How information filters up the chain of command

The story

On 6 September 1941 Winston Churchill spent a morning at Bletchley Park, where the Government Code and Cypher School was breaking German Enigma traffic. He toured the huts, met the people running them, and told the staff how much the work mattered to the war. Hut 6 read the Army and Air Force keys, and Hut 8 read the naval keys that mattered in the Battle of the Atlantic. The bombes, the machines that found each day’s settings, were arriving in good numbers. What the huts could not get was clerks. For months the heads of the two huts had asked through the normal channels for punched-card operators, typists, and Wrens to test the bombe output, and the requests had gone up the chain and not come back.

Six weeks after the visit, on 21 October 1941, Alan Turing, Gordon Welchman, Hugh Alexander, and Stuart Milner-Barry wrote to Churchill directly. The letter was headed “Prime Minister only.” It opened by reminding him of his visit, credited their deputy head for the bombes, and then said the work “is being held up, and in some cases is not being done at all, principally because we cannot get sufficient staff to deal with it.” The punched-card section had stopped night shifts, so “the finding of the naval keys is being delayed at least twelve hours every day,” and the fix was about twenty untrained clerks. Middle East traffic had sat undecoded “since May” for want of “about twenty trained typists.” They closed by saying they had written on their own initiative and did not know who was responsible.

There was no procedure for a letter like this, so Milner-Barry carried it himself. He guessed later that he was chosen because he was “the most readily expendable from the scene of action.” He took the train to Euston, hailed a taxi, and with what he called “a sense of total incredulity” asked for 10 Downing Street. The driver shockingly didn’t show any surprise. At the end of the street he found a wooden barrier and one policeman, who waved the taxi through. He rang the bell, explained that he had an urgent letter for the Prime Minister, and handed it to Churchill’s parliamentary private secretary, who was puzzled but promised to deliver it. Then he took the next train back to Bletchley.

The next day Churchill sent a minute to his chief of staff under his red “Action This Day” label: “Make sure they have all they want on extreme priority and report to me that this has been done.” Within a month the head of MI6 reported that the needs were being “very rapidly met.” Milner-Barry did not see the minute for forty years. What he noticed, he wrote, was that “almost from that day the rough ways began miraculously to be made smooth.”

How we see it through leadership economics

No one in the chain above Bletchley was ignoring the requests. That chain of command was doing what we’d expect: taking in more requests than it could pass up and sending forward the ones that looked most important. A leader cannot read everything, so the organization filters on the leader’s behalf. In wartime Britain, with labor rationed and every request urgent, the observable thing was the size of the request. The letter describes what they suspected to be the problem: “as we are a very small section with numerically trivial requirements it is very difficult to bring home to the authorities finally responsible either the importance of what is done here or the urgent necessity of dealing promptly with our requests.”

The filter did not refuse the request. It stripped two things from it on the way up. The first was what the work was worth, which no one above Bletchley could observe. The second was what each day of waiting cost, twelve hours of naval keys and five months of Middle East traffic, which the request form that reached higher leadership could not convey. What arrived at the top was a request for forty low-grade staff from a small section, so the request appeared less important than the urgent, large needs elsewhere. In their own words: “No doubt in the long run these particular requirements will be met, but meanwhile still more precious months will have been wasted.”

Every organization has a filter like this. It starts as a sensible way to triage, but eventually the filter narrows to pass along only the most visible information, such as the requesting organization and the size of the request. Churchill could read the letter as it deserved because six weeks earlier he had visited Bletchley and met the team. Most requests will never reach a leader that way. The useful question is what information filters are in place, and whether those filters have narrowed over time.

A quote we’re thinking about

“It is the province of knowledge to speak and it is the privilege of wisdom to listen.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., “The Poet at the Breakfast-Table”