On Battle Rhythm

From our wiki article on Battle Rhythm, we noted an US Army manual that cited a lack of battle rhythm can cause various issues such as leader fatigue and the leader being missing from critical decisions.

In my new job, there seemed to be various battle rhythms starting to develop. Initially, I was content to let the chiefs pick their rhythm. However, over time, I'm beginning to see that establishing a battle rhythm is very difficult, even for the most accomplished of senior leaders. Working in this new office, with a charter unlike any other office within the command, the selected battle rhythm (and several iterations thereafter) have yet to adequately serve the senior leaders.

On the topic of staff coordination and senior staff meetings, finding the right day to go with the command's decision cycle in our role as an integrator is hard. Initially, we chose the day of the week and time that worked best for the seniors. However, that time ended up being immediately after all the command decision meetings, which meant everyone only really knew the immediate out briefs. In our command, the real actions tend to flow a day or so after the meetings.

However, by moving the staff coordination to the start of the week, which would seem to be the optimal date for the command's decision process time line, we haven't had as much staff participation in the meetings. Since the office's charter is to perform coordination and integration (a kind of portfolio manager), many of the staff have subordinate commands to attend on that same day.

Even for a small office, this inability to effectively coordinate action has resulted in seniors (and their deputies, such as me) getting fatigued and scrambling to figure out where the next critical decision point lay and get someone prepared to be there.

Of course, since I'm matrixed from the system engineering organization to this coordination office, that gives me two battle rhythms to attempt to satisfy with my boss. Additionally, my parent organization's battle rhythm is well suited for engineers of single systems, but my boss and I have to service a portfolio manager, which makes our efforts unique compared with our peers.

My initial thought that is to consider integrated work/decision environments, such as operating from a war room, so that we can get the best picture of the environment. However, I do hesitate, because although getting the complete information picture appeals to me as a systems engineer, knowing that the seniors lack a battle rhythm that I can know when/where to inject that gained information makes me question if the effort will bear fruit (and here, fruit is reducing leader fatigue and getting leaders to the critical decisions sufficiently prepared).

The one light is that we just this week got a full set of deputies assigned and we seem to be working well together. If we can establish the battle rhythm in the near future, we should be able to start getting our seniors in the right places. Read More......

Hands on with Systemic Leadership

Well, been busy the past few months getting settled into a new job standing up a new organization (yes, adding to the bureaucracy). I was tapped as an "enterprise systems engineer" responsible to provide architectures, concepts of operations, requirements, and other technical support to future visions.

In this job, there are people, like a former President of a Harris division, who are very interested in understanding how to best set up the organization based on the specific leadership capabilities, personal traits, and other factors of the senior leaders. Fortunately, so far the office is relatively flat in organization, so I have insight into the workings of the seniors.

I'm hoping to start posting my observations from this experience - good, bad, and ugly to see how paying attention to the systemic (or in places where we fail to pay attention) leads to what kinds of behaviors in the organization. Read More......