Inspection
A tale of two commanders
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When I was a staff captain, I once had a front row seat to two very big inspections. During these inspections, a very high-ranking officer brought in dozens of subject matter experts to inspect whether or not a unit was adhering to Army standards in a variety of different areas (maintenance programs, security programs, logistics systems, etc.) These inspections were designed to help the unit see itself and make improvements, and to inform the Army as to whether or not units were adhering to standards. From my perspective, these were not career-making or career-breaking events; they were designed to help commanders, not poke them in the eye.
The most interesting thing about these inspections was the approach taken by the different commanders.
One commander clearly did very little preparation for the inspection. He even said as much during his remarks in the After-Action Review. He said that he wanted to give the inspectors an honest look at the formation and so did not focus the organization on trying to “pass” the inspection — and it showed. The AAR slides looked like someone had been murdered on the slide deck because they were dripping with red. As the inspectors took turns telling the commander of the unit all the things that were wrong, the commander displayed no defensiveness, and all his questions were aimed at trying to understand what the unit needed to do.
The second commander took the completely opposite approach. It was clear that he had directed his unit to put enormous focus on preparing for and passing this inspection. They had conducted pre-inspections and had filled out memos explaining certain deficiencies on this or that inspection item. And in his remarks, he talked about how seriously he had taken the inspection and how much organizational focus he had placed on it. And it was clear that they did. I talked with several of the soldiers and leaders in the unit and all of them confirmed that they had worked quite a lot to prepare for the inspection. But how did it turn out?
The second unit ended up doing only marginally better than the first unit. Their slides weren’t markedly better, and they were only slightly better in a few areas. And while each inspector discussed the deficiencies they had found, the commander pushed back like a defense attorney objecting to a witness’s testimony in a court room. He was borderline defensive, though he kept his composure and was completely professional. It was evident the commander was upset that the inspection had not gone as he had hoped.
I am not going to say that one approach was better than the other, I just want to point out that when it comes to the results of the inspection, the unit that spent a lot of effort preparing preformed only marginally better than the unit that spent no time preparing. How many man hours and units of organizational energy did the second unit have to expend per increased percentage points of performance over the first unit? Based on my observations, quite a lot.
Of course, you may know the technical term for this phenomenon in the field of microeconomics — the law of diminishing returns.
A lot of themes come together in this tale of two commanders.
From Failceeding:
Just because something is going to be inspected, does not mean that it should become a commander’s first priority. Allowing your unit to fail an inspection might be the most honest thing you can do as a commander. This is something that most commanders don’t get.
Commanders who are lazy have a deep intuition about the law of diminishing returns. If a lazy commander is going to be bothered to lift a finger, she wants to have a really good reason. She won’t use organizational energy on something unless she is pretty dang sure that it is going to be worth it.
And if she is going to spend organizational energy, she is going to make sure that it is direct and focused.
A good commander cares about results and taking care of people and understands the complex relationship between those things. She won’t sacrifice people just to pass an inspection because she isn’t worried about how people perceive her because she doesn’t suffer from Simulacrum Disease.
I hope free subscribers found this post engaging and thought provoking! If so, please check out the essays that are linked above and feel free to share this post with others.
Paid subscribers get a little extra in the next section where I talk about another area of my professional life where I aggressively applied the logic of the law of diminishing returns.
How much of this for that?
I am happy to admit that I did almost zero of the required reading as a student at the Command and General Staff Officer Course (CGSOC). I had my own professional reading and writing which I thought much more fruitful. This included reading a giant biography of Napoleon, a dense history of the French Revolution, multiple books on WWII, books on complexity theory, decision making theory, economics, innovation, race relations, and other things. I also started teaching myself French (which is still very much a work in progress), began writing this newsletter, and worked on improving my chess skills. Not to mention I got to spend quality time with my wife and children. This left very little time for reading and digesting the supposedly important work on strategy1 and the minutiae of force management. And I was quite happy with this arrangement. CGSOC was a very nice year for me and my family.
The funny part is that this had very little impact on my grades. I finished with a 3.95 out of 4.3 GPA, and just missed the commandant’s list by a few points. It wasn’t a standout performance whatsoever, on the contrary, it was quite average. But I also did nothing more than show up to class and, for the most part, pay attention. My heart broke for the students who tortured themselves night after night reading every single thing that was assigned and taking detailed notes. This made absolutely no sense to me.
Why would I spend 90 minutes reading and understanding an article that we will discuss in class for 10-15 minutes and which will likely not be on an exam? And if it is on the exam, the instructor will give the key points in the lecture. Sometimes I would open a required reading document during class and scan it quickly enough to find a topic sentence or two about which I could make a passing comment or be able to intuit the answer to a question posed to the class.
When I would reveal to a classmate that I spent zero time outside of class studying the reading they were shocked. Not only was it not obvious that I wasn’t doing the reading, they were incensed as if I were shirking some profound professional duty. “Why don’t you just do the reading!?” they would ask. To answer them, I would go up to a white board and write “80%.” I would say, “If I can get an 80% without doing any work, how much time do I have to invest outside of class for each additional percentage point?” If we figure that it takes at least two hours of work per day to do all the reading, and that doing all the reading could guarantee you a 95% (you still have to remember all you have read and you must still write well), that means that 10 hours per week (and this is a very conservative estimate) can get you 15 percentage points over the year. If use only 32 weeks in the academic year (September-May and subtracting December) that 320 hours over the year to get 15 percentage points — or 21 hours per percentage point over the academic year! This math gets even more insane the higher you can get your grade without studying!
My year at CGSOC was very fruitful for me both professionally and personally. But that was because I was there to learn the things I wanted to learn and focus on what I wanted to focus on. Those who know me know how much I love the Army and how badly I want to be a good leader. Based on my interactions with other officers up to that point in my career, I saw zero correlation between academic performance and ability to command units or serve on a staff. If anything, there was a slight inverse relationship — I saw many field grade officers who had performed well academically but were lousy officers. This especially includes officers who graduated from the esteemed remedial intermediate level education course. I kid! I kid! …but only slightly.
In closing, you really have to ask yourself if the juice is worth the squeeze on every decision you make, especially at scale. Doing things for the sake of doing them, or just to protect your reputation, is a horrendous thing to do to your organization. Yes, sometimes you will have to make your organization do things that aren’t optimal because you have to follow orders, but leaders should always be doing what they can to avoid doing things that aren’t absolutely necessary.
Have a great week!
Having just lost the war in Afghanistan I thought it quite humorous that this school felt qualified to teach “strategy.”