Mission Command

The Doctrine of Empowerment first formulated in WWII, and used ever since in the military to enable distributed decision making at speed

Text

Distributed Decision making

Mission Command

Command and Control

Synchronous 

Bottom up

Top down

Imposition of order

Emergence of order

Effectiveness

Efficiency

Asynchronous 

The building blocks of MC

Mutual Trust - Einheit

Psychological safety

Camaraderie

Distributed authority & leadership

Empowerment requires authority

Alignment - Auftragstaktik

Commanders intent - Schwerpunkt

Shared Consciousness

Independent, asynchronous operations

The why of purpose

Intuition - Fingerspitzengefühl

Empowered execution

Implicit guidance and control

Orientation

Intrinsic motivation & initiative

Agility

Empowerment

Flexibility

Orientation

Effectiveness

Team of Teams

Shared Consciousness

Empowered Execution

Alignment

Intuition

Mutual Trust

Agility

Team of teams lessons

  • MISSION
  • Shared consciousness
  • Empowered execution
  • Continuous feedback/reinforcement
  • Operational tempo
  • Push authority downwards

Mission Command - The doctrine of empowerment

By Ben Ford

Mission Command - The doctrine of empowerment

Bringing commando operations to tech start ups

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