Deciding to Decide

First of all, to my millions of readers (Haha!), I find myself in that awkward position of having to once again apologize for not keeping up with this blog. I know I have not posted anything in a few weeks and for that, I have no excuse. Although I will admit, the demands of the job here in Afghanistan have been taking a toll. Something about these 90-hour work weeks seems to squeeze out any extracurricular activities! But...no excuses. Let's talk about the business of leaders!

One thing that there is no shortage of here for me is the opportunity to make decisions. Some big, some small. Some involve minor issues like who to meet with or what projects I need to visit, while others involve larger issues like whether we should take on certain projects, how to prioritize our resources, or what we need to do to execute a multi-billion dollar construction program.

One thing that is common among all of these issues is that as leaders, we must "decide to decide." That is not to say that we have to make decisions immediately. Clearly there are times for immediate action. But the key leader skill that I practice regularly with my teammates is to identify when decisions must be made, what possible alternatives should be considered, and how those alternatives will be implemented.

During previous assignments as a trainer at the Army's National Training Center, one of the most important decisions a training unit leader often would make during a mission was when to commit his reserve force. They would usually hold some component of their force out of the engagement, but ready to respond to the enemy's attack or to reinforce any successes during the battle.

Unfortunately, few leaders were successful in getting their reserve forces to the place they were needed on the battlefield in time, usually missing the opportunity to make the difference in the mission that was envisioned for them. Commanders failed to decide when to decide ahead of time, with a good analysis of how long it would take to get that reserve element moving, or of how much time it would take to get to the place where they could engage the enemy from a position of advantage. They usually failed to understand exactly what event would trigger their decision, and got their forces moving after it was too late.

We call those triggers decision points. They are the point in time or space when we must decide. They are the point of no return, where experienced leaders understand that they must either commit immediately, or deal with the consequences of not having done so.

Leaders must review decision points regularly with their team. When we don't, we become informed of important milestones in a project -- after we miss the milestone. All too often, someone on the team knew we wouldn't hit the milestone much earlier, when we could have taken action to still meet the mission requirement. We could have reallocated resources, reprioritized our work efforts, and certainly informed our customers about any possible fallout well before the project went south. Those decision points are where we must decide to decide.

In the lifecycle of a project, there are many of these decision points. As leaders, we have to be able to work backwards on a timeline, identify when events will happen, and then move further back to determine when we will know that those particular things will happen. Those are the triggers, much like with the combat leader, when we must either decide to decide, or find ourselves arriving at the battle too late to influence the action. It is much like the fork in the road in the picture above. You don't wait for the actual fork to decide which path to take. You make your decision, you decide to decide, well ahead of the fork, when you see the road sign that there is a fork ahead.

As leaders, we need to work with our staff to identify those signs early. We need to constantly review our situation and look for those triggers that will indicate that a decision must be made, as well as formally detail the information that will be the basis for that decision. When we do that, we will be much more prepared to make a decision when the inevitable fork arrives. We can commit early enough to still influence the action, not after it is too late to make a difference.

Following this approach will not guarantee that our decisions will always be right. But they will be timely, with a solid basis (those triggers) upon which to make them, such that, more often than not, we will take the right fork. That makes "deciding to decide" -- Leader Business!

Strategery Part I -- Setting the Conditions

While I love tactics, the drive to achieve, battling it out in the arena, I know there is much more to being a leader. Someone on the team has to look over the horizon, anticipate issues, see possible new opportunities, and take the lead in charting the course to the future. That, as our former President once coined, is "Strategery."

Strategery (okay...before you think that I believe that is really a word...I know some of you may know it as strategy) is the sort of longer term, disciplined planning that we cannot discount simply because we are wrapped up in the heat of battle. While strategery is not the exclusive domain of the leader, in fact we need strategic thinkers within our ranks to help push the team to greatness, no leader or team can achieve sustained excellence without it.

We can easily be consumed with short term thinking here in Afghanistan. We certainly have enough to do just executing the work in front of us. To many, life here is a day to day existence. Some just want to come and go. But to be this short-sighted is a recipe for failure. We've got to evolve, incorporate new ideas and lessons learned, and keep improving. We have to build capacity, build for the future. We cannot rest on our past accomplishments nor operate as if we can't get better. We can do all of this...and we must...if we want to achieve our overall purpose here.

So for my team, it's time to roll up our sleeves and envision the future. This strategic, long-range thinking is strategery. I plan to dedicate about 3 days in the weeks ahead to gather with my senior leaders to put together our road-map for the way ahead. As such, I wanted to share some thoughts on this page (and get some of yours) about how to set the conditions for such a planning session.

Before preparing a plan in the military, we conduct what we call -- Mission Analysis. This is a detailed examination of one's current position that enables productive thinking about the future. In simple terms we need to see ourselves, see the enemy, and see the terrain. Some of you may know it as SWOT. Same thing. Strengths and Weaknesses enable us to see ourselves, Opportunities are the terrain around and in front of us, and threats are the enemy. Many of you have been doing mission analysis without knowing it!

Here are the tools we are gathering as part of our Mission Analysis in addition to conducting a detailed SWOT assessment of our organization:

-- Customer surveys. We need to know what we are doing well...and not so well.
-- Workforce surveys. What do our employees say and what is important to them?
-- Internal After Action Reviews. We have been doing our AARs at all levels of the organization since we ended our Fiscal Year -- looking for things we can sustain and, more importantly, improve.
-- Analysis of the strategic plan of our higher headquarters 1 and 2 levels above us. We are looking for specified tasks (what are we TOLD to do) and implied tasks (what SHOULD we do to accomplish our mission...even if not explicitly stated) that must be addressed in our plan.
-- Assessment of our old strategic plan. What should we keep? What have we accomplished?
-- Analysis of our current mission. What is our workload, budget, personnel situation, etc? What do we need to do to be competitive? What opportunities do we see coming down the road? What needs fixing?

So...we are gathering the tools now. This is the "condition setting" phase of strategery. We're not ready yet to start putting our plans together. But we certainly are getting an idea of what we need to do. These ideas will start to coalesce into groups the more we analyze different areas of our team and our mission. These groups will become the ACTIONS and INITIATIVES that will form the nucleus of our plans. But more on them the next time. We're still doing our analysis. If you are not...why not now? Know that if you are not into strategery, your competition most certainly is. That's always enough to motivate me to climb up the ship's mast and look over the horizon. That's what leaders do. And that's Leader Business.

Still Learning From Failures

I have written often in these pages about the importance of learning from our setbacks. My experience has taught me that we learn infinitely more when we fail than when we succeed. The former pushes us to examine our shortcomings, tighten up our chinstraps, and get back into the arena motivated to improve. Too often, the latter breeds complacency and a misplaced satisfaction with performance that inhibits growth.

So I have come to appreciate the opportunity to learn that challenges and losses typically present. While I certainly prefer to win, I know that aggressive risk-taking and the willingness to reach high inherently puts us in the position to occasionally come up short. The alternative, playing it safe, staying on the sidelines, being afraid, is simply unacceptable. I say...bring it on.

Certainly there are no shortages of setbacks here in Afghanistan. Everything we do here is difficult. Every construction project seems to present multiple opportunities to learn. Corruption, interruptions to the supply chain, hostile environmental conditions, and a hostile enemy are present on almost every job. And yet, my job is not to make excuses, not to be afraid of failing, but to learn from it, make corrections, get better every day, and keep moving forward.

This is the time in the federal "business cycle" where we always take time to determine how we can improve. Our fiscal year ended on September 30th (Happy New Year to my government friends...and those who partner with us). Thus there is no better time to make an assessment of how we might improve our performance. The grades are in. The challenges are too many to enumerate here. There is no time like the present to learn. And I have no doubt that the learning we will do through our After Action Reviews (AARs) will set us on the course for victory in FY2011.

I also want to celebrate another who learned from failure, my daughter Shelby. You may recall my discussion about her willingness to run for school office -- and fail -- not once but two times. Both times were heartbreaking. Yet that little one never gave up. She did not hesitate to jump back into the arena, this time running for President of her high school freshman class. As her father, I was fearful of her losing again, afraid of seeing her heart broken, and worried about what a third setback might mean to her self-confidence. But that little one is a fighter. She never gives up. She would clearly rather fail, falling forward on her face, than to be afraid and timid, falling backward on her tail!

You guessed it. She won! She learned from her failures, ran a great campaign, and finally experienced the thrill of victory. Am I proud of her? You better believe it. Do I wish I had that sort of short-term memory, where I was more focused on the opportunities ahead than the failures in my rear-view mirror? Definitely.

I have no doubt that my daughter learned more from the two previous setbacks than she would have had she won. That is just in our nature. We take success for granted. We rarely look for opportunities to improve when things go well. It is in those failures that we learn the most, where our AARs have the most meaning, and where improvement is the greatest. I see it every day. And I have watched it from a distance in my little daughter, the President! That's Leader Business!