running around doing different tasks, one. thing. at. a. time.”
I planned the mission and wrote the OPORD in about 30 minutes. I had already written this order dozens of times and studied the terrain for hours for the past four years. All I had to do was fill in the specifics. When I got back from writing the order, the patrol base was totally peaceful. There was a small team going around collecting the trash, but things were calm. I was shocked the find that we were done with over half of the tasks we needed to complete for the morning. Holy sh*t! I knew my one-thing-at-a-time plan was going to work, but I had no idea it would work so well. All we needed to do was build a terrain model, brief the Operations Orders (OPORD), and rehearse the mission. My confidence soared.
I went ahead and built the terrain model myself while the platoon finished up the last of the tasks in the patrol base. We were going to have SO MUCH TIME to brief the order to the platoon and conduct a rehearsal. I knew the mission was going to be wildly successful. My heart was racing with excitement.
I brought my squad leaders to the middle of the patrol base and briefed the OPORD. The Ranger Instructors tried to shake my confidence by asking a bunch of “what-if” questions, but I had a ready answer for everything. I was so confident that I felt euphoric.
Just as the OPORD brief ended, the “enemy” attacked our patrol base! I immediately executed our procedure for counter-attacking an enemy force. I led a squad out of the patrol base, flanked the enemy aggressively, and stopped the attack in minutes.
I felt like I was outside of myself watching myself do these things. Everything I had done felt as natural as breathing. I felt like I was on drugs.
I had completely turned around the platoon in only a few hours. Ever since the previous phase, the “Mountain Phase,” the platoon had struggled with patrol base operations. We had been okay at establishing the patrol base at night, but when the morning came and we had to use the patrol base to prepare for our mission, everything would fall apart. But by introducing that one small change and insisting on one thing at a time, the patrol base went from zero to hero.
If you are interested in more stories from Ranger School, I am making a youtube series you can check out: Austin Caroe’s YoutTube Channel
Why did it work?
Why was doing one thing at a time so effective? Why was it faster? How did it make the platoon so much more combat effective?
I didn’t have the answers to these questions at the time. I hadn’t sat down and worked it all out. It wasn’t like I had masterminded the patrol base process and was just sitting and waiting to be put in charge. I didn’t even know that I was going to order the platoon to do one thing at a time; it just, kind of, came out of my mouth that way. I was acting on instinct, not on intellect.
But looking back, it makes sense why it was so much faster.
Let’s say you have four teams each doing a task. Team 1 is on trash, Team 2 is on food and water, Team 3 is on batteries and other equipment resupply, and Team 4 is planning the mission.
If each team begins its work immediately, it will inevitably cause issues for the other teams. Team 1 has to collect trash from everyone, but teams 2, 3, and 4 are working on their tasks. So, trash collection slows down:
Ranger 1: “Hey man, I need your trash.”
Ranger 2: “Hold on, let me finish handing out the MREs then I’ll grab it.”
Teams 2 and 3 want to distribute supplies, but people from team 1 are trying to collect trash, and team 4 is planning. They get slowed down.
Ranger 3: Yo, I need your old batteries so I can exchange them for new ones.
Ranger 4: I gotta finish planning the mission, ask Ranger 1, he knows where my batteries are.
And all of these conflicts are interconnected.
Ranger 3: Hey, where is Ranger 4’s rucksack? I need his old batteries
Ranger 1: Oh shoot, okay. It’s over here, let me show you.
10 seconds later:
Ranger 2: Where did Ranger 1 go?! I gotta give him my trash.
Ranger 4: Can I grab my MREs from you now?
This is only a small example with a handful of people. Multiply this by 10 x the number of people all doing different things and it’s a wonder that anything got done at all!
When we went to do one thing at a time, it eliminated all of this friction and things got done much faster.
You might say, “well, this is why pRiOrItIzAtIoN is sooooo important. That way people know which tasks are most important and how to prioritize.”
Let’s examine the word “priority,” shall we?
Priority
One of the best field grade officers I ever worked with once said, “you know, when the ancient Greeks invented the word ‘priority’ it didn’t have a plural form.” His point was that the word “priorities” is, essentially, a contradiction. There can only ever be one priority.
I have tried to verify his claim about the Greeks, but, alas, I am not a scholar of ancient languages. But the point stands: having multiple “priorities” is a modern invention. We can prove this point by simply looking at the history of the word using Google NGram Viewer.2
Here is the word “priorities”
And if you have multiple “priorities” you have to rank them. And so, you naturally get the word “prioritization.”
Bingo.
When we go all the way back to 1500, the earliest available time for Google NGram, we see that these two words were, essentially, non-existent. It wasn’t until the 1940s that we started using these two words.
When I was a company commander, I banned these two words from being used. In my company, there would only ever be ONE priority. Everything else was, by definition, not a priority.
Military leaders understand this is the most serious contexts. We have “Priority of fire,” “Priority of sustainment,” etc. We would never say, “PriorTIES of fire” because we understand that only one unit can be THE priority to receive fire support. But when it comes to a garrison environment, we almost always use the plural and talk about prioritization. Now, of course, the priority can shift from one thing to another and back, just like we can shift the priority of fire. But that doesn’t change the fact of having one priority.
This is because with all of the different things that a unit has to do, and there is a lot, it can seem almost impossible to focus. We never seem to have enough time or enough manpower to do everything we have to do.
Do we have enough time? Do we have enough manpower? The answer might surprise you.
Keep reading.
Time and Manpower
In his book The Mythical Man Month, Frederick Brooks, an expert in software design and development, establishes something called “Brooks’s Law,”
“ADDING MANPOWER TO A LATE SOFTWARE PROJECT MAKES IT LATER.”
This is because software development is a complex task that requires enormous amounts of coordination about many interconnected details. It is a task that has to be completed sequentially. If a bunch of new people are added to a development project, those people have to be trained on what has already been done and their new efforts have to be coordinated. The amount of time it takes to integrate new people into a team, coordinate their efforts, and then de-bug all of the new code they write, drastically increases the amount of time required for the project. More people means more friction. Had the software team remained the same, without adding anyone new, the software project would not end up being as late.
But why do people think that adding manpower will make these types of projects go faster? Brooks argues that it has to do with the way that projects are measured — in Man Months.
The “Man Month” is a unit of measurement for the amount of work that one person can complete in one month. For some tasks, this is a useful measurement. If you need to dig a ditch that requires one-hundred man months, it means that 1 person can dig the ditch in 100 months. 50 people can dig the ditch in…
think about it…
…2 months. Good job!
And 100 people can dig the ditch in 1 month.
But this is not the case with many tasks. Brooks humorously points out that it takes a woman 9 months to make a baby, but 9 women cannot make a baby in 1 month. Software development is more like making a baby than digging a ditch. Hence, one cannot simply add programmers to a project to make it go faster. Different programmers have different skills. It is much more important that the project is organized properly with what he calls “Surgical Teams.” We’ll cover this idea more in-depth in a different essay, but the main advantage of using “surgical teams” is the reduction of the amount of friction associated with a software project by reducing the number of people who need to coordinate with each other. In his design, small teams are each led by a lead programmer, “the surgeon,” and the team’s job is to support her. The surgeons are the ones who talk to each other and coordinate the efforts of the teams. This is opposed to having a bunch of programmers all working and coordinating independently. The fewer the number of people who have to coordinate their actions, the less friction there is going to be.
Let’s return to the patrol base in the story at the beginning of this essay. I had a certain amount of manpower at my disposal to complete a certain number of tasks. But as I pointed out, simply surging all of that manpower on all of the tasks simultaneously made things slower. It was much more important that the tasks were done sequentially. By focusing on one task at a time, I removed all of the associated friction that came with doing the tasks all at once. Removing friction was much more important than adding manpower.
In the Army, soldiers and leaders are often frustrated by the amount of work that has to get done. It always feels like there simply isn’t enough time or enough manpower to get things done. Units are constantly tasked with dozens of different things, and when the higher headquarters adds even more tasks, units often respond by saying that they won’t be able to accomplish them because they simply don’t have the people or the time.
But it’s not that units have too little manpower, it’s that they have too much. It’s not that they have too little time, it’s that they have too much.
Thanks to E.L. for recommending The Mythical Man-Month
Energy
It makes intuitive sense that the number of tasks or amount of work that a unit can complete is a function of the time, resources, and manpower available. But, as it turns out, those are not the most relevant factors. The most relevant factor is something called Organizational Energy3. Organizational Energy (OE) is, as the name suggests, the amount of energy the organization has to do things. Unfortunately for some, OE isn’t a quantitative measure like Man Months. You cannot simply say, “We have X units of OE. Task A will take W units, Task B will Y units, and Task C will take Z units. That leaves R units remaining.” This is because OE is extremely sensitive to friction, and the more that the total amount of energy is divided the more energy is lost.
In other words, a group of 10 people working only on Project A will probably have more energy than a group of 100 people who are all working on Projects A, B, C, D, and E. Even though the 100-person group has an average of 20 people per task, they will likely have less total OE than the 10-person group, depending on how the two groups are managed. Again, the patrol base illustrates this. Small groups of 5 people doing all of the work in sequence were much faster than 40 people doing all of the work simultaneously. This is simply because of how I focused the OE of the platoon. Rather than allowing the platoon’s OE to dissipate, I focused it on one thing at a time. Reducing friction meant conserving OE.
Having too much manpower and too much time tricks leaders into thinking that they can accomplish more things in less time, so they look for more and more work. If you have 1000 people, it will feel like you can accomplish more things than if you had 10 people. So, you will take on more and more tasks. But each new task creates more friction and significantly degrades OE.
Failure to understand OE leads us to the fatal error of allowing OE to dissipate. If you have 10 tasks that need to get done and 100 available people, most leaders simply split the 100 people into 10 teams of 10 people and assign a task to each of the teams. Problem solved. Wrong, sparky, all you are doing is dissipating your OE. Your 100-person team will feel lethargic rather than energized; frustrated rather than empowered; overworked rather focused. Getting those 10 tasks done is about putting the right people on each task at the right time. Leaders have to focus OE on what is most important, not simply manage it.
Depending on the sequence, it might make sense to have two people do the 1st task while everyone else does…nothing. Then as soon as the 1st task is done, it might make sense for all one-hundred people to do the 2nd task all at once. Then it might make sense for five people to do the 3rd task and twenty people to do the 4th task.
The important thing to understand is that leaders are not always aware of all the tasks being accomplished or of how tasks are interacting. It may seem to a leader like he can simply divvy up tasks because there are no obvious conflicts between the tasks. But the more tasks there are floating around the organization, the higher the chances are that tasks start conflicting with each other.
A crucial task of a leader, then, is to conserve organizational energy by reducing friction and then focusing on the priority.
But why do leaders have such a hard time with this?
Waste Not
The reason so many leaders are hesitant to focus their organization’s energy on only a few things at a time is that it feels wasteful. Brooks writes about this in The Mythical Man Month.
It is a very humbling experience to make a multimillion-dollar mistake, but it is also very memorable. I vividly recall the night we decided how to organize the actual writing of external specifications for OS/360. The manager of architecture, the manager of control program implementation, and I were threshing out the plan, schedule, and division of responsibilities.
The architecture manager had 10 good men. He asserted that they could write the specifications and do it right. It would take ten months, three more than the schedule allowed.
The control program manager had 150 men. He asserted that they could prepare the specifications, with the architecture team coordinating; it would be well-done and practical, and he could do it on schedule. Furthermore, if the architecture team did it, his 150 men would sit twiddling their thumbs for ten months.
To this the architecture manager responded that if I gave the control program team the responsibility, the result would not in fact be on time, but would also be three months late, and of much lower quality. I did, and it was. He was right on both counts.
Moreover, the lack of conceptual integrity made the system far more costly to build and change, and I would estimate that it added a year to debugging time.
Many factors, of course, entered into that mistaken decision; but the overwhelming one was schedule time and the appeal of putting all those 150 implementers to work.
In the patrol base, I had the entire platoon on the perimeter pulling security rather than inside the patrol base doing tasks. (For non-military folks, “pulling security” means laying prone on the ground and staring at the woods). Usually, in situations like that, only one-third to one-half of the platoon is on security while the rest are doing other work inside the perimeter. By having everyone on the perimeter, it felt like we were wasting manpower that could have been doing other work.
Most leaders cannot stand the amount of discomfort that comes from allowing manpower to lay around seemingly unused, as we saw with Brooks’s example. If you have people available, you want to find work for them to do. But the more work you assign, the more you dissipate organizational energy and the less you will be able to do overall. Plus, having large amounts of manpower available but not utilized allows you to surge that manpower when necessary.
Remember when the patrol base was attacked? The only reason we were able to immediately launch an aggressive counter-attack was that the entire platoon was pulling security on the perimeter. If they had been busy inside the perimeter doing other tasks, shifting to launch a counter-attack would have been much more difficult. Having slack in the system, rather than utilizing everyone all the time on tasks you think are important, is incredibly useful.
Also, as Brooks points out later in the chapter, it’s not that people will sit around and do nothing, even if it feels like that. As I wrote about in Network, human organizations are complex systems. By not assigning a bunch of tasks and focusing on one thing at a time, the network will continue to operate in support of the priority that the leader has established. The network, like the human body, will start small processes of micro repair and look for new ideas and new efficiencies. That manpower isn’t being wasted, quite the opposite. If you have built and cultivated a healthy network, that manpower is going to be put to the best possible use, much better than if you alone had determined how it should be used. This is why I wrote about the importance of being lazy.
but fear and discomfort still hold back so many.
Conquer Your Fears
In combat, fear is deadly when it causes paralysis. So much of what we do in the Army is designed to induce paralysis in our enemies. We want to present the enemy with multiple interconnected dilemmas. We’ll jam your radios so you have to either use your cell phone or just not talk. If you use your cell phone, we’ll detect you and drop artillery on you. If you choose to not talk then you can’t coordinate.
If you are in a static defensive position, we’ll drop artillery on you and suppress you with machine gun fire. If you run, you’ll get mowed down. If you stay put you’re bound to take an incoming artillery round. If you try to fight back, 5’ 7” 165-pound Private Snuffy is going to bury his bayonet deep in your Commie belly. You have no good options, so you freeze.
And if paralysis is what we are trying to cause in the enemy then, obviously, it is something we are trying to avoid ourselves. Avoiding paralysis requires that soldiers overcome their fears. What’s the best way to survive an ambush? The counter-intuitive answer in most cases is to attack into the ambush as aggressively as possible. The best way to avoid getting pinned down is to return fire in the face of the enemy. Doing this is incredibly scary. Fear tells soldiers to curl up in the fetal position and hope the shooting stops. But the best chance a soldier has to survive is to overcome that fear and fight hard.
Just like soldiers have to overcome their fears to survive in combat, so too must leaders overcome fear and discomfort. Much of what I have written in these newsletters requires this.
Let your subordinates do the planning.
Don’t try to control how others see you.
Yes, it is hard to feel like people are sitting around and not doing anything. Get over it. Attack into the ambush!
As Usual, a Warning
Don’t overdo it, silly goose. I am not saying “never do more than one thing at a time regardless of the size of your unit.” I am saying leaders need to set a priority, explain the conditions for achieving that priority, and then explain how the priority will shift. It doesn’t mean units can’t do more than one thing at a time. They can and oftentimes must.
The key here is to FOCUS on the most important task, accomplish it, and then move on to the next one. It’s about trying to get you, dear reader, to understand that the threshold for “task saturation” is much lower than you think. Just because it feels like you can be doing more, it doesn’t mean that it’s best for the organization to do more.
Focus and do less!
The OPORD team was a group of officers that would gather in the center of the patrol base to collectively plan the mission and write the Operations Order. The platoon had established this practice when we first got to the field and I detested it. Patrol Leaders should write their own orders by the time the Florida phase comes around. I knew that as a platoon leader in the regular Army, I would have to plan and write by myself. I saw no reason to get help for this in Ranger School. DARBY PHASE IS AN EXCEPTION.
I got the idea of doing an NGram search from a 2016 LinkedIn post by Giovani Santos while researching the etymology of “priority.” You can find it here: One thing about the word "PRIORITY" nobody has told you ... yet! (linkedin.com)
You can Google this. A bunch of people have written stuff about it.
I use the “the Greek word ‘priority’ wasn’t created to have a plural form” all the time. It’s stuck with me since the first time you explained it to us Baker junior officers. Even though you said you got it from another FG officer, you always get the credit 😂
Love the quote at the beginning: “the thing you do obsessively between age 13 and 18, that’s what you have the best chance of being world class at.” I find that to be incredibly true for myself and I’m curious to investigate other anecdotal reports from friends and colleagues.
Also, I could not detest more intensely the common thinking of “wE mUsT uSe EvErYoNe! Kim, here’s person X & Y, use them on your team”... which is commonly followed up some weeks later by, “hey, these people told me that you didn’t have them doing much -- Why not?” I find myself frequently responding with “sometimes the best way to help is to do nothing at all.” Happy to have this essay to refer back to in the future. Nice one!