How the Military Decision-Making Process can help your organisation to crisis manage

his is Part 3 of a series of articles on how you can make the best decisions for your business or organisation during the Coronavirus pandemic. Follow these links for part 1 and part 2.

So in my previous articles I talked about the challenge of making decisions in complex environments. Complex environments are dynamic. Where things continually change, and you have to continually update your situational awareness, decisions and actions.

If you don’t do this it’s like trying to play tennis with a blindfold.

We are used to making decisions in complicated environments (more on what this is and what it means here).

But what it means for us is that we have a fundamentally different approach to organisational decision making and action taking, when operating in a complex environment.

This involves planning, making decisions, implementing, and then reassessing what the situation is, adjusting your plan, and making new decisions. This is essentially what happens in the OODA loop, which I also talked about in my previous article. (this may also remind you of the PDCA cycle).

The challenge with the OODA loop is that is kind of tricky to do well as an individual. But as a team, or an organization, it’s even more difficult. But those who do this best are the organisations that survive and thrive.

Further on, I am going to describe how the military does decision-making in complex environments. The military has been operating in groups in complex and dynamic environments for millennia. As such, they have developed some great decision-making tools.

So here is an opportunity to learn from the best.

What I am going to communicate here is a simplified version of the military decision-making process. But before I get into this I just wanted to briefly talk about time and decision making.

Time

In the graph under you can see the basic challenge of time in decision-making. The less time you have the less information you can gather, which causes more uncertainty and makes it hard to make decisions.

As time progresses we can gather more information and assessments, thus in turn leads to less uncertainty. The problem with this is that it takes time. The longer we wait, the more information we have and the less uncertain we feel. However, we might have waited too long. The situation has changed and it’s too late to take action.

A good example of this is the Coronavirus pandemic. Governments have (had) limited data on which to shut down the economy. However, if there were to wait until they had more information and more certainty about Coronavirus, then it would have been too late to take action and prevent the spread of the disease.

Waiting for more information is also known as “paralysis by analysis”.

In the military we were often told; a mediocre product, delivered on time, is much better than a perfect product, delivered one minute too late.

So, what’s the key takeaway here?

Well the key takeaway is the military decision-making process needs to be scaled according to how much time you have. If you have very short amount of time. Then you to go through this process faster. Accepting that you’re going to have less information and more uncertainty.

However, if you have more time, you can collect more information, spend more time analysing and assessing it, reduce your uncertainty.

If you have enough time you’ll be able to do this in a structured, methodical way. But if you’ve got a very short amount of time you might just have to do this on the fly. Regardless, it is my advice to follow the same methodical process, even if you just use 5 minutes on each section. The added value is doing this in a methodical way.

This leads to the next question. Why bother do it?

WHY

So why should you bother being methodical in your decision-making? After all, it takes time and effort to use the military decision-making process.

Here are 7 reasons:

1. Less jumping to the answer. One of the biggest challenges in group decision-making is people jumping straight to the solutions, before they really understand the problem, or what they’re trying to achieve. A methodical decision-making process will stop you jumping straight to the solution, before you’ve actually understood what the problem.
2. More explicit. It will help you be explicit about the key factors, and your key assumptions. It will drag them out of your heads and get them down on paper so they can be discussed and quality controlled.
3. Less endless discussion. Have you ever had meetings where some people are talking about the problem, others are talking about the solutions, and yet more people are challenging the basic assumptions? Meetings where nothing gets decided and you run out of time? Well this approach will stop you having endless discussions that go around and around in circles and never conclude. You will be able to break down the decision process into steps, so you can discuss one piece at a time, then move on towards a decision.
4. More rational. This process allows you to be more scientific in your decision-making. You will approach problems in a more strategic and rational way, engaging the prefrontal cortex and reduce decision-making driven by emotions.
5. More team decision-making. This process will help you make decisions as a team, help you build consensus, and help you to draw on the complimentary expertise of the different people in your team. It will prevent one person dominating the interaction.
6. More creativity and engagement. This process allows for more brainstorming and more creative problem solving. It stops you jumping straight to the same solution you did last time. It helps you come up with new ideas and also helps create an environment that fosters creativity.
7. More inclusion. This process also facilitates for more constructive criticism and reduces groupthink. It encourages psychological safety during group interactions, when people present their ideas. Under this process, ideas are made explicit and discussed independent of the person. People are less likely to feel like they are being personally criticised.

In the next article…

In the next article I am going to get into the meat of how the decision-making process works. Here I will present a simplified model of the Military Decision-Making Process that you can all utilise in your organisation in order to make better decisions.

Published by

Frederick M Fladmark