Network
Easy steps to enabling your organization to solve problems.
If you are short on time just quickly read “Corny Overtime” then skip to “How to Act Like It”. Please come back and read the rest later.
Corny Overtime
One of the corniest videos I watched in a business school class was also one of the most important.
In the video, a new manager begins work at a small factory. The supervisor is sitting in his office going over paperwork when one of the workers comes in and says (paraphrasing), “Hey boss, I can’t make this piece without retooling the machine. It’s going to take me two hours of overtime and I can’t do that.” The boss says, “okay, we’re allowed to change the parameters slightly, go ahead and change them a little so you don’t have to retool the machine.”
A minute later another worker comes in and says, “did you tell Jimmy to change the parameters on his piece?” The boss, looking confused, says “yep, is there a problem?” The worker explains that if Jimmy changes the parameters on one of the parts then he also has to change the parameters on his part. The boss checks the project specifications and says, “Oh, look! You can change the parameters on your part slightly as well. That will make the two parts work together and we’ll be good to go.” The second worker leaves, seemingly satisfied with this answer.
Another minute goes by and a third worker enters the manager's office. He is clearly quite angry and says, “if those two guys change the parameters on those parts it’s going to mess up the whole project! We’ll have to close the factory down for days to reset everything!” The manager looks stunned, and he knows he’s messed up.
The video then cuts to an instructor talking to an audience in a conference room about the difficulties that arise when everyone is always bringing their individual problems to the leader.
We then return to the factory and see how events could have unfolded. Rather than sitting in his office, the manager is walking around the factory floor. He encounters the first worker, “Jimmy,” and asks him how everything is going. Jimmy explains the problem with the part, just as he did in the first scene. This time, however, the manager calls over the other two workers and facilitates collaboration between them. They come to a solution that doesn’t involve overtime or shutting down the factory.
After the video, the professor talked briefly about the importance of empowering our teams to solve problems which, of course, I agreed with. However, in conversations with my classmates afterward, I discovered that they thought the video was only moderately insightful; the horrendous acting had apparently caused many of them to miss the point. But, to me, the message of the video was validation of one of the core components of my leadership philosophy. And the implications that can be drawn from that short five-minute video are exceptionally vast.
As good as the video is, it fails to capture the significance of its own message. Because of this, it proposes a suboptimal final solution—good enough to help a brand new manager avoid a common mistake, but not good enough for those looking to achieve mastery, a point to which we shall return. It correctly demonstrates that projects which occur inside organizations often have large degrees of interdependence; changes to one part of the project affect many other parts of the project and vice-versa. A high level of interdependence is one of the hallmarks of a complex system.1
Human systems are complex
Human systems are complex, almost by definition—humans are complex beings and so are their interactions. The larger an organization gets, and the more interdependencies that exist between people and projects, the more complex the situation becomes. And this complexity scales in a non-linear fashion. A company of 100 soldiers is 10x larger than a squad of 10 soldiers, but it might be 50x more complex than the squad.
Many people, especially in the West, struggle to understand complexity. We are not good at seeing how multiple variables can affect an outcome, preferring to see clean lines of cause-and-effect, even when no such clean lines exist. Take our fictional general from Laziness Part 1 (The whiplash effect). He draws a nice clean line between safety stand-down days and a reduction in vehicle accidents, and this leads him astray. His inability to see his organization and the events that shape it as complex prevents him from using good judgment and making good decisions.
This inability to clearly see and understand complex systems is a handicap we all share2, and those who understand this point have an incredible advantage over those that don’t. Unfortunately, many leaders, both in the military and in business believe that they can neatly organize, sort, and control complex systems. Leaders take the reins of an organization thinking that they can force it into compliance through brilliance, or charisma, or both. But many leaders are thwarted and frustrated when things don’t go their way. They try to make an improvement or fix a problem, but somehow it ends up making things worse. Their people do unexpected things like quit or fail to deliver on time. Followers complain about how things are going. Projects constantly hit snags and things are always backed up. The leader feels like she is on a never-ending treadmill of daily drudgery and they feel like they will never get ahead. This feeling of helplessness is one of the worst emotions one can imagine.
A leader in this situation thinks, “how can this happen?! Look at the line-wire diagram…I am at the top!”
In fact, our entire language when we talk about military and corporate structures is based on hierarchy. We say “up and down the chain of command,” “shit rolls downhill,” “Lowest private,” “these orders are from our higher headquarters,” “top-down guidance, bottom-up refinement.” Have you ever seen a task-organization chart where the leader is at the bottom? There is an old joke that if the Sergeant Major of the Army has a bad Monday, the lowest private in the Army has a bad Tuesday. Hierarchy defines military structures, both in our doctrine and in our minds. But maybe it shouldn’t. Instead of thinking of a leader as someone at the top of an organizational hierarchy, and somewhere in the middle of a larger hierarchy, we should think of leaders as nodes in a network.
This idea of thinking of an organization as a network is hardly unique to me. So many have proposed or demonstrated this point that it’s almost banal. But if it’s banal, why all the hierarchy-speak? The problem isn’t with understanding this point about organizations as networks, it’s about believing it, and belief is best exemplified through action. If you act like your organization will behave like a machine, responding instantaneously to your every whim because you reside at the control panel, then you don’t believe it’s a complex network.
As an aside, as McChrstyal points out in his book Team of Teams, this linear top-down way of organizing can be good for optimizing certain tasks. If you are making steel, like Frederick Taylor, you can treat your organization as a machine and it will, basically, do what you want. But this typically leads to fragility and stagnation. When things go wrong they tend to go really wrong, and when a competitor starts taking market share it’s incredibly difficult to innovate to catch up. On the battlefield, a unit that is based on rigid hierarchy is doomed to be destroyed by one that behaves like a network.
This point isn’t lost on military doctrine writers. This is, in part, why the Army has adopted the philosophy of Mission Command.
How to act like it
So, your organization is complex and you need to act like it. Easy, right?
…Probably not.
Psychologically speaking, people in positions of leadership tend to act like they are in positions of leadership. As a cadet at an all-male military school, the crude term we used to describe the change in someone’s behavior when they were put in a position of leadership was that that person had a “rank-boner,” which is a slightly less refined way of saying that “power tends to corrupt.” When we are put in charge, especially if we are inexperienced, something changes within us. We stand up straighter, we project our voice louder, or we feel the pull in that direction and overcompensate the other way — we appear as least threatening as possible, lest people think we are overbearing. Our psychology puts our focus squarely on ourselves, and we lose sight of the organization we are supposed to be leading.
When leaders are consumed by thinking about themselves and how their actions will be perceived, they will cloud their own judgment, leading to poor decisions. The consequence of these poor decisions will be an increasingly poor performance from the organization, which increases the strain on the leader, leading to worse judgment, etc. Once this death spiral begins, it can be almost impossible to escape.
A leader’s most important tool is wisdom and judgment because ultimately a leader’s job is to complete the mission and improve the organization.3 To do this, a leader has to, among other things, make decisions to achieve the goals of the organization. To build your judgment as a leader, you must declutter your mind to the greatest extent possible. You have to remove as much strain from yourself as you can and distribute it to the rest of the organization. If you are constantly caught up in the day-to-day grind, you won’t be able to detach and see the big picture, which leads to shortsighted decision-making and an increased risk of organizational failure.
Let’s return to the example from the video to illustrate this. In the end, the manager removes the strain of making all the decisions and distributes it to the team. His judgment is in knowing that he doesn’t know the best solution. He literally builds a human-computer right there on the factory floor, feeds the inputs, reads the outputs, and makes an informed decision. Again, the video doesn’t understand its depth in this regard, but that, for me, is part of its charm.
But let's also look at the required psychology of the manager. He isn’t afraid to look stupid in front of his workers, otherwise he would have evaded making a decision for fear that it would be the wrong decision, or he would have made a decisive decision and stuck with it even if it was wrong.
In the end, the new manager isn’t afraid to look stupid, but he also does not feel obligated to come up with an answer! Oftentimes, leaders want people to come to them with problems so that they can fix it themselves and look very smart. People in positions of power want people to rely on them and they want to have to make decisions. “I’m the BOSS! I should be making decisions. If people are just off doing their own thing, why am I even here?” Insecure leaders always want to be informed about everything that is going on. But, again, all of this information and constant decision-making takes brainpower. And the more decisions the leader makes, the more people will rely on him to make decisions. This increasing reliance weakens the nodes and fragilizes the network because it becomes more and more reliant on the central node. If the nodes are not linked together in a way that increases their effectiveness, then the network will become less and less effective over time. To make matters worse, the weaker the network gets, the more little mistakes they make and the less the leader trusts its reliability. Of course, this causes the leader to take on more and more tasks and/or scapegoat perfectly good people in the network and replace them with sycophants.
But if you understand that your organization is a network, then you understand that the real power of the network comes from each node in the network adding value to all of the other nodes. As a leader, it’s not about being the all-knowing, all-seeing, all-commanding central node from which all instructions flow. It’s about being a network administrator that is connecting the nodes of the network together in ways that enable the network to do new things or solve difficult problems. This is what we see in the video. The new manager doesn’t issue commands to the nodes, he connects three nodes together and that cluster of nodes solves the problem. This is also the same approach used by the fictional battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Folkus, in Laziness Part 2, section: “One thing at a time.”
So, if you want to act like your organization is a network, and you want to get the most out of that network, your focus needs to be on connecting the nodes together to solve problems, not trying to solve problems yourself.
Practical Example
In an infantry unit, one of the most important training events at all tactical echelons is the Live-Fire Exercise (LFX). The final part of most LFXs is a nighttime attack against an enemy (plastic targets) on an objective (plywood buildings surrounded by barbed wire) using live ammunition. It is very intense, and it can be very dangerous. When I was at Fort Bliss, one of the units doing an LFX accidentally shot at one of the safety vehicles and nearly killed several people. When I was a company commander preparing for my company LFX, the company that went before us had a freak bullet ricochet that hit a soldier in the head and killed him. A year after I left command, during an LFX for one of my former squads, a soldier accidentally shot his Team Leader in the arm. These training events are deadly serious business.
Aside from being dangerous, an LFX is vitally important because it is the culmination of all the unit’s training. It is also a large part of how many leaders are evaluated. A company commander has 100+ soldiers shooting live ammunition at a variety of different targets at night, sometimes in the rain or snow. She also typically is talking to artillery assets, controlling mortar fire, and coordinating with rotary-wing aircraft. She’s also having to report to her higher headquarters. If something goes wrong, even if no one is injured or killed, it could be the end of her career, or at least highly detrimental. For this reason, most leaders exercise extremely tight control over their subordinate units during the planning and execution of an LFX. Who could blame them?
But I didn’t control my company LFX very closely. In fact, I didn’t even plan it. I knew there was no way I could control 100+ people and all of the enabler assets and report to my higher headquarters, so I didn’t even try. Instead, I gathered my officers around a terrain model of the area, gave some general planning guidance, and said, “come get me when you’re ready to brief me on the plan.” Every now and then I popped in on them and they briefed me on their progress. I would ask questions and use my judgment to make some minor adjustments, but for the most part, they made the plan themselves. I knew from experience what a good plan looked like, and theirs was a damn good plan.
By going through this collaborative process, writing a formal operations order (OPORD) would have been a waste of time. The platoon leaders made the plan together and rehearsed it together dozens of times. They had also talked through several different contingency plans in case things didn’t go according to plan. They owned the plan.
When it came time for execution, they dominated. Rather than reporting to me, and waiting for me to make decisions, they talked to each other and adjusted on the fly. Because they maneuvered themselves, I was free to see the situation clearly and concentrate my efforts on coordinating the enabler assets and describing the situation to the higher headquarters. The network dominated the LFX and impressed the hell out of the battalion and brigade commanders.
Result:
Again, the key here wasn’t that I was a master tactician or some kind of military super genius. In fact, my lack of tactical prowess was somewhat of a running joke amongst the officers in the battalion. The point is that I leveraged the network to solve a tactical problem, and enabled the network to be self-correcting when unexpected problems arose.
As an aside, it’s not like I’m the only person in the military or business who thinks like this. Any leader who fosters teamwork and collaboration to get things done is using the power of their network, whether they know it or not. All I am doing is describing this basic idea of teamwork from a different angle, and explaining how I like to think about these things. And it’s only in retrospect that I have fully understood interpreted what I did. At the time, I wasn’t thinking about building or leveraging a network, I was just doing what I wanted to do because it felt right at the time.
The network is there
Whether you like it or not, your organization exists as a complex network. Your focus needs to be on connecting the right nodes to create clusters that can solve problems and/or create new things. But you should avoid trying to over-design this process. Remember, you cannot control this network because it is too complex. As Yaneer Bar-Yam points out in Making Things Work, when you are dealing with a complex system, pushing on the system here often has unknown consequences there. Even when you cluster nodes together to solve problems, you will often get unintended consequences, some of which are good, some of which are bad. It’s not about controlling the network, it’s about generally guiding it in the right direction.
But this network (usually) won’t guide itself in the right direction on its own. You can’t just do nothing and then try to use the network when you need it. You build and strengthen this network from your first day in command. You let the network and nodes in the network failceed so that people recognize the importance of their place in the network. Failceeding allows the network to beneficially correct itself so that it can respond better in the future. The stronger the network becomes, the less and less it will rely on the leader for guidance, but paradoxically it makes the leader more and more able to influence it in a crisis.
This process takes time and it can take a psychological toll when things don’t work out right away. When the network fails to accomplish something it can be demoralizing and it can cause you to lose trust, leading the death spiral I described earlier. Be patient. Identify the root cause of the problem, gather the right people together, and empower them to solve the problem.
If a leader wires the organization correctly, nodes learn how to cluster themselves together to prevent and solve problems without needing any guidance. People simply provide updates so the leader is aware of what is going on. Because the leader’s brain isn’t clouded with the problems of the network, it keeps his mind free which allows him to use good judgment when the network needs it.
Remember that quote from the Tao Te Ching?
“When his task is accomplished and his work done, the people all say, ‘It happened to us naturally.’”
Next Month
This essay is about wiring your organization so that it can eventually operate (mostly) without you. If you are too proactive and you never let it fail, it will never operate without you. You will become decisively engaged in minutiae and you will be unable to see the big picture or think strategically. You will become more and more caught up in the daily grind and your judgment will suffer. Your decisions get worse and your organization begins to decline. The harder you work and the more you do to try to turn things around, the worse things get. Depressed, you turn to the bottle. The sweet burn of whiskey becomes your only respite from the day’s unrelenting pressures. You begin drinking every day, usually starting around 10 am. Finally, one day, you arrive home already drunk. Your children scream as your wife hurriedly packs her’s and the children’s belongings. You weep, “I’m sorry baby, I’ll get sober, I promise! I’ll fix this!” Her cold eyes pierce your soul as she says robotically, “it’s too late for that. I’m leaving you and I’m taking the children.” You collapse in a pitiful heap of self-loathing as the front door slams and your wife’s minivan rolls slowly down the driveway. You thrust your fist at the sky and curse the gods for your misfortune. The gods look at each other confused and say, “Why the hell is he cursing us? He could have just subscribed to Austin’s newsletter.”
…sorry, I got a little carried away there.
The theme of my last two essays (Failceeding, and Laziness) was about limiting damage at scale by doing less than you think you should and stopping yourself from constantly intervening in the things your organization is doing.
In the next essay, we’ll expand on the idea of building and strengthening your organization by putting a large emphasis on leader development. We’ll talk about how leader development is the process of strengthening the crucial nodes in your network and diminishing the negative impacts of the deleterious nodes.
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Thanks for reading!
Interdependence and Emergence are two important concepts from complexity theory that I will discuss in future essays.
These bolded points are not my own creation. These ideas come from and can be found in a variety of sources that have influenced my thinking: Incerto by Taleb, Making Things Work by Bar-Yam, Thinking Fast and Slow by Kahneman, The Systems Bible by Gall, podcasts and newsletter from Joe Norman, and elsewhere.
ADP6-22 Definition of Leadership: “The activity of influencing people by providing purpose, direction, and motivation to achieve the mission and improve the organization.”