Keeping the real objective in focus

This week’s dispatch comes courtesy of Josh Richardson. He is a retired Army lieutenant colonel and our guest on Episode 3 of the podcast, and he wrote to us with a story from his first operational assignment that he’s kindly allowed us to reproduce here in his own words.

The story

In 2002 I was a lieutenant serving as a mechanized infantry company fire support officer – my first operational duty position in the Army. My unit was forward in Kuwait on a 6-month operational deployment. We used it to establish some good maneuver training lanes in the open desert. As a fire support officer, my job was to plan, synchronize, and execute Army and joint fires — cannons, mortars, attack aviation, etc. — in support of the ground scheme of maneuver. I learned a lot about fire support and leadership during this deployment that would serve me well soon through multiple combat deployments.

One training lane stands out. We had done pre-mission planning against a scenario, including identifying likely enemy locations and corresponding effects for fires. We had planned what assets to use to achieve those effects and each target’s trigger for execution based on our own rates of advance among other things. We created the target list and execution matrix and updated graphical control measures with phase lines and target locations plotted. We shared the plan, rehearsed, and made final preparations.

When it came time to execute, our armored formation loaded up and began to move; for me this meant hunkering down inside of an M113 armored personnel carrier with a headset on and map board in my lap for a bumpy ride. I knew the plan – I could visualize the formation and the fires we needed. I monitored multiple radio channels, and as we rolled, I used reports of phase line crossings to trigger artillery and mortar fire on pre-planned targets. We fired every target on time, and at the end of the iteration I felt pretty good.

When we consolidated on the objective, we dropped the ramp of our vehicle, and I found the field artillery battalion commander waiting for me. “How do you think it went?” he asked. I felt pretty good about it and remember responding along those lines, mentioning we fired all the targets as planned. He acknowledged that and asked, “Did you observe enemy activity at each location? Were they exactly where we had planned?” I was catching on now…without beating me over the head with it, he allowed me to realize that I had become so beholden to the time-synchronization aspect of the plan that I had completely neglected to observe and confirm the targets. Had it been live-fire or combat we would have wasted a ton of ammunition or worse. As these thoughts were rolling through my head, he said something I’ve never forgotten: “The target list is just an ammunition allocator.”

This made sense to me in that moment and helped me grow as a young leader, but I think I still remember it so well because it goes beyond this application. The practical wisdom of asset allocation in an ambiguous environment assumes that things won’t play out neatly like we plan for them to. We will need to adjust fire, but we have assets and resources in position and can do that when the time comes. In my story, the fire support plan that I developed with my infantry company was sent to another organization who read it as requirements. That team developed their plan to make sure that they had the right resources in space and time to meet requirements. Together, we were prepared to deal with a wide range of possibilities – resources were allocated.

A brief footnote about leadership. This lesson resonated so well in the moment and stuck with me due to how it was delivered. The senior leader showed up where the work was happening and asked me a few open-ended questions. He surely knew the lesson we would get to, but he was patient and caring enough to let me find my own fault rather than racing in and bludgeoning me with his wisdom.

How we see it through leadership economics

One part of this we loved was the subtle way it illustrates the importance of our focus. As a young lieutenant, Josh had been focused on the immediate target: make and execute the plan. But the larger target was effective use of munitions to eliminate the enemy. When we talk about a leader’s role in conveying the production function to subordinates, we mean exactly this. The same question applies to your own goals: is the plan still serving the objective, or has staying on the plan become the objective?

A quote we’re thinking about

It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince