Learning goal-oriented control with Napoleon

The answer lies a few years back and is a crucial piece of the puzzle from the StartUps method set. The title already reveals who the book refers to: Napoleon. Napoleon was extremely successful with very small armies against much larger troops, see for example his fight against the Prussians. Clausewitz, Scharnhorst and Moltke, all three Prussian officers, analyzed why this was so and later transformed their actions accordingly:

Prussian officers sat down before each battle and planned it through in detail. In doing so, they tried to anticipate many contingencies and make assumptions, such as what the enemy's reactions would be to certain troop movements or the upcoming weather conditions. In the battle itself, the senior officers stood on a hill from which they had an overview of the action. From there they gave orders to the subordinate officers with the troops. The lower-ranking officers were hardly allowed to make their own decisions, but had to either wait for the decisions of the higher-ranking officers or send a messenger with a request to the hill, which of course took some time in each case. Progress was slow.

In the battle itself it turned out very quickly that assumptions were wrong, the enemy behaved differently than planned or the troops from the hill could hardly be seen or distinguished from the enemy by the gun smoke. The complexity of this system was simply unmanageable. At the beginning, not all information was available to be able to draw up an exact plan. When is this ever the case?

This approach can often be found in large companies. When planning major software releases, they tend to want to evaluate everything in advance. First, ideas are bundled into projects in complex processes. Assumptions are made regarding dependencies and outcomes. They are evaluated and planned in detailed and rough concepts and provided with resources and milestones. Developers talk to their project managers and these in turn turn turn to individual control groups in the event of deviations from the plan in order to have decisions made there. There, it is then presented that planning assumptions were not correct and the plan can no longer be executed. Since the planning effort is very time-consuming due to the many dependencies and participants, attempts are made to stick to the plan despite problems, which often ends in further problems. The problems add up over time, the plan becomes more and more unrealistic and everything goes awry... A typical and deliberately strikingly described horror scenario.

But now back to Napoleon. What was his strategy? What did Napoleon do differently? The essential secret of Napoleon's speed and success was to trust the skill as well as the knowledge of his officers. He delegated responsibility and was thus able to take advantage of his officers' proximity to the actual action. He thus drastically shortened the lines of communication and mitigated knowledge and transfer losses. This principle was later christened "Mission Command."

In contrast to command-oriented leadership, the principle of "Mission Command" describes goal-oriented leadership. Accordingly, Napoleon first and foremost defined the objective of the battle. In addition, he communicated his motivation according to rank, why he wanted to achieve this goal. Each officer was given the freedom to decide for his command room how to achieve his objectives. It was the principle of centralized intention and decentralized execution. This allowed the small armies to act much faster than the Prussians. Even when they were cut off, they could act almost autonomously. They knew why they were fighting, which also enabled them to make decisions more purposefully. This led them to identify more strongly with their actions and was accompanied by greater motivation and willingness to perform. The officers and soldiers were not just pawns on the battlefield, but directly responsible for their fate. This situation naturally placed higher demands on the officers, and this had to be taken into account in the selection process. The one-time planning effort also turned into a permanent one, which greatly increased flexibility as new insights were gained.

In the book, StartUps are described as acting much like Napoleon. Founders hand over more responsibility to their teams so that they make tactical decisions themselves. They define goals as well as measurable KPIs and explain the Reason Why. In addition, they introduce continuous planning, which they support through agile procedures such as Scrum, so that they are able to implement decisions quickly through continuous development. Our e-commerce development teams at OTTO show that this is also possible at large companies.

However, we would like to describe the metamorphosis of our OTTO army into a goal-driven unit as well as the presentation of the current product development process in a follow-up article. We look forward to your feedback on how you liked the historical context.

Inke & Jens

Live long and prosper! PS It should be noted at this point that we distance ourselves from Napoleon as a person. We do not want to glorify his person and especially war with this article. The historical reference serves exclusively for the plastic representation of the development of the methodology "order tactics".